Joan Mitchell Lady painter : a life

Patricia Albers

Book - 2011

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BIOGRAPHY/Mitchell, Joan
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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2011.
Language
English
Main Author
Patricia Albers (-)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
"This is a Borzoi book"--T.p. verso.
Physical Description
xxi, 514 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780375414374
  • Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Prologue
  • Introduction
  • Chicago
  • Chapter 1. Jimmie and Marion
  • Chapter 2. Satin Curtains Redux
  • Chapter 3. The Lake
  • Chapter 4. War and Peace
  • Chapter 5. Taking from Everybody
  • New York
  • Chapter 6. Tenth Street
  • Chapter 7. Savage Debut
  • Chapter 8. The Hurricane
  • Chapter 9. Hudson River Day Line
  • Chapter 10. To the Harbormaster
  • Paris
  • Chapter 11. Seeing Something Through
  • Vétheuil
  • Chapter 12. La Tour
  • Chapter 13. Vinnie and Thea
  • Chapter 14. La Grande Vallée
  • Chapter 15. A Few Days
  • Chapter 16. Ici
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

Two biographies examine the spiritedness and formidable success of Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. BIOGRAPHERS are forever readjusting our sense of the fantastically mutable relationship between an individual and a society. All men and women are shaped by the world in which they live, and it remains unclear to what extent even the figures who loom largest, a Churchill or a Proust, have precipitated or only crystallized the values or visions with which they are now inevitably associated. "Another time has other lives to live," W. H. Auden once observed. True enough. But to what extent can a person transform a particular time, even turn it into another time? The question is anything but academic. And when a biographer's subject is a 20th-century woman who wants to make her mark in a field hitherto mostly open to men, the question becomes almost alarmingly urgent. Is the story really about a society that has changed enough that a woman can take the next step? Are there cases where the personal triumph actually brings about a social transformation? Or do many of these stories end in a standoff, the woman simultaneously victor and victim, embodying within a society new possibilities that remain in many respects impossibilities? The lives of Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell - painters born nearly a generation apart, Krasner in 1908 and Mitchell in 1925 - cannot be understood without considering such questions. Reading "Lee Krasner" and "Joan Mitchell," the first full-scale biographies of these two immensely complicated women, I can see that the authors, Gail Levin and Patricia Albers, do not have the easiest time reconciling their subjects' energy, determination and formidable success with all the suspicion and skepticism they confronted. Krasner started out in the 1930s, when the Depression made careers in the arts confoundingly difficult for everybody, and after the war she and Mitchell both navigated an art world that had its own bohemian version of the Feminine Mystique, with women seen as helpmates and accessories, even if the setting was a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side rather than a Cape Cod in Levittown. "There were the artists and then there were the 'dames,' " Krasner said of New York in the 1940s. "I was considered a 'dame' even if I was a painter too." Albers observes of Mitchell's situation in the 1950s that "women artists were considered women first and artists second." And the attitude was internalized, or so some have maintained. A friend of Mitchell's, the artist Miriam Schapiro, recalled that "the women really didn't respect each other deeply." Few would dispute such assertions. And yet there they were, Krasner and Mitchell and some others, making their way when there was not supposed to be a way. We see Krasner, in 1942, exhibiting in a now legendary show organized by the brilliant and idiosyncratic painter John Graham, where her work hung along with that of Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, de Kooning and Pollock - whom she met after being told that this man she had never heard of and would eventually marry was going to be in the exhibition. Mitchell, not yet 30, had her first solo show in New York in 1952, and the poet John Ashbery, soon to be a friend, later remembered "a sensation of gyrating fanblade shapes, chilly colors and an energy that seemed to have other things in mind than the desire to please" - work, in short, of great seriousness. Whatever the skepticism with which men had sometimes greeted their ambitions, Krasner had had long, extraordinary conversations about art with Clement Greenberg, and among the writers who admired Mitchell were Frank O'Hara and Samuel Beckett, a sometime lover. Both women had enduring friendships with women. Although Krasner and Mitchell eventually came to be seen by some as sacred monsters, coldhearted warrior women in paint-spattered jeans, their imperiousness