As a teenager, she was raised on a steady regimen of music, dance, sports and art, with regular trips to the Art Institute to see 19th-century masterpieces by Cézanne, Monet and van Gogh.
At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a major retrospective opening on Saturday tracks how Mitchell's steely resolve to be written in history as one of the greatest painters produced a signature style that extended the contours of Abstract Expressionism. Spread across 10 galleries, with some 80 oil paintings and works on paper, the exhibition demonstrates how the bold physicality of Mitchell's brush strokes allowed her to breathe new life into Abstract Expressionism, even as it had become outmoded, stateside, by Pop Art and Conceptualism.
The show, curated by Sarah Roberts, head of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, and Katy Siegel, senior programming and research curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, ingeniously reconsiders Mitchell's legacy so that we see her developing a cosmopolitan, trans-Atlantic sensibility rooted in the tradition of 19th-century French landscape and history painting. Rather than the all-over, canvas-filling brush strokes favored by other abstract painters, Mitchell's works were looser, gathered away from the edges. In paintings like "Harbor December" and "Hemlock," both from 1956, Mitchell twists long, broad strokes of paint around a central core of densely layered, multicolored marks to suggest a sense of torsion - of being wrenched, swept and spun around. These interpretations are vivifying and thoughtful, and a selection of pastel on paper works from 1975, collaborations between Mitchell and the poet James Schuyler, testify to the deep impact that poetry had on her painting.
In multipaneled works like "La Vie en Rose" (1979), Mitchell juxtaposes energetic - nearly violent - sections of black and blue brush strokes against a haze of lavender and pale pink, warping the viewer's sense of the painting's scale and directing the eye across the four panels.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/arts/design/joan-mitchell-sfmoma.html
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