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Lot Essay
The Rockefeller Mitchells: Science for the Benefit of Humanity
The Rockefeller University is the world’s leading biomedical research university, drawing top scientists and graduate students to New York City from around the world in pursuit of one mission: to conduct science for the benefit of humanity. Rockefeller was founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller with the core principle that understanding the fundamental causes of disease provides the surest route to prevention and treatment. The university’s unique interdisciplinary environment is structured around individual laboratories rather than academic departments. Each of the 72 labs on campus is headed by a visionary scientist, who is asking big questions that can result in transformational discoveries. The success of Rockefeller’s scientists is unparalleled and has resulted in 26 Nobel Prizes, 26 Lasker Awards, and 20 National Medals of Science. Seminal discoveries from Rockefeller scientists have driven clinical advances in the treatment of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity, among many other fields. In this golden age of biomedical discovery, the sale of the Joan Mitchells will help support groundbreaking research and advance the university’s founding mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
Painted in 1955, Joan Mitchell’s City Landscape is an iconic masterpiece from a pivotal period in the artist's oeuvre. Two years earlier, the artist was still searching for her nascent style and had limited herself to a palette of muted grays, but by the time she executed the present work the intensity of her painterly powers was in full force. City Landscape contains the most significant colors of her arsenal: cobalt blue, scarlet red, teal, turquoise, and black, which cluster at the center and are swathed on all sides by passages of pearlescent white. Together with Hudson River Day Line (1955, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio) and The Lake (1955, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art), the present work ranks among the best paintings from this important period and a structurally similar painting, also titled City Landscape, now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago. Painted in the wake of personal and emotional turmoil, and yet mounting critical success, City Landscape exemplifies Mitchell’s determination and perspicacity as she formulates many of the greatest techniques that would sustain her years to come.
City Landscape is a striking painting teeming with an astonishing variety of colors, gestures, and marks. Gathered toward the center is a riotous, light-filled area, made by layering red, blue, teal, green, black, and white. Here, v-shaped marks made decisively with a forceful movement of the hand are met with horizontal strokes in black and white. Moving into the lower register, a thin brush has been used to create oscillating, undulating lines, giving the effect of watery reflections, of an electrified city shimmering at a distance. At this time, Mitchell prized the figure/ground relationship, and by organizing the imagery toward the center, she establishes a sight line that prevails despite the painting’s resolute abstraction. The overall effect conveys what Mitchell prized most, that when a painting works, it is like “motion is made still, like a fish trapped in ice” (J. Mitchell, quoted in Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings, exh. cat. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015, p. 55).
Indeed, City Landscape shows an artist triumphantly claiming her place in the New York art world, one whose feelings and memories were embedded in the very warp and weft of her paintings. As its title suggests, City Landscape evokes a wintry, watery world, conjuring views of a river or lake, as seen through a rain-splattered window, or a sparkling city in the midst of a wintry blizzard. Here we witness how water itself “doubles as a matrix of abstraction and memory,” as the critic David Anfam explained (D. Anfam, “Outreach,” Joan Mitchell: Paintings from the Middle of the Last Century, exh. cat., Cheim & Read, New York, 2018, n.p.). From her childhood home on the shores of Lake Michigan to her view of the East River in downtown New York, and later the Seine as seen from her home at Vétheuil, water became a powerful emotional signifier for the artist.
Mitchell created at least three paintings with the title City Landscape in 1955. This body of work received instant critical acclaim when shown at the Stable Gallery in March of that year. Reviewers described them as “huge sprawling city-scapes seen from vast distances” (A. Newbill, “Joan Mitchell,” Arts Digest, March 1955, p. 28) and praised Mitchell’s “new range of color intensity” (D. Seckler, “Joan Mitchell” ArtNews, March 1955, p. 51). The art historian Judith E. Bernstock described the series as a “breakthrough” and the curator Jane Livingston declared: “These works mark the beginning of that unique combination of bravura and delicate subtlety that would remain with the artist for the rest of her life” (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 22).