may have served to mask a deep ambiguity. Krasner's and Mitchell's greatest passion, the art of painting, is a profoundly traditional activity - and thus perhaps a complicated choice for any self-styled pioneer. But here, so I believe, lies one key to their success. Whatever spirit of defiance helped to shape them, they were also attentive to the value of the past, to the gold that can be extracted from even the seemingly inhospitable topography of family life. Krasner was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants living a hardscrabble existence in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and her mother, Levin tells us, "like many other Jewish mothers ... favored her only son over her daughters." Mitchell's parents were Chicago society, wealthy and cultivated. Mitchell remembered her father, a doctor, telling her, "You can't do anything as well as I because you are a woman" - a vote of no confidence that she may have found it difficult to reconcile with the fact that her mother, Marion Strobel, was ambitious, a poet and novelist who was involved with the avant-garde magazine Poetry. If the future could look dark for a girl with dreams, Krasner and Mitchell were unwilling to see it that way. Levin shows how the dislocations of immigrant life could in fact be freeing. "My parents," Krasner later recalled of their willingness to let her study art at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, "had their hands full acclimatizing themselves. ... They didn't encourage me, but as long as I didn't present them with any particular problems, neither did they interfere." As for Mitchell's finishing-school upbringing - the French lessons, the stint as a teenage figure-skating star with national recognition - what she took from all this was not only a lifelong disdain for anything like good manners but also the kind of wild aristocratic self-assurance that Katharine Hepburn personified for all time in "Bringing Up Baby," which came out when Mitchell was 13. LEE KRASNER, as she emerges in Gail Levin's pages, although born after her family arrived in the United States, is very much a product of the immigrant life, with her determination, resilience and hunger for new experiences. While her marriage to Jackson Pollock is no less the central fact of her life that one had imagined, the marriage did not define her. She once said of their time together: "Look, it was a mixed blessing - our relationship. It had many, many pluses and several minuses." She also said: "I respected and understood his painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry." Those remarks reflect a considerable equanimity about a stormy alliance with a man who spent much of his life drunk and depressed and died after driving his car into a tree. But then, by the time Krasner met Pollock she was already extraordinarily self-aware. She had a profound grasp of modern art, deeper though less instinctive than Pollock's, which she had absorbed through her studies in the 1930s with the great teacher Hans Hofmann. And she knew she enjoyed being with exciting, challenging men, having already lived with a fellow art student, Igor Pantuhoff, a White Russian with matinee-idol looks and the charm and deviousness to match. Krasner, so often represented as the woman with the graceless face who was somehow allowed to be Pollock's caretaker, turns out to have had her own sexual magnetism. Pollock was her choice - a daunting choice, true enough, but her choice, nonetheless. Levin, a respected art historian, is not the most graceful writer. Too much is presented almost as raw data, quotations from interviews of one sort or another, at moments closer to oral history than to biography. We see the explosive growth of the art world in the years after Pollock's death in 1956, Krasner's canniness about marketing his work, and the poor girl's pleasure in good fur coats and dinner at the "21" Club. Levin appreciates Krasner's complex responses late in life (she died in 1984) to feminists in the art world. Their work often left her cold, while their cause could not fail to touch something deep inside. "I'm glad I'm alive," she proclaimed in the 1970s, "now that women's lib has brought a new consciousness." So did the sacred monster give a nod to the young. Krasner struck up a friendship with Levin when the author was still a student, and one feels that Levin liked her and still likes her, which is not always true by the time somebody has finished writing a biography. But the book offers little in the way of judgments, and suggests, as Elizabeth Hardwick once noted, that when a biographer depends too much on taped interviews, "the drastic distance between gossip, the libertine loquacity of the dinner table, and print dissolves." Although we are given to understand that many people think Krasner's paintings are important, Levin does not make the case. Krasner's vast canvases of the 1960s, with roiling arcs and circles marshaled to create cascading arabesques, strike me as programmatic, an idea about joyful abandon rather than the thing itself. The images suggest cosmologies, geologies, glorious