Untitled

Date: 1956

Object Type: Painting

Material/Technique: oil paint; canvas

Dimensions: 83 3/4 H x 77 W in

Accession No: 1977.37

Credit Line: Gift of Mr. Clay Felker

Description: Slightly taller and wider than an average male museum visitor standing with his arms outspread, Joan Mitchell’s Untitled engulfs the viewer in an energetic lattice of red, blue, black, green, and brown brushstrokes varying dramatically in opacity and color saturation. Her loose, often drippy marks move from vertical to horizontal to diagonal, and they coalesce into and dissolve out of intricate knots. As the above excerpt from a poem by Jim Brodey suggests, Mitchell’s paintings evoke psychological states rather than depict recognizable subjects. Mitchell is closely associated with abstract expressionism. Developed in New York in the late 1940s by painters who included Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock and given a theoretical framework by the influential critic Clement Greenberg, this new form of “nonobjective” painting was characterized by the exuberant application of paint to express primal states of being. Although she frequented the studios of de Kooning, Gorky, and Kline and was a regular at their favorite Greenwich Village watering hole, the Cedar Tavern, Mitchell belonged to a younger, second generation of abstract expressionists who expanded the concept of pure abstraction. Asked why he didn’t work more from nature, Jackson Pollock famously declared, “I am nature!” Mitchell, however, never subscribed to the existential and self-referential tenets of abstract expressionism, instead remaining closely connected to the physical world. “I’m very old-fashioned but not reactionary,” she explained. “My paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape.” Like her early influences, Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky, artists who sought new ways to express impressions of the world in painterly form, Mitchell attempted to translate subjective sense memories through the objective medium of paint on canvas. “I paint,” she once wrote, “from remembered landscapes that I carry with me – and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” The art historian Marcia Tucker characterized Mitchell’s work as “private, vulnerable, full of the energy of madness and genius, elegance and unparalleled physical intensity.” Untitled dynamically expresses, and balances, the qualities Tucker identified. Written for the exhibition, Art of Our Time (April 24, 2010 - August 8, 2010).

Exhibitions: [im]permanent: Hard Edges and Lyrical Visions, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, 12/20/2023 - 06/06/2025 Solving for X=Accessibility, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, 09/12/2019 - 12/08/2019 Forty Years/Forty Stories, 04/26/2014 - 08/03/2014 Art of Our Time, 04/24/2010 - 08/08/2010 Shifting Perspectives: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collection (full run), 02/10/2003 - 08/09/2005 Connecting the Past to the Present (rotation two), 07/10/2002 - 02/10/2003 Selections from the WSU Foundation Art Collection, 02/05/2001 - 01/02/2002 Beren Gallery, 05/01/2000 - 10/31/2000 Twenty-Five Years of Collecting, 12/04/1999 - 01/09/2000 The Language of Abstraction: Post-War Paintings from the Collection (rotating exhibition), 08/01/1998 - 12/13/1998 Women's Works, 03/07/1990 - 04/22/1990 Women Artists: Works from the Collection, 10/01/1986 - 12/21/1986 The Best of the Collection: The Catalog Premiere Exhibition, 12/03/1980 - 02/04/1981