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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.
Joan Mitchell’s Untitled is a tour-de-force of Abstract Expressionism. This intense, visceral painting exemplifies the tenacity and fearlessness of the young artist, having been executed two years before she was featured in the now famous “Mitchell Paints a Picture” article in Artnews, a rare accolade at the time for a female painter. In the present work we see Mitchell as a perceptive and resourceful colorist, organizing a taut canvas where passages of bright white provide the backdrop for powerful, sensational colors. Splitting her time between New York and Paris, Untitled displays the influence of the new friendships with artists, poets, and writers that she cultivated at the time, and demonstrating her ever more complex usage of both color and impasto, it becomes an important work from the highpoint of twentieth-century painting.
Painted in 1955, Untitled embodies the excitement and freedom evident in her life and work at this time. A profusion of unique and beautiful painterly marks have been executed with incredible variety. Some have been painted wet-on-wet in forceful daubs of a fully-loaded brush, whereas others have been thinned-down with turpentine, creating stunning curtains of rivulets and drips. The painting is loosely grouped into three registers, with the calmer, light-filled area at the left, where the paint is thinner and more atmospheric. Along the right side, the tumultuous energy is intense, filled with a barrage of brushstrokes bubbling up like a volcano. The middle section seems to bridge the two, where a series of stepped-up blue brushstrokes act like a footstep or bridge connecting them both. The bridge motif was an important and long-running theme in Mitchell’s work. So, too, was the triptych format, which seems to be germinating before our eyes.
This was also the beginning of a period during which Mitchell often utilized a horizontal format, as she would do in Ladybug (1957, Museum of Modern Art, New York), To the Harbormaster (1957), and Piano mécanique (1957, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The precedent for this horizontal configuration was most likely her early, Cubist-derived paintings, such as Cross Section of a Bridge (1951, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka), a work that visually vibrates with broken shards of color and a liberal use of gray tones, all within a horizontal format. Mitchell often worked cyclically, and her use of the horizontal alignment in Untitled gives the sensation of landscape, especially given the beautiful blue passages along the upper edge, where one would expect to find the sky. In several passages we see Mitchell’s horizontal brushstrokes arranged in a sophisticated layering process. It is probably not surprising, then, that she titled a similar horizontal painting after the Italian word for “layers” – Strata (circa 1960), in the Minnesota Museum of Art.
In the summer of 1955, Mitchell found herself in the beginnings of what she called “the experiment.” On the advice of psychoanalyst and dear friend Edrita Fried, Mitchell decided to leave New York and fly to Paris, and it was here, in the lively bars and cafes of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and along the tree-lined Boulevard Saint-Michel, that Mitchell’s new style took root. Almost immediately upon her arrival she was thrust into a fascinating new microcosm, populated by American expats and French artists, writers and critics that included Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Paul Jenkins, Kimber Smith, Marisol, Hantaï, Shirley Jaffe, Zao Wou-Ki, Giacometti, Samuel Beckett, Michel Tapié, and Georges Duthuit.
Initially planned as a two-month sojourn, Mitchell’s first trip to Paris would in fact last until November. It was during this significant visit that she was introduced to the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and immediately began one of the most important relationships of her life. Mitchell and Riopelle enjoyed what has been called a “dialogue in paint.” At the time, Riopelle was the enfant terrible of a new style emerging in France, called “art informel.” He became known for his virtuosic use of the palette knife, creating allover abstractions that appeared to be fractured and crystallized like stained glass. “These mutual influences endured during the first years of their relationship,” the French critic Éric de Chassey has recently explained, with Mitchell influencing Riopelle, and he influencing her work. Around the time Untitled was painted, Mitchell wrote to Riopelle…"Last night I painted eight pictures on paper…some were gray and dark and had an influence of someone I know in Paris–including a palette knife” (E. de Chassey and J. Mitchell, quoted in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 90).
The curator Judith E. Bernstock once wrote that “a multiplicity of simultaneous references” can be discovered in paintings from this period, when Mitchell was dividing her time between the French and American art scenes (J. E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p 33). Indeed, there is a wide variety of powerful pictorial influences that have been assimilated in the present work. Mitchell’s bravura brushwork—probably made with the full sweep of her arm—is offset against a white background, recalling Franz Kline’s black-and-white paintings, which Mitchell had seen in his studio in the early 1950s. (Earlier in 1955 she painted a small series that she called “my Klines.”) Also in Untitled, Hans Hofmann’s push-and-pull technique is evoked by the airy passages of white paint that act like the sky and create a feeling of deep, recessional space, only to snap back immediately to the surface. The many stacked layers in these paintings may hint at Hofmann’s slabs too. So, also, is the preponderance of white space possibly connected to her relationship with Sam Francis, whose paintings began to include more white space around this time. Mitchell has said of the color, “Painting without white would be like ‘planting a garden without plants’” (J. Mitchell, quoted in J.E. Bernstock, ibid., p. 39).
1955, the year of the present work, marks a highpoint of the artist’s early career. Mitchell participated in Vanguard, an important group exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in addition to the Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute and an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As the curator Jane Livingston continues, “Few bodies of work in her career outpace the work done…between 1952 and 1958, for sheer energy, quantity and finesse” (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 21). Indeed, Untitled is a powerful painting that bears witness to this heady time, one filled with love affairs and professional partnerships, of transatlantic travel and daring leaps of faith.