turmoil, but the handling, for all its lavish virtuosity, is weirdly perfunctory, almost corporate in its decorative impersonality. PATRICIA ALBERS has written a book about Mitchell that I cannot imagine will ever be improved upon, so graceful and incisive is her account of the artist's hellbent life and lyric art. Ashbery once wrote of Mitchell's work that "one's feelings about nature are at different removes from it," and Albers, the author of a biography of the photographer Tina Modotti, has found her key in this subtle observation. She uncovers the allusions to places, people and experiences woven deep into the warp and woof of Mitchell's canvases, and she skillfully evokes Mitchell's chromatic wonders, with "the flaring up of fluid, translucent strokes" and colors that include at one point "a celery ocher, an opulent burgundy and a gamut of light-rinsed and storm-tossed blues." Strange to say, there are times when I find Albers's prose almost too perfectly tuned. The appearance of Evans Herman, one of the many attractive men who crossed Mitchell's path and ended up in her bed, is announced with this image: "Joan's doorway framed a 23-year-old stripling, lean-faced and clean-shaven, with the kind of dark good looks and soft-spoken seriousness that can melt women instantly." Although Albers's ability to put us right there is impressive, I think I prefer a biographer who stands at a slightly more discreet distance from the subject. There is a virtue sometimes in admitting that we are not really there, in leaving the descriptive flourish aside and letting expository prose do the hard work. Mitchell was a wonderful letter writer, and Albers has the good fortune to be able to quote extensively from the artist's own prose. Mitchell's ecstatic rants can have some of the energy of Kerouac's sentences, especially when she is writing to Barney Rosset, scion of a wealthy Chicago family, Mitchell's first and only husband and lifelong friend, and known to many as the man behind Grove Press. "I did lots of good drawings today," she writes, "and read lots of Marx and wanted so to get in the Oldsmobile and pinch and bite and be generally irritating and go drink beer with potato chips" and have sex "and then drink six cups of coffee and talk about China." A reader cannot help rooting for this slim, good-lcoking young woman, so full of herself and her possibilities. The hedonism loses its shimmer only in the 1960s, when Mitchell is living mostly in Paris, involved with the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle in what amounts to a marriage without a license. Riopelle's suavely flamboyant abstract paintings were then selling like hotcakes, and he had the piles of money to satisfy an appetite for fast cars, big yachts and endless rounds of drinks. Rip, as Joan called him, was dark, compact and pugilistic, and their relationship was along the lines of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," only more so. He divorced his wife but went back on a promise to marry Mitchell, and although she made close connections with his children, sometimes touchingly worrying about their education in the midst of alcohol-soaked days, she had wanted to have her own and had the abortions to forever remind her of what might have been. During her later years, living outside Paris, Mitchell attended to her gardens and her dogs and reached out to younger artists and writers, mixing tenderness and even passion with tough love and outright cruelty. For her troubles, she found Rip taking up with one of her young female enthusiasms, although Mitchell was hardly an innocent bystander. She died of lung cancer in 1992 at the age of 67, and only days before was seen in the hospital "seated in a chair in the hall amid a coterie of young French painters, sipping Chablis and looking 'like a queen holding court.' " Albers relates all this with remarkable dignity and poise. There is only one completely false move in the book, and that is its subtitle: "Lady Painter." It is a phrase that Mitchell used with honeyed irony about herself and her situation, and I do not think it unlikely that on seeing a book about herself with those words on the cover, she would have tossed it across the room. Mitchell probably would have been in a drunken state. But then, she apparently painted some of her best canvases while high on booze. I do have one gnawing doubt about Albers's approach to the paintings. She writes of Mitchell's ability to relive "emotional states, sounds, even bodily movements" as "eidetic" and reports on recent studies of synesthesia, a "sensory cross-wiring in the brain." While Albers's observations are interesting, I am troubled by her insistence on establishing some physiological explanation for the brilliance of Mitchell's abstract evocations of sights and emotions. What I see here is a dangerous objectification - and maybe even medicalization - of the imagination. I do not think that Albers gives enough weight to the aestheticization of memory and sensation as self-conscious, even willful acts, rooted in the Symbolists and Post-Impressionists of the late 19th