T. S. ELIOT’S epigraph for “Marina,”
quoting Seneca
With Yseult away at dance school and Jean-Paul shuttling back and forth to Paris, where he was casting bronzes, Joan, Sylvie, and Rufus held down the camp in Golfe-Juan during the summer of 1965. Joan wrote often to Mike. The two had drifted apart, then grown closer in the aftermath of Mike’s latest troubles: he had lifted several drawings from Bill de Kooning’s studio, forged the artist’s signature, and sold them. After the fraud was discovered, de Kooning took steps to prosecute, but Mike’s wife, Patsy, helped deter the older artist by repurchasing the drawings, raising the cash to do so by selling her own Pollock and Kline. After much string pulling and negotiating, Mike wound up at the Psychiatric Institute of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where he would remain for eighteen months while psychiatrists attempted to “graft a conscience onto him.” Patsy had initiated a divorce. At first furious with Mike, Joan later rallied to his side, reportedly rounding out the amount Patsy had put together to buy back the de Koonings.
Joan’s letters to Mike reel off the details of her days. Back in Paris, she and her stepdaughter Sylvie had attended the opening of an exhibition of American sculpture at the Rodin Museum, where New York Museum of Modern Art director René d’Harnoncourt had bought them drinks. Two days later, the pair had flown to Nice with the dogs in crates and Sylvie’s pet hamster nibbling lettuce on her tray table. Sylvie was supposed to lose thirty-five pounds before returning to Canada, so Joan had tracked down a Parisian specialist who prescribed appetite suppressants and ordered the weighing of “every pea and radish” the teenager consumed. To help her along, Joan was following the same Spartan diet. Already lean, the artist now looked emaciated.
Of her routine with Sylvie and Rufus, who’d driven down with Jean-Paul, Joan reported,
My life is strictly them. Not much time to brood. Sometimes I wonder what’s it all about—life—that is—the children wax very philosophic—sweet and intelligent—ah youth. So my day—dog walk—provisions for boat—sail—eat at sea—swim—return 8:30ish—wash boat—dog walk—eat—play bridge—sleep. Can’t get into much trouble that way. I have developed enormous patience however and I do prefer being alone to seeing lots of devastating people or destructive or time-consuming or boring. (I do like people though.) … Rufus and Sylvie intensely ask me advice—O I feel tired …
Painting isn’t so different either. Well—it takes guts I guess to see “anything through” as H. James would say, even if you don’t know what or why you’re seeing it through like why put red on or why not … I need some time to get at my feelings for painting. My dreams are what all little girls’ dreams are made of. My real sadnesses are you and my Mother—I miss you very very very much.
After a two- or three-day sail with Rip and the teenagers, she took up her pen once again:
I can’t go whipping back up [to Paris] … much as I would like to do some work. However, in the long run I’ve learned I’m better not doing it at all than in a half-assed fashion which fills me with anxiety and anger—and I have no place to work. We arrived about 4 am—and I sat staring at that quay—the light was fabulous—and the black rubber tires under the quay looked like something Motherwell should have seen … also there was a mad rock that Rufus took photographs of—little bits of ideas—strange light.
Memories of her feelings about that stony outcropping viewed in dawn light would spawn the hermetic bioluminescent Rufus’ Rock Mistral and, several months later, Rufus’s Rock.
From the south of France, Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica, other mental landscapes accumulated. Seduced by Corsica, which they compared to the old, unspoiled Riviera, Joan and Jean-Paul loved to sail, usually with a gang of friends, the stunning and complicated coasts of Cap Corse and the western side of the island, dropping anchor in deep-sheltered inlets where they swam amid shimmying seaweed. Rugged red granite cliffs threw oddly shaped shadows over the water. Beyond the cliffs’ edges stretched olive groves and rough, sweet-smelling carpets of maquis (rosemary, myrtle, laurel, butcher’s broom) and, beyond that, cypress, beech, and mountain pine forests. As the light softened, the pleasure-seekers would watch the sun set, sip vin du pays, and feast on the sea urchins they had gathered or on fresh lobster purchased from peddlers right on the beach. Often the Serica weighed anchor in the harbor of the fortress-village of Algajola in Calvi, teeming with legionnaires; or near the splendid, wooded Girolata, “a magical, unviolated spot” inaccessible except by boat or on foot. The paintings of the devouring-eyed Joan were now mostly “[coming] out of trees,” as she put it. Perhaps she was picturing one in Corsica when she told John Ashbery, “I’m trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long time.”
Joan’s paintings of the mid-sixties oppose scruffy, atmospheric whitish areas to hovering clumps of thalo greens, dusty silver greens, mossy greens, and shiny juniper greens, complicated by rusts, cerulean blues, and red violets. Emphatically tactile, they evoke dusk-strangled terrains where light sensuously clings to a green, liquefies a blue, untarnishes a silver. The whole weight of some paintings hangs to one side. Edges are complicated. Here and there heavy bright whites sidle up to greens or blues as if to infringe upon them, yet, for once in Joan’s work, the relationship between figure and ground feels unambivalent. On the other hand, whether scabrous or milk thin, her paint never stops metamorphosing from landscape to pigment to landscape again. Large yet less athletic, less expansive, than what came before, the work at times feels elegiac.
What is “the difference between, say, Joan Mitchell’s kind of painting and a very loose kind of landscape painting?” Ashbery asks in his 1965 feature story on Joan for ArtNews. Depending on the situation, he continues, “one’s feelings about nature are at different removes from it”: apprehending one’s feelings may demand semi-recognizable form or, in contrast, “abstracted impressions.” He cites the artist: “I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.”
Yet Joan’s labeling of works like Calvi and First Cypress her “black paintings” appears to sanction viewers’ tendency to read abstract art in terms of biography. (In fact, there’s no black in them, but where thalo green is thickly applied, they look black.) Some people assumed that her dejection over her father’s death and her mother’s illness explained Joan’s use of dark colors. Absolutely not! the artist rejoined. First of all, she strenuously objected to the pathetic fallacy by which black equals sad and yellow equals happy (even though color-emotion synesthesia led her to experience loneliness, for instance, as dark green and to declare, of one work, “It’s a yellow painting. There’s hope.”). Second, believing that to wallow in paint would be unprofessional and self-indulgent, she agreed with Bill de Kooning that, whatever an artist’s personal problems, his or her job is to make a good picture. Moreover, she took as an article of faith that one should not timidly try to stay within one’s reputation. Pushing herself as a painter, she demonstrated her emotional as well as her formal range.
Some dismissed the “black paintings” as dismal. On the other hand, when New York Times critic Stuart Preston reviewed Joan’s show at the Stable in April 1965, he swooned a little over the “violent contrasts of dark and light” and “intricate webs of trickling color” that “Mitchell continues to nail … to the abstract expressionist mast.” Preston wasn’t alone. At Joan’s opening, landscape painter John Button found himself “covered with goose-flesh—so thrilled and moved that I couldn’t participate in the usual ‘socializing’ … those large, scribbled, green-black places are noble and tragic and cool. When an artist uses color that way … it is almost too much.”
Two years later, Parisian gallerist Jean Fournier would exhibit other “black paintings.” Raised in the country, Fournier once responded to a question about Joan’s work with the metaphor of a bird building a nest: “A bird works so hard. Bits of hair, cotton threads, and straw are woven into something solid in this work vital to the life and death of birds. The painter too works with what he has at hand, what he has in his heart.”
That September Mike heard more from Joan, now back in Paris:
Well—about me—I’m okay … big shows offered in Basel—Zurich and Germany. [None of these materialized.] … Hard painting—made a few I like—smallish and thick—harder to make a dark center—don’t know where I’m going at all—but have to put in the hours—do love painting still—fuck it—and do love you too, but the painting sometimes bores me and sometimes kills me—and “man”—I guess it has to be “felt” and when I don’t feel, it’s zero—seems to me “I’ve sung this song before.”
J.P. is being very nice—Well—I’ll play it by ear—but life is looking up—and it’s a lovely day—the kind to put on my old leather coat—I still have it—and walk to Horatio Street. I never will kick the past, so I might as well indulge in it from time to time.
Joan’s measured tone belies the combustibility of life at Frémicourt, where it was not unusual for visitors to find dishes smashed, paintings slashed, tables and chairs overturned, the couple crabby and hung over. There were still sweet moments, yet, night after night, Joan and Jean-Paul would get “so fucking drunk,” then bully and beat each other up and turn every scene ugly. Friends got sucked into their dramas. To go out with the pair, one had to be “tough-skinned because it was always, always disaster,” remembers Zuka of the midnight rampages through Montparnasse that inevitably ended in four a.m. train wrecks. One early morning, as Zuka’s husband Louis dashed from their apartment to buy bread, he nearly