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.
Joan Mitchell’s Untitled is a tour-de-force of Abstract Expressionism. This intense, visceral painting exemplifies the tenacity and fearlessness of the young artist, having been executed two years before she was featured in the now famous “Mitchell Paints a Picture” article in Artnews, a rare accolade at the time for a female painter. In the present work we see Mitchell as a perceptive and resourceful colorist, organizing a taut canvas where passages of bright white provide the backdrop for powerful, sensational colors. Splitting her time between New York and Paris, Untitled displays the influence of the new friendships with artists, poets, and writers that she cultivated at the time, and demonstrating her ever more complex usage of both color and impasto, it becomes an important work from the highpoint of twentieth-century painting.
Painted in 1955, Untitled embodies the excitement and freedom evident in her life and work at this time. A profusion of unique and beautiful painterly marks have been executed with incredible variety. Some have been painted wet-on-wet in forceful daubs of a fully-loaded brush, whereas others have been thinned-down with turpentine, creating stunning curtains of rivulets and drips. The painting is loosely grouped into three registers, with the calmer, light-filled area at the left, where the paint is thinner and more atmospheric. Along the right side, the tumultuous energy is intense, filled with a barrage of brushstrokes bubbling up like a volcano. The middle section seems to bridge the two, where a series of stepped-up blue brushstrokes act like a footstep or bridge connecting them both. The bridge motif was an important and long-running theme in Mitchell’s work. So, too, was the triptych format, which seems to be germinating before our eyes.
This was also the beginning of a period during which Mitchell often utilized a horizontal format, as she would do in Ladybug (1957, Museum of Modern Art, New York), To the Harbormaster (1957), and Piano mécanique (1957, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The precedent for this horizontal configuration was most likely her early, Cubist-derived paintings, such as Cross Section of a Bridge (1951, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka), a work that visually vibrates with broken shards of color and a liberal use of gray tones, all within a horizontal format. Mitchell often worked cyclically, and her use of the horizontal alignment in Untitled gives the sensation of landscape, especially given the beautiful blue passages along the upper edge, where one would expect to find the sky. In several passages we see Mitchell’s horizontal brushstrokes arranged in a sophisticated layering process. It is probably not surprising, then, that she titled a similar horizontal painting after the Italian word for “layers” – Strata (circa 1960), in the Minnesota Museum of Art.
In the summer of 1955, Mitchell found herself in the beginnings of what she called “the experiment.” On the advice of psychoanalyst and dear friend Edrita Fried, Mitchell decided to leave New York and fly to Paris, and it was here, in the lively bars and cafes of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and along the tree-lined Boulevard Saint-Michel, that Mitchell’s new style took root. Almost immediately upon her arrival she was thrust into a fascinating new microcosm, populated by American expats and French artists, writers and critics that included Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Paul Jenkins, Kimber Smith, Marisol, Hantaï, Shirley Jaffe, Zao Wou-Ki, Giacometti, Samuel Beckett, Michel Tapié, and Georges Duthuit.
Initially planned as a two-month sojourn, Mitchell’s first trip to Paris would in fact last until November. It was during this significant visit that she was introduced to the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and immediately began one of the most important relationships of her life. Mitchell and Riopelle enjoyed what has been called a “dialogue in paint.” At the time, Riopelle was the enfant terrible of a new style emerging in France, called “art informel.” He became known for his virtuosic use of the palette knife, creating allover abstractions that appeared to be fractured and crystallized like stained glass. “These mutual influences endured during the first years of their relationship,” the French critic Éric de Chassey has recently explained, with Mitchell influencing Riopelle, and he influencing her work. Around the time Untitled was painted, Mitchell wrote to Riopelle…"Last night I painted eight pictures on paper…some were gray and dark and had an influence of someone I know in Paris–including a palette knife” (E. de Chassey and J. Mitchell, quoted in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 90).
The curator Judith E. Bernstock once wrote that “a multiplicity of simultaneous references” can be discovered in paintings from this period, when Mitchell was dividing her time between the French and American art scenes (J. E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p 33). Indeed, there is a wide variety of powerful pictorial influences that have been assimilated in the present work. Mitchell’s bravura brushwork—probably made with the full sweep of her arm—is offset against a white background, recalling Franz Kline’s black-and-white paintings, which Mitchell had seen in his studio in the early 1950s. (Earlier in 1955 she painted a small series that she called “my Klines.”) Also in Untitled, Hans Hofmann’s push-and-pull technique is evoked by the airy passages of white paint that act like the sky and create a feeling of deep, recessional space, only to snap back immediately to the surface. The many stacked layers in these paintings may hint at Hofmann’s slabs too. So, also, is the preponderance of white space possibly connected to her relationship with Sam Francis, whose paintings began to include more white space around this time. Mitchell has said of the color, “Painting without white would be like ‘planting a garden without plants’” (J. Mitchell, quoted in J.E. Bernstock, ibid., p. 39).
1955, the year of the present work, marks a highpoint of the artist’s early career. Mitchell participated in Vanguard, an important group exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in addition to the Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute and an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As the curator Jane Livingston continues, “Few bodies of work in her career outpace the work done…between 1952 and 1958, for sheer energy, quantity and finesse” (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 21). Indeed, Untitled is a powerful painting that bears witness to this heady time, one filled with love affairs and professional partnerships, of transatlantic travel and daring leaps of faith.