century, whose work in both poetry and paint Mitchell admired. When Mitchell's friend Irving Sandler wrote about her work in 1959, he commented that she "considers herself a 'conservative' in that her pictures are in the tradition of de Kooning, Kline, etc.," and I think Mitchell's originality rests in the intrepid spirit with which she steps into and embraces the history of painting going back to the Venetians, not in something unique or even unusual about the hard-wiring of her brain. Mitchell's and Krasner's lives overlapped at various times. Early on, they knew many of the same people, exhibited at some of the same galleries, and suffered similar indignities when they found themselves known mostly for their relationships with hard-drinking, immensely famous male painters. Both had retrospectives at the Whitney Museum in the 1970s, and both ended up exhibiting in the beautiful, high, light-filled rooms of the Robert Miller Gallery. Krasner, late in life, mentioning Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan, said that they "had an easier time of it" than her cohort a generation earlier. "We had to create all this," she said. "The next generation had an open door. ... That's a little bit of progress." But Mitchell, when first offered a retrospective at the Whitney, did not want it at the same time as Krasner's. "Not only did Joan feel that her work clashed with Krasner's," Albers writes, "but she also held her nose at the idea of ghettoization as a woman artist." Krasner had of course always worried about the same thing. What Krasner and Mitchell were after was not gender equality but membership in a community they believed transcended gender: the community of artists. The free-flowing nature of the art world in mid-20th-century New York emboldened them, for there was no guild or academy or salon or presiding figure to declare who could and could not be a member. For Krasner and Mitchell the question was not feminism but freedom - the freedom to accept the discipline of art. If by the 1950s the New York artists, as many were arguing, understood Matisse better than the Parisians, who was to say that a woman might not understand de Kooning better than a man? Nearly 20 years after her death, Joan Mitchell looks to be the only artist of her generation, man or woman, who produced a big, abstract, painterly painting that can stand up to the best of de Kooning and Pollock. The legions of arrogant young men who swaggered into the Cedar Tavern have been eclipsed by this woman who probably had more self-confidence and certainly had a more abundant gift than any guy her age in the room. Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and was a 2010-11 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is writing a life of Alexander Calder.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 10, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Painter Mitchell is no mer. second-generation abstract expressionist. Albers avers in the first comprehensive biography of this ruthlessly independent, flagrantly blunt, highly educated artist. Mitchell's ravishingly chromatic, organically structured, endlessly evocative paintings are unique, and Albers learned why. Mitchell had synesthesia. For her, music, the letters of the alphabet, people, and emotions all emitted pulsing colors. Possessed, too, of eidetic memory, her visual recall was acute. Thi. perceptual otherness. along with her technical mastery, underlies the push-pull vitality and ecstatic beauty of her paintings. But what a contentious, abrading life she lived. Born to wealth but scant affection in Chicago, Mitchell wa. fiercely competitive. excelling at art and as a champion ice skater and becoming a debutante who joined the Communist Party. Hard-drinking Mitchell's moxie, recklessness, an. smoky, tough-cookie glamou. enabled her to hold her own with de Kooning, Pollock, and the boys in New York's macho art world. Albers, also the biographer of photographer Tina Modotti, is electrifying in her metaphor-rich descriptions and forthright analysis, tracking Mitchell's volcanic artistic fecundity in sync with her psychological struggles an. sexual adventurin. that included tempestuous relationships with legendary publisher Barney Rosset, Samuel Beckett, and French artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. Albers emulates Mitchell's painterly mission to conjoi. accuracy and intensit. in this transfixing and justly revealing portrait.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this first biography of renowned abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti) vividly chronicles the artist's tortuous journey from her wealthy upbringing in Chicago to her defiant student days at Smith College, and as a young painter at the Art Institute of Chicago when "the wisdom of the day held that women couldn't really paint." Albers focuses on Mitchell's artistic life as a rising and respected New York School painter and her years in France from the late 1950s until her death. Albers deftly balances Mitchell's often difficult temperament (some found her "cranky and contentious"; she was an insomniac and alcoholic) with her artistic vision. Mitchell described her mind as a mental "suitcase filled with pictures," and Albers centers her narrative on the "blessing and curse" of Mitchell's vivid visual memory and synesthesia. Albers astutely analyzes Mitchell's paintings, and one wishes she had done so more often throughout a generally comprehensive study. Vibrantly written and carefully researched, including numerous interviews with Mitchell's former husband, Barney Rosset (former owner of Grove Press), friends, lovers, and colleagues, Albers constructs a fluid, energetic narrative of Mitchell's complicated life and work. 8 pages of color photos, 62 photos in text. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

