A central figure of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) is known for her lush orchestrations of color and form in paintings that create a dialogue between the landscape and gestural abstraction. Over the course of her four-decade career, Mitchell brought a synesthetic approach to representing her observations of urban and natural environments, music, and poetry. At once intimate and immersive, her canvases reflect not a direct translation of the world, but rather a remembered impression of the way one moves through it as an embodied subject. Mitchell’s singular mode of mark-making is by turns calligraphic, turbulent, and symphonic, resulting in heavily worked yet airy surfaces.

Born in Chicago, Mitchell attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also received her master’s degree. After completing a fellowship in France, in 1949 she settled in New York, where she enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s painting classes. In 1951, she participated in the landmark 9th Street Show, which marked the resistance of New York artists to French modernism, and she became one of the few women members of The Club, founded by artists of the New York School. In 1955, she began spending more time in France, and she moved to Paris in 1959 before settling permanently in Vétheuil, a town northwest of Paris, in 1968. There, she began hosting and providing resources for other artists, a passion that was formalized after her death in 1992 with the establishment of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Throughout Mitchell’s life, her work was regularly the subject of solo exhibitions at such major galleries as the Stable Gallery, New York; Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris; and Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York.

In 1974, a mid-career retrospective dedicated to Mitchell’s work was mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and in 1982, Mitchell became the first American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1988–89, a touring retrospective of her work appeared at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Posthumous retrospectives have been organized by such museums as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002–4; traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2015–16; traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne); and the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2021–23; also appeared at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris). Mitchell’s numerous honors include Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) of the City of Paris (1991); Award for Painting, French Ministry of Culture (1989); and the inaugural Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of America (1988).