Joan Mitchell: Remembering in Color
Twenty years ago, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, I shook Joan Mitchell’s hand. I was the new wife of an old friend of hers—Paul Auster. They had met in the early seventies through the poet, Jacques Dupin, whom Paul had translated. Jacques a
- PDF / 2,952,754 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 247 Views
Twenty years ago, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, I shook Joan Mitchell’s hand. I was the new wife of an old friend of hers — Paul Auster. They had met in the early seventies through the poet, Jacques Dupin, whom Paul had translated. Jacques also worked at the Galerie Maeght, which showed the art of the man Mitchell was living with at the time, the French Canadian painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle. I had been informed that Mitchell’s character, like certain kinds of weather, chanced a thunderstorm now and again, and I braced myself. But what I remember from that day is that when Joan Mitchell saw my husband, she threw herself into his arms and hugged him. Ten years earlier, the then twenty-four-year old Paul had survived a memorable dinner party given by Jacques Dupin and his wife, Christine. Over the course of the evening, Mitchell had insulted Paul, not once or twice, but steadily, without respite, for hours. While Riopelle, in a spirit of avoidance and contented oblivion, slept soundly on the sofa, the Dupins did their best to follow the barrage of verbal missiles that were flying across the table in English —“Who do you think you are, Lord Byron?” But Paul’s unflappable demeanor under fire (a sanguine mixture of astonishment and amusement) seemed to win the painter’s affection, and after that grueling but never-to-be-repeated initiation, they became friends. It was Joan who introduced Paul to Samuel Beckett, Joan who gave him an etching of a sunflower for the cover of the small literary magazine, Living Hand, that he had started with a friend, and Joan who wanted signed manuscripts of his poems to keep. She got them. I remember the hug, and I remember the paintings in the museum. At the time, I had never seen any of Mitchell’s work. What fascinates me now is what I have retained of the pictures hanging on those walls, because I think my memory may hold some clues to their character. I remember no single canvas perfectly, but there was little doubt in my mind that the paintings were not purely abstract but referred to landscapes. I remember deep and lighter greens, a host of blues, a feeling of movement in foliage, and white light through leaves. I recall one work in particular that covered a whole wall, and I’m quite sure it had four panels. I was standing at a distance to take in its sweep. Memory has simplified the image, and what remains are copses in a broad, wild meadow and a sense that I am looking at something beautiful, fierce, and touched by melancholy. The exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York in the summer of 2002 of fifty-nine paintings by Joan Mitchell allowed me to take another look
siri hust vedt
136
at the artist’s work. The show, organized by Jane Livingston, included canvases from 1951 to 1992, the year of Mitchell’s death. Most of the canvases are large and several, mostly from the seventies, are huge. Clearing (1973), for example, is roughly nine by eighteen feet. An unusually small canvas in the show, Untitled (c. 1960), which is only twenty-four by nineteen-and-five-eig
Data Loading...
