Museums: National Gallery of Art #18

It's been a while since we lasted the National Gallery of Art.  During this visit, we are focusing on a single painting. 

During Year 2, we blogged about a friend introducing us to Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) .  Mitchell was an American abstract expressionist painter.  Together with Lee Krasner and a few others, "she was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim."

Joan Mitchell in 1984

Here is a short bio from JoanMitchellFoundation.org:  "Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship, which took her to France for a year in 1948-49, and it was there that her paintings moved toward abstraction. Returning to New York, she participated in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets."

"In 1955 she began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1968 she settled in Vétheuil, a small town in the countryside outside of Paris, where she worked continuously until her death in 1992. During the almost 50 years of her painting life, as Abstract Expressionism was eclipsed by successive styles, Mitchell’s commitment to the tenets of gestural abstraction remained firm and uncompromising. Summing up her achievement, Klaus Kertess wrote, “She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled.”"

The National Gallery recently acquired a very large Joan Mitchell painting from the now defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art.  (The Corcoran was run into the ground.  Its amazing collection was divided among other institutions, including the National Gallery.  The Corcoran building was acquired by nearby George Washington University, which has greatly expanded its fine arts and design curriculum.) 

The Mitchell acquired by the National Gallery, Salut Tom,  is pictured below.

The painting (a tetraptych-four side-by-side canvases) measures a whopping 9' tall by 23' long.  The painting is so large that we used a panorama shot to photograph it.  Hence, the painting appears distorted.  Of course, the painting is rectangular, not curved.  Below is a better photo of Salut Tom.  

.  © Estate of Joan Mitchell

According to Corcoran.org, the "inspiration for Salut Tom, one of Mitchell’s largest and most important paintings, is the view of the river Seine from her estate in Vétheuil, France. Motivated as much by her recollection of the landscape as by the actual panorama, Mitchell depicted the scene many times, merging factual depictions of her subject with abstract ruminations."

The painting sort of looks like a river.  Doesn't it?  Below is a photo of the Seine near Vétheuil.

Recently, Artsy published an article about Joan Mitchell, titled "Joan Mitchell on How to Be an Artist".  The article is an interesting read.  One quote in particular caught Greg's attention:  "[W]hen I do paint, I am not aware of myself. As I said before, I am ‘no hands,’ the painting is telling me what to do.”

We enjoy viewing Joan Micthell's paintings.  We hope to see more during the 10 Year Plan and to learn about other artists.  

Thanks for visiting the National Gallery with us to view Salut Tom.

P.S.  Another painting depicting the Seine near Vétheuil appears below.  Enjoy.

Arm of the Seine near Vétheuil by Claude Monet (1878)