For Mitchell, the mid-1950s were a time of both crisis and growth. It was in this generative moment that she began to synthesize the many artistic influences that inspired her, hoping to paint that “secret magic that other people don’t understand” (J. Mitchell, quoted in P. Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, A Life, New York, 2011, p. 217). Mitchell was a regular at the Cedar Tavern, rubbing shoulders with artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, who both became important champions of her work. Walking through Washington Square, she would sit with Ad Reinhardt to talk about painting, or cross paths with Hans Hofmann, who would playfully ask, “Mitcha, why aren’t you home painting?” (H. Hofmann, quoted in J. Perl, “New Art City,” The New York Times, October 16, 2005, online). Mitchell was also a voracious museum-goer, and attended nearly every gallery opening of her friends and colleagues. Among the myriad influences on her style at that time were Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Piet Mondrian, Roberto Matta, Wassily Kandinsky, and Vincent van Gogh.
The difference between Mitchell and her Abstract Expressionist peers, however, lay in her relationship with the natural world, as she felt an almost preternatural affinity for certain places, with lakes and rivers having an especially profound resonance. Whereas for “action painters” like Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, whose canvases became their ‘arena’ in which to ‘act,’ for Mitchell the act of painting allowed her to translate her feelings and emotions about a particular place through the paint. Essentially, Mitchell used the vernacular of Abstract Expressionism – with its gestural, emotional, sometimes violent and rage-filled application of paint – to do something utterly new. Rather than simply copy nature, or record its transient effects (as the Impressionists had done), Mitchell would paint the effect it left her with. Her paintings, then, exist in a liminal state; they became the active record of the artist’s engagement with her medium, but also function as a kind of metaphorical mirror, conjuring up the natural world in a poetical way that somehow also revealed Mitchell’s emotional state, along with her dreams, aspirations, disappointments, and fears.
It may have been Philip Guston’s paintings that coaxed the artist into this new direction, when she began to embrace color and the natural world in paintings such as City Landscape. Mitchell had seen an exhibit of Guston’s abstractions at the Charles Egan Gallery in early 1953, and although they shared a complicated relationship, Guston’s beautiful, subtle, hovering areas of color were more connected to Cezanne, Impressionism, and nature than anyone else working in the downtown New York scene. Landscape painting, however, was seen as declassé, so it was shocking to even consider this erstwhile subject matter. But both Mitchell and Guston intuited that a change was in the air. They were ready to break free from Pollock and de Kooning. They could no longer rely on painting by “sheer force alone.” “We don’t have to go back because we never left,” Mitchell explained. “Man made a city; nature grows. I see it all as nature. I look at it all as what I see” (J. Mitchell, quoted in K. Siegel, “St. Marks,” Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 35).
Despite all the professional accolades that she received in the 1950s, Mitchell still never earned the same commercial success as her male peers. Coupled with this ongoing frustration and the necessity to be ‘one of the boys’ were her tumultuous personal relationships and constant moving from place to place. The summer of 1954 proved especially fraught, as her relationship with artist Michael Goldberg became increasingly conflicted, and her work proceeded in fits and spurts. That summer ended with a major hurricane hitting Eastern Long Island, and with her father, Jimmie, falling ill in Chicago. She later told Irving Sandler: “It was a very devastating experience. [...] It seemed as if the wrath of God fell upon East Hampton. The hurricane is a ghastly symbol of a frightening period in my life” (J. Mitchell, quoted in P. Albers, op. cit., New York, 2011, p. 213).
By the fall of 1954, however, something seemed to break loose for the artist, giving way to an exciting and powerful new body of work, in which she established many of her major pictorial techniques. Over the winter of 1954-55, Mitchell flew from Chicago to Santa Barbara to visit her sister, Sally Perry, and was overcome by views of the city that she saw from the plane. So, too, had the city of Chicago extended before her, viewed from her parents’ apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. All of this awakened a powerful new impulse to paint. Mitchell was also touched by the gift of a single, yellow sunflower that Barney Rosset’s fiancée presented to her over the summer. And this opened up the possibilities for new color, and hastened her connection to van Gogh, and the emotional intensity his paintings contained. In the months that followed, Mitchell painted churning maelstroms of vibrant colors, mostly concentrated within the middle of the canvas, some titled after cities or lakes.
As the pieces of the puzzle began to align, Mitchell synthesized her own unique pictorial vernacular. This was coupled with new, jewel-toned colors and a kind of forthright honesty and directness not heretofore seen in her work. Critics have therefore perceived City Landscape and the related paintings as among her early mature masterpieces, considered to be among the artist's very best and emblematic of gestural abstraction in painting at mid-century.