With this generously illustrated work (eight pages of full-color photographs; 62 in-text reproductions), art historian, author, and curator Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti) presents the first full-scale biography of Joan Mitchell (1925-92), a major 20th-century American artist. Often described as a second-generation abstract expressionist painter, Mitchell, who came from a wealthy Chicago family and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Columbia University, moved to New York during the late 1940s, where she attracted the attention of critics, collectors, curators, and gallery owners. In 1955, she moved to France, where she practiced a painting style described as abstract impressionism. This significant biography covers all aspects of Mitchell's life, including her synesthesia, eidetic memory, alcoholism, troubled relationships, and art. Filled with intimate details of her complex personality and unconventional lifestyle, this is a conscientiously objective yet sympathetic portrait of the "lady painter" and the social and cultural contexts in which she became a successful artist in the male-dominated Parisian and New York art worlds. VERDICT Reasonably well documented, this scholarly yet compelling book will interest general readers as well as students, scholars, and museum professionals. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]-Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Independent curator Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti, 2002) presents a sizable biography of Joan Mitchell (19251992), a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters who changed the face of the art world in the 1950s.Raised in luxury as an heiress to the fortune of famed Chicago engineer Charles Louis Strobel, Mitchell competed for the national figure-skating title as a teen in the early 1940s. She would follow her own path to success, dropping out of Smith College (where, she noted, "I got a B+ in art") to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. She took up residence in New York's Greenwich Village in late 1949, becoming part of a vibrant art scene along with soon-to-be famous names like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The book begins a bit slow, but as Mitchell, armed with talent and a stormy personality, begins to establish herself as an important painter, Albers begins to find her footing as a biographer. The author is at her best when writing about the art, managing the difficult trick of bringing visual work alive on the written page. Eventually dividing her time between New York and France, Mitchell inhabited an alcohol-fueled world of artists, poets and musicians, including her longtime companion, French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, poet Frank O'Hara and playwright Samuel Beckett. Discussion of Mitchell's turbulent personal relationships, her lifelong pursuit of psychoanalytic treatment and her synesthesia and eidetic memory all inform what the author calls her "glorious, all-consuming involvement with memory, landscape, and paint." "Lady Painter" is how Mitchell often referred to herself, and though her experience as one of few women in a male-dominated milieu is present throughout the narrative, it is not the focus. As Albers writes, Mitchell "refused to differentiate herself from male artists," and "did not want to be considered among the forgotten or neglected."A revealing portrait of a complex personality, this biography provides insight into the work of a master artist, but is perhaps too detailed to appeal to casual readers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One of Joan's favorite haunts, the smoke-and stale beer--perfumed San Remo had black- and- white tiled floors, a pressed-tin ceiling, a dark-mirrored bar, and a clientele that included James Agee, Miles Davis, Judith Malina, Tennessee Williams, and young New York poets. There painter Jane Freilicher used to observe Joan and Mike across the room--she in jeans and the talismanic long leather coat-- smoking, drinking, huddling conspiratorially over a little table, and looking "very French New Wave." Besides painting, jazz held the two rapt. A connoisseur of early jazz--Louis Armstrong, Buck Clayton, Bessie Smith--Mike knew everything and everybody, while Joan dug, above all, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, and