In the fall of 1907 Rainer Maria Rilke, living in Paris, made a daily pilgrimage to the Grand Palais to see the posthumous Paul Cezanne retrospective. In between writing his sole novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and his monograph on the sculptor August Rodin, Rilke wrote down his reflections on the Cezanne exhibition to his wife, Clara, then still living in Germany. Rilke, writing fifty years before Joan Mitchell began her painting career which is superbly told in Patricia Albers’ Joan Mitchell Lady Painter, clairvoyantly channeled the pictorial power the American artist’s paintings would evoke. Rilke’s description of Cezanne’s art could equally apply to Joan Mitchell's:
Today I went to see his pictures again; it’s remarkable what an environment they create. Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality. As if these colors would heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand beneath them as acceptingly as possible, it’s as if they are doing something for you. You also notice, a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s natural after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it… He certainly would not have shown another human being his love, had he been forced to conceive such a love; but with this disposition, which was completely developed now, thanks to his strangeness and insularity, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever. Can you imagine what that is like, and what it’s like to experience this through him?
Rilke, ‘Letters on Cezanne’
Joan Mitchell, an avid reader of Rilke, created art and lived a life that certainly came together in a colossal reality. Patricia Albers, who wrote a biography of the Italian photographer Tina Modotti, describes in vivid colors the startlingly crystalline life Joan Mitchell lived in Chicago, New York, Paris and Vetheuil.
Raised in moneyed elegance amongst Chicago society, Mitchell developed a tough, bratty and privileged demeanor in adolescence. Her father was a distant and demanding surgeon while her mother was a founding editor of the journal Poetry. The combination of clinical exactitude and bohemian expressionism created the two sides of Mitchell’s personality, her strict discipline in the studio as well as her lifelong love of language, poetry and nature.
Mitchell moved to New York in the early fifties with her husband Barney Rosset, the future publisher of the literary underground Grove Press. Joan’s commitment to Rosset, as her commitment to any amorous relationship, was elliptical at best. Joan soon took up with the unbalanced Ab Ex painter Michael Goldberg. The two young painters, dashing around Manhattan in paint splattered blue jeans, making love on roofs, filching paintings from each other’s apartments, is the most buoyant chapter of her life. Albers vividly sketches the development of Mitchell’s exploding talent. Her love of Modernism, Mozart and painting make for quick reading. An all-star cast of characters whirl around Mitchell, including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and the other regulars of the Cedar Tavern. New York City is a kinetic backdrop to Joan’s early story; all night drinking, all day painting, recurring exhibitions and summer vacations on Long Island charm in its’ nostalgia for a distant Bohemia.
The charm fades, however, as Mitchell’s emotional world became increasingly consumed by alcohol, infidelity and aggression. Mitchell, as Albers only partly explains, had a significantly unbalanced emotional inner life that was greatly exacerbated by alcohol consumption. Joan’s relationships were long drawn out affairs marked by intense violence, both emotional and physical. Mitchell’s relationship with Goldberg, for instance, included multiple abortions, physical abuse and an incident where Mitchell was raped visiting Goldberg in an upstate clinic where he was undergoing psychiatric care.
Starting in the late 50’s Mitchell spent more of her time in France, eventually settling there permanently. She took up in a marriage like relationship with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. Riopelle, who was the leader of the European variety of Abstract Expressionism Taschisme, was the center of a coterie of French artists and intellectuals that included the writer Samuel Beckett, briefly a lover of Joan’s. Towards the beginning of their relationship the two of them lived an energetic creative life in Paris, painting during the day and entertained in cafes at night. For a time Joan’s life in Paris matched the brilliance of her life back in New York.
Parisian gloom sets in and Mitchell’s relationship with Riopelle eventually took on the same flavor as with Goldberg. Intense non-stop fighting, physical violence and perpetual infidelity on both sides strained their teetering but elastic relationship. Added to the mix was the astounding critical and commercial success Riopelle’s work received before Joan’s reputation flourished. Riopelle, an international Ab Ex art celebrity whose star has gone into eclipse, comes alive in Albers’ telling. Her novelistic renderings of lesser known figures in Mitchell’s orbit, Michael Goldberg and Jean Paul Riopelle especially, make the book an important piece of art history and compelling reading.
Starting in the mid-sixties, however, Mitchell’s life becomes a blur of anxiety and alcoholism. Moving to a small town in France Mitchell’s social world became more confined to her studio and her three German shepherds. Exhibitions and retrospectives follow in succession of one another. Young artists and writers weave in and out of the story. Mitchell and Riopelle split for good in the later 70s, and her life afterwards is marred by substance abuse and health problems. She dies of cancer in France in 1992.
In spite of her enormous talent, three strains kept recurring in the book that undermines the reader’s innate desire to root for this plucky girl from the Midwest. Mitchell’s alcoholism, her disdain for other people’s emotions and her immense economic privilege hampers the reader’s love of this path breaking artist. Joan Mitchell drank and smoked herself to death at a relatively early age of 67. Mitchell, whose amazing Beat-like letters are generously quoted in this biography, could be dismissive and abrasive to people who she felt beneath her. Several important relationships ended abruptly for Mitchell in recrimination and hurt feelings. Towards the end of her life Mitchell would verbally abuse the young visitors to her home for no apparent reason. Also, Joan Mitchell never worked a day in her life; her disdain for middle class niceties was paid for by her daddy’s money. Mitchell didn’t have to work a day job, and the reader is left with the feeling that if she hadn’t had so much free time she might not have spent so much of it nursing a hangover.
Patricia Albers cannot be expected to explain all the psychological contradictions and desires of this demanding and important artist; this is a biography not a novel. Joan Mitchell’s personality in all its feral and cultivated force bears down from the cover photograph to the last page.
Mitchell, a life-long reader of poetry, would take certain important volumes with her into the studio to help her with the work late at night. Her paintings, glorious, consummate, inspired her life and this book. Rilke, one of Joan Mitchell’s favorites, writing about the torso of Apollo, could again be describing the good conscience of her reds, her blues, her simple but hard won truthfulness. Her painting could certainly cure one of indecision once and for all:
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life
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| Patricia Albers 'Joan Mitchell Lady Painter' |
