Joan Mitchell American, 1925-1992

Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992) stands as one of the most prominent American Abstract Expressionists of the 20th century. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship, which brought her to France from 1948 to 1949. It was there that she began developing the foundations of her distinctive approach to abstraction.

Upon returning to New York, Mitchell participated in the landmark 1951 9th Street Show, and was quickly recognized as a rising force within the Abstract Expressionist movement. By the mid-1950s, she began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1968, she settled permanently in the village of Vétheuil, just outside Paris, where she worked until her death in 1992. There, she often hosted and mentored younger artists, her generosity leaving a lasting impact on their lives and work.

Today, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, established in 1993, continues her legacy by supporting contemporary artists and advancing awareness of her work. Of Mitchell's achievement, Klaus Kertess wrote: "She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled." -Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002