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Property From a Private american Collection JOAN MITCHELL (1926-1992) UNTITLED oil on canvas 36 x...

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Property From a Private american Collection JOAN MITCHELL (1926-1992) UNTITLED oil on canvas 36 x...
Property From a Private american Collection
JOAN MITCHELL
(1926-1992)
UNTITLED
oil on canvas
36 x 283/4 in. (91.4 x 73 cm)
executed ca. 1967-1968
ESTIMATE: $200,000-300,000

PROVENANCE
Martha Jackson Gallery, NEW YORK
Private collection
The year 1967 marked a turning point and milestone in the life of Joan Mitchell. The artist lost her mother to cancer, she made France her official home by purchasing property north of Paris in the suburb of Vétheuil, and she developed a relationship with the dealer Jean Fournier, who would build her name and reputation throughout France as well as in the United States. Created during this tumultuous time, UNTITLED exemplifies the shifts and progressions that Mitchell was implementing in her painting. She was becoming more experimental with color and her abstractions were more delicate and lyrical than they had been previously. She was painting with thinner surfaces and not using the heavy impasto that had become one of her signature trademarks. As Jane Livingston notes: "...Mitchell allowed color to become the main subject of many of her paintings, using chromatic juxtapositions in ways new not only to her but also to painting itself" (quoted in THE PAINTINGS OF JOAN MITCHELL, NEW YORK, 2002, p. 33).
The surroundings of Vétheuil provided Mitchell with new inspiration. The Seine and tree-filled river banks seemed to have a direct effect on the works that she produced, as they had on many other artists who had visited the area, most notably Claude Monet, who had lived on part of the property that Mitchell had purchased from 1878-1881. The relationship between the landscape and her paintings was organic.
Since her earliest visits to Vétheuil, the river Seine has provided a fruitful subject for Mitchell's art. Her painted river represents a composite of feelings associated with memories of real rivers and other bodies of water. Mitchell's paintings of rivers dating from 1967-68 exhibit opaque, loosely brushed, roundish areas of blue or green floating on large luminous white grounds.
Judith E. Bernstock, JOAN MITCHELL, NEW YORK, 1988, pp. 76-77