Hollis Taggart

Pastel allowed the celebrated American artist Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) to exercise her characteristic fierce exuberance of line and color, while also achieving subtler veils of color afforded by pastel’s smudgy, soft materiality. This work’s web-like frenzy of gestural lines, distributed evenly across the surface, epitomizes Mitchell’s mastery of the pastel medium. Here, the lines of color intermingle––blue, red, yellow, and black––to create a dense tangle. The pastel knot seems to float on top of its white background, as the bolder and more solid lines—particularly the blazing red—push and pull against receding colors. The traditional figure-ground relationship is recast in terms of emotionally charged immediacy of feeling. The artist’s pastel-dusted traces in the negative space around the central mass deliver a disarming intimacy and index of her physical presence. Mitchell made pastel drawings throughout her career as another way of exploring color and mark-making. This 1991 pastel work makes especially vivid Mitchell’s unparalleled orchestration of the energies of color, line, and light. The artist Brice Marden mused of Mitchell’s keen ability to suffuse her paintings with pure feeling: “She could make yellow heavy.” (1) 

This particular pastel work was exhibited at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, in a 1997 exhibition called “Pastels by Joan Mitchell.” Furthermore, a similar example of this work from the same year (1991)––also entitled Pastel––resides at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite the seeming spontaneity of her pastel works as well as her paintings, Mitchell was highly methodical in her mark-making. “The freedom in my work is quite controlled,” she once explained. “I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best.”

Klaus Kertess cogently described Mitchell’s pastel works from this period––the early 1990s––in his catalogue essay for the artist’s 1992 exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery in New York: 

“[The pastel works] have an elemental directness as well as a sensuous, chromatic braveness not customarily associated with the pastel’s paler and politer proclivities. They are at once vulnerable and defiant. Mitchell has fully exploited the fragile powdery effusiveness of pastel—the way it fugitively settles into and illuminates the nap of the paper surface. Pastel’s willing responsiveness to the varying pressures of the hand has been deployed in a startling panoply of mark making, from blurred staccato tracks, to amorphous wisps, to sinuous trajectories of athletic assertiveness. These pastels have a kind of velvet fury.” (2)
 
Mitchell was born in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois. Growing up, she felt a particular affinity with Vincent Van Gogh, a lifelong favorite whose work would continue to influence Mitchell throughout her career. Mitchell attended Smith College, where she concentrated in English and studied art with Hyman George Cohen between 1942 and 1944. After two years, she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting with Robert von Neumann and Louis Ritman and worked in a figurative manner. Mitchell’s art reflected the influence of a wide variety of artists, including Matisse and Cézanne, and Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, both of whom she met on a trip to Guanajuanto, Mexico. While at Chicago, she received the Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship before graduating with a B.F.A. in 1947. That same year, Mitchell moved to New York City to study with Hans Hofmann. Although impressed by his paintings, she ultimately decided not to enroll in his class.  During this period, Mitchell saw works produced by New York School artists such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, but later said that she was not yet able to appreciate them.