My story about Joan Mitchell's life and work timed with the retrospective of her work at SF MoMA opening this week appeared in Air Mail News over the weekend. In learning more about Mitchell, I began to see beyond her fairly reductive reputation as a very talented but very volatile artist.

I hadn't understood how her childhood, while privileged, had betrayed her earliest impulses towards art and poetry and that she had to fight her way past a controlling father to be able to study art and reject the life of an ice skating princess.

I didn't know that she had helped her first husband, Barney Rosset, who went on to become a fearless publisher, imbue new life into Grove Press. And that her other relationships with men who were also painters were fraught. Mitchell was not great at commitment to anything but her work.

Mitchell felt she had to be as tough as one of the guys to be taken seriously. At the time, even among the other strong women of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 50's, this was unusual.

I hadn't realized that the pull of Paris and of France, where she ended up living, was at first a place where she felt uninspired. She bought a property where Monet had lived, and she both enjoyed and, at times, resented the connection.

Most importantly, I hadn't known that her dramatic paint strokes and large canvases had been inspired by artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne, and had roots in the sunflowers and bridges that she could see from her window. That she remembered landscapes and didn't need to have them in front of her. And that her abiding painterly energies went towards expressing the feelings that she had--and not some 'abstract' idea of things. Joan Mitchell opened my eyes. Link to the story in my bio.

Photo: Loomis Dean, Life Picture Collection