The Rockefeller University is the world’s leading biomedical research university, drawing top scientists and graduate students to New York City from around the world in pursuit of one mission: to conduct science for the benefit of humanity. Rockefeller was founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller with the core principle that understanding the fundamental causes of disease provides the surest route to prevention and treatment. The university’s unique interdisciplinary environment is structured around individual laboratories rather than academic departments. Each of the 72 labs on campus is headed by a visionary scientist, who is asking big questions that can result in transformational discoveries. The success of Rockefeller’s scientists is unparalleled and has resulted in 26 Nobel Prizes, 26 Lasker Awards, and 20 National Medals of Science. Seminal discoveries from Rockefeller scientists have driven clinical advances in the treatment of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity, among many other fields. In this golden age of biomedical discovery, the sale of the Joan Mitchells will help support groundbreaking research and advance the university’s founding mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
Painted in 1955, Joan Mitchell’s City Landscape is an iconic masterpiece from a pivotal period in the artist's oeuvre. Two years earlier, the artist was still searching for her nascent style and had limited herself to a palette of muted grays, but by the time she executed the present work the intensity of her painterly powers was in full force. City Landscape contains the most significant colors of her arsenal: cobalt blue, scarlet red, teal, turquoise, and black, which cluster at the center and are swathed on all sides by passages of pearlescent white. Together with Hudson River Day Line (1955, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio) and The Lake (1955, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art), the present work ranks among the best paintings from this important period and a structurally similar painting, also titled City Landscape, now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago. Painted in the wake of personal and emotional turmoil, and yet mounting critical success, City Landscape exemplifies Mitchell’s determination and perspicacity as she formulates many of the greatest techniques that would sustain her years to come.
City Landscape is a striking painting teeming with an astonishing variety of colors, gestures, and marks. Gathered toward the center is a riotous, light-filled area, made by layering red, blue, teal, green, black, and white. Here, v-shaped marks made decisively with a forceful movement of the hand are met with horizontal strokes in black and white. Moving into the lower register, a thin brush has been used to create oscillating, undulating lines, giving the effect of watery reflections, of an electrified city shimmering at a distance. At this time, Mitchell prized the figure/ground relationship, and by organizing the imagery toward the center, she establishes a sight line that prevails despite the painting’s resolute abstraction. The overall effect conveys what Mitchell prized most, that when a painting works, it is like “motion is made still, like a fish trapped in ice” (J. Mitchell, quoted in Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings, exh. cat. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015, p. 55).
Indeed, City Landscape shows an artist triumphantly claiming her place in the New York art world, one whose feelings and memories were embedded in the very warp and weft of her paintings. As its title suggests, City Landscape evokes a wintry, watery world, conjuring views of a river or lake, as seen through a rain-splattered window, or a sparkling city in the midst of a wintry blizzard. Here we witness how water itself “doubles as a matrix of abstraction and memory,” as the critic David Anfam explained (D. Anfam, “Outreach,” Joan Mitchell: Paintings from the Middle of the Last Century, exh. cat., Cheim & Read, New York, 2018, n.p.). From her childhood home on the shores of Lake Michigan to her view of the East River in downtown New York, and later the Seine as seen from her home at Vétheuil, water became a powerful emotional signifier for the artist.
Mitchell created at least three paintings with the title City Landscape in 1955. This body of work received instant critical acclaim when shown at the Stable Gallery in March of that year. Reviewers described them as “huge sprawling city-scapes seen from vast distances” (A. Newbill, “Joan Mitchell,” Arts Digest, March 1955, p. 28) and praised Mitchell’s “new range of color intensity” (D. Seckler, “Joan Mitchell” ArtNews, March 1955, p. 51). The art historian Judith E. Bernstock described the series as a “breakthrough” and the curator Jane Livingston declared: “These works mark the beginning of that unique combination of bravura and delicate subtlety that would remain with the artist for the rest of her life” (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 22).