that fabulous "B. Holiday woman." Jazz had seduced her with its urban cast, moody romanticism, blend of discipline and instinct, and aura of freedom and authenticity. Trombonist and painter Howard Kanovitz (to whom she introduced Beethoven's late quartets) saw distinctly, however, that Joan wasn't really there as far as I was concerned. She was a square, and we were hip. A very clear distinction as far as I was concerned. Although Joan smoked some grass like everybody else, that didn't make her hip . . . Mike Goldberg was hip. And Miles Forst was hip. And Ray Parker was hip . . . [But] Joan didn't have rhythm in her soul. She did have a near-mystical feeling for paint. Squeezed by the class she was taking at NYU (Painting of the Early Middle Ages), three weekly sessions with Fried, and a chockablock social life, Joan nonetheless painted hard all that fall. Loading her brushes with blacks, whites, ochres, blues, and reds, she was producing muscular, jostling canvases rife with ambiguities, complexities, and urban tensions, using Hofmannesque push and pull. By the first of the year, Joan had what she considered sixteen decent paintings, fifteen of them squarish and around six by seven feet, and one, Cross Section of a Bridge , six and a half by nearly ten feet. In early January these went to the New Gallery, where they were installed by consultant Leo Castelli. Two flights above the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room restaurant, the New Gallery occupied the top fl oor at 63 West Forty-fourth Street. Up on Fifty-seventh Street, Betty Parsons had invented the white-box gallery, but the New Gallery retained the staid gray walls and abbreviated neoclassical decor of an earlier day. A modest outpost of the art world in the theater district, it lacked the cachet of a Fifty-seventh Street venue, yet, with the New Yorker a block away and Times Square just to the west, it enjoyed a little scene of its own. The cast party of the popular Broadway play I Am a Camera , starring Julie Harris, took place at the New Gallery during Joan's show. Her opening threw the artist into a panic but turned out okay. Marion and Jimmie flew in for the event, but, more important, her fellow downtown artists came out in force. Grace perceived "a fantastic display of youthful talent and virtuosity, without the real thing," but others who felt Joan had been slow to assimilate avant-garde thinking now lavished praise upon her. John Gruen found her a "remarkable artist, full of fire and sweeping gestures," and Mimi saw her as "full of talent and drive-- articulate, as though [she] were ripe with intention to hold the sun in [her] orbit as long as possible." The older men also took notice. One day Pollock strode into the New Gallery, stared hard at her paintings, then turned heel without uttering a word. According to Tom Hess, writing in 1976, another (unnamed) Abstract Expressionist elder proclaimed ruefully that it had taken him eighteen years to get to where Joan Mitchell had arrived in as many months. He didn't intend it as a compliment. He felt that the situation had changed so drastically between 1947 and 1950 . . . that younger artists could make direct contact with new ideas almost as soon as they came off the easel. Looking back, however, it becomes clear that it was a compliment; Mitchell didn't jump on a bandwagon; she made tough decisions and she stuck to them. It took courage, skill, and a fierce delight in competition. Most of Joan's paintings bore the names of places or place concepts: East Side, Le Lavandou, Guanajuato, Coastline, Midwest 5 P.M . These she bestowed after the work was completed. Her 34th St. and 7th Ave. , for instance, got its title when Surrealist Max Ernst blurted out as he stood before it during the installation: "Oh! But this is Thirty-fourth Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue!" Hired by the ever-attentive Barney to write a thousand-word essay for Joan's announcement, Ernst's pal, literary man Nicolas Calas, saw the work's grounding in the material world as a relief after other avant- garde painters' suffocating insistence upon expressing their feelings. For Calas, a Mitchell painting derived its meaning as much from shrewd omission as from subtle observation: fragmented and heterogeneous, it was "endlessly interrupted" yet forever becoming. (Not only had Barney persuaded Calas to produce this fi rst important essay on Joan's work, but also he paid for the announcement on which it appeared, and he personally documented the show using his old Rolleifl ex.) Joan also garnered three brief but generally positive critical notices. Betty Holliday of ArtNews praised her "savage debut" (what looked savage then looks lyrical today), while New York Times critic Stuart Preston looked favorably on the paintings' fast-paced shapes and serial explosiveness even as he detected a certain shrillness and monotony. And Paul Brach, writing for Art Digest , singled out Cross Section of a Bridge , Joan's first self-consciously important canvas, for its "tense tendons of perpetual energy" and "wide arc-shaped chain reaction of spasmodic energies." Reflecting New York School attitudes about putting oneself on canvas, he heralded the show as "the appearance of a new personality in abstract painting." As usual in those days, nothing sold. Shortly after the show closed, however, the gallery's co-owner, Eugene Thaw, visited the small yet elegant apartment of twenty-four-year-old William Rubin, then a conductor in training but later chief curator of painting and sculpture at the New York Museum of Modern Art. There hung a Mitchell, Rubin's first serious art purchase, made directly from the artist, paid for in fifty-or seventy-dollar installments, and fi nanced, in part, by the sale of two fine prewar clarinets. On the heels of her show, Joan more or less cut Thaw dead: "She already knew she was a star." Indeed, she was quickly elected to membership in the Club, the mark of approval that mattered to her more than anything else. A month later she participated in a Club panel about Abstract Expressionism, alongside Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, painter Larry Rivers, and poet Frank O'Hara--a bunch of kids (the oldest, Grace, turning thirty the following day) sharing their tremendous excitement about what was still to come. In her third semester of graduate study that spring, Joan took latemedieval art and advanced French at NYU and audited Wallace Fowlie's course on Marcel Proust at the New School. Fowlie's class coincided with her slow plow through the final volume of the "absolutely marvelous" In Search of Lost Time , which she was reading in the original French. There were many reasons for Joan to adore Proust's novel, including its sensuousness, luminosity, poetic language, psychological subtlety, intense opticality, and inward and outward focus. Beginning with the opening episode of the narrator's traumatic bedtime separation from his mother, she would have seen her own childhood self in the work's ultrasensitive protagonist. Moreover, reading Proust made her even more acutely aware of music's capacity for delicious magnifi cation and confusion of desire. When the novelist's character Swann hears a stirring little musical phrase as he is falling in love, that ineffable phrase--"airy and perfumed"--unseals an otherwise inaccessible part of him and amplifies his being. At novel's end, Proust's narrator discovers the secret of the bliss he fi rst felt when, against his habit, he had tasted a madeleine soaked in linden tea that whisked him back to childhood Sunday mornings in the country. This slipping outside time explains, Proust writes, "why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future." The only way to grasp and make meaningful the past, which is all that truly belongs to us, he realizes, is through art made from one's resurrected past. Similarly, the memory of a feeling, transformed as she painted, would become the basis for Joan's work. She would think of painting--"not motion . . . not in time"--as a way of forgetting death: "I am alive, we are alive, we are not aware of what is coming next." Moreover, for Mitchell as for Proust, art had the power to transform pain into beauty and to make sense of the messes we call our lives. Not infrequently the insomniac Joan read all night. Besides Proust, she devoured novels by Faulkner and Joyce as well as the brilliant six-volume autobiography of Irish playwright and socialist Sean O'Casey. She also kept up with newsmagazines and the Times (and always held strong opinions about current events). But, above all, poetry still held her rapt. She dipped into Valéry, reread Baudelaire, knew much of Verlaine by heart, and discovered what proved to be an abiding passion for Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's woundedness, yearning for transcendence, feeling that ordinary life is not real life, and love of trees and stars deeply moved her. So too did his vulnerability to the external world: witness the scene in Rilke's autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (which she read many times) in which the narrator remembers dining in his family's banquet hall as a child: You sat there as if you had disintegrated--totally without will, without consciousness, without pleasure, without defense. You were like an empty space. I remember that at first this state of annihilation almost made me feel nauseated; it brought on a kind of seasickness, which I only overcame by stretching out my leg until my foot touched the knee of my father, who was sitting opposite me. Moreover, Rilke looked to painting, especially Cézanne's, as a model for poetry. In late 1907, the writer visited the Paris Salon d'Automne nearly every day, seeking to memorize the work of the Post-Impressionist, whose discipline, nuance, precision, and chromatic emotion he emulated. Having visually devoured the blues that dominate Cézanne's late work, Rilke wrote, in Letters on Cézanne (another Joan favorite), of "an ancient Egyptian shadow blue" seen while crossing the Place de la Concorde, of the "wet dark blue" in a certain van Gogh, of the "hermetic blue" of a Rodin watercolor, of "the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings," and of "a kind of thunderstorm blue" in a work by the Master of Aix-- fabulous stuff for the future painter of Hudson River Day Line , Blue Territory , and La Grande Vallée , among myriad triumphs of blueness. Joan's no-credit course on Proust that spring took her far afi eld from the practical considerations that had led her to pursue an MFA. As her relationship with Mike frayed and married life with Barney retreated into the past, her determination to gain financial independence had waned. That June she wrapped up her coursework with straight As and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She never got a teaching job, however. Instead, she kept living on the monthly stipend from her parents, peevishly because she hated having to answer in any way to Jimmie and Marion, even though she begrudged Sally the larger checks she received because she had children. At the same time Joan tried to hide from her fellow artists how very privileged she was. Still, her claims to struggle along on one hundred dollars a month like everyone else met with raised eyebrows and mostly unspoken resentment. It did not escape notice that she could afford the Studio Building; that she never stinted on liquor, paint, or analysis; that her leather trench coat was beautifully tailored; that she didn't have to take day jobs and thus enjoyed the luxury of time. In fact, the only clock Joan was punching was Fried's: three sessions a week, plus a new seven- member "neurotics club" that caused her to feel "the most collective" she had ever felt-- no exception made for the Artists' Club. Joan relied on Fried more than ever. After two years, her psychoanalysis remained a central element in her life. Joan's dependence struck Evans one midday when he met her at Tenth Street after her regular session with Fried up on Riverside Drive. Having wiggled out of her dress slacks, Joan was pattering around in her underwear when she dropped the news that, Fried having decided that sleeping with Evans was unhealthy for her, they could no longer have sex. "Well, I'm sorry because I-- are we allowed to be friends?" "Oh, yes, yes, yes." More discussion, then: "I'll leave now, because you seem very confused." In a sense, Evans was relieved by Joan's announcement. Their relationship was going nowhere, and he needed to get his life together. He told himself he didn't care. "Marisol would like to sleep with you." A Paris-born artist of Venezuelan parentage studying at Hofmann's, Marisol Escobar would shoot to fame in the sixties for her witty assemblage portraits viewed as Pop Art. Famously elegant, silent, and beautiful--the "first girl artist with glamour," as Andy Warhol once put it--she would later have affairs with both Bill de Kooning and Mike Goldberg. (Joan's astringent comment regarding the latter: "I imagine with all the crotch sharing, N.Y. will soon be like one incestuous royal family.") Evans responded to Joan's matchmaking attempt: "This is happening so fast, Joan. You lost a lover, and now you're playing my pimp." That went down badly. The Village tom-toms lost no time in spreading the news. Two days later, Alfred Leslie's ex- lover Naomi Bosworth knocked at Evans's door, and thus began another drop-the-hanky love affair. One night Evans took Naomi for a ride on the Staten Island ferry and caught a bad cold. Afterward they returned to her place. When his cold worsened the following evening, Naomi phoned her doctor uncle, who walked in, glowered at the young man in his niece's bed, applied a mustard plaster to his chest, and ordered rest. After he departed, Naomi too left for class. Then the phone rang: Joan. "What are you doing over there?" "Why are you interested?" "I'm with Mike, and, if you don't get out of there, I'm going to go home with Mike." "You've been going home with Mike a thousand times. When I get well, I'll see you, and we'll have a drink. Right now, I need a cup of tea." Half an hour later, Joan let herself into Naomi's apartment, stripped, and forced Evans to make love, mustard plaster or no. Then they squabbled over whether or not she would have to lie to Fried. Evans too was in analysis, but he considered Joan's reliance on her analyst, not unlike the reliance of her younger self on her father, extremely unhealthy. No doubt Edrita's method of issuing injunctions did inhibit Joan's progress, because it simultaneously replicated her father's directive manner and gave her the warm, intimate attention she craved. When Fried decided that she should stop having sex with Evans, Joan felt compelled to fulfill that prescription as a step on the path to mental health, yet, like a child testing her parent, also acted defiantly, rashly asserting her own will by dashing over to Naomi's apartment and forcing Evans to succumb to her lust. Still she remained deferential to Fried, her only hope, she felt, of overcoming her defective psychological birth. At stake was nothing less than a second chance at personality development. Excerpted from Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter by Patricia Albers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.