For Mitchell, the mid-1950s were a time of both crisis and growth. It was in this generative moment that she began to synthesize the many artistic influences that inspired her, hoping to paint that “secret magic that other people don’t understand” (J. Mitchell, quoted in P. Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, A Life, New York, 2011, p. 217). Mitchell was a regular at the Cedar Tavern, rubbing shoulders with artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, who both became important champions of her work. Walking through Washington Square, she would sit with Ad Reinhardt to talk about painting, or cross paths with Hans Hofmann, who would playfully ask, “Mitcha, why aren’t you home painting?” (H. Hofmann, quoted in J. Perl, “New Art City,” The New York Times, October 16, 2005, online). Mitchell was also a voracious museum-goer, and attended nearly every gallery opening of her friends and colleagues. Among the myriad influences on her style at that time were Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Piet Mondrian, Roberto Matta, Wassily Kandinsky, and Vincent van Gogh.
The difference between Mitchell and her Abstract Expressionist peers, however, lay in her relationship with the natural world, as she felt an almost preternatural affinity for certain places, with lakes and rivers having an especially profound resonance. Whereas for “action painters” like Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, whose canvases became their ‘arena’ in which to ‘act,’ for Mitchell the act of painting allowed her to translate her feelings and emotions about a particular place through the paint. Essentially, Mitchell used the vernacular of Abstract Expressionism – with its gestural, emotional, sometimes violent and rage-filled application of paint – to do something utterly new. Rather than simply copy nature, or record its transient effects (as the Impressionists had done), Mitchell would paint the effect it left her with. Her paintings, then, exist in a liminal state; they became the active record of the artist’s engagement with her medium, but also function as a kind of metaphorical mirror, conjuring up the natural world in a poetical way that somehow also revealed Mitchell’s emotional state, along with her dreams, aspirations, disappointments, and fears.
It may have been Philip Guston’s paintings that coaxed the artist into this new direction, when she began to embrace color and the natural world in paintings such as City Landscape. Mitchell had seen an exhibit of Guston’s abstractions at the Charles Egan Gallery in early 1953, and although they shared a complicated relationship, Guston’s beautiful, subtle, hovering areas of color were more connected to Cezanne, Impressionism, and nature than anyone else working in the downtown New York scene. Landscape painting, however, was seen as declassé, so it was shocking to even consider this erstwhile subject matter. But both Mitchell and Guston intuited that a change was in the air. They were ready to break free from Pollock and de Kooning. They could no longer rely on painting by “sheer force alone.” “We don’t have to go back because we never left,” Mitchell explained. “Man made a city; nature grows. I see it all as nature. I look at it all as what I see” (J. Mitchell, quoted in K. Siegel, “St. Marks,” Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 35).
Despite all the professional accolades that she received in the 1950s, Mitchell still never earned the same commercial success as her male peers. Coupled with this ongoing frustration and the necessity to be ‘one of the boys’ were her tumultuous personal relationships and constant moving from place to place. The summer of 1954 proved especially fraught, as her relationship with artist Michael Goldberg became increasingly conflicted, and her work proceeded in fits and spurts. That summer ended with a major hurricane hitting Eastern Long Island, and with her father, Jimmie, falling ill in Chicago. She later told Irving Sandler: “It was a very devastating experience. [...] It seemed as if the wrath of God fell upon East Hampton. The hurricane is a ghastly symbol of a frightening period in my life” (J. Mitchell, quoted in P. Albers, op. cit., New York, 2011, p. 213).
By the fall of 1954, however, something seemed to break loose for the artist, giving way to an exciting and powerful new body of work, in which she established many of her major pictorial techniques. Over the winter of 1954-55, Mitchell flew from Chicago to Santa Barbara to visit her sister, Sally Perry, and was overcome by views of the city that she saw from the plane. So, too, had the city of Chicago extended before her, viewed from her parents’ apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. All of this awakened a powerful new impulse to paint. Mitchell was also touched by the gift of a single, yellow sunflower that Barney Rosset’s fiancée presented to her over the summer. And this opened up the possibilities for new color, and hastened her connection to van Gogh, and the emotional intensity his paintings contained. In the months that followed, Mitchell painted churning maelstroms of vibrant colors, mostly concentrated within the middle of the canvas, some titled after cities or lakes.
As the pieces of the puzzle began to align, Mitchell synthesized her own unique pictorial vernacular. This was coupled with new, jewel-toned colors and a kind of forthright honesty and directness not heretofore seen in her work. Critics have therefore perceived City Landscape and the related paintings as among her early mature masterpieces, considered to be among the artist's very best and emblematic of gestural abstraction in painting at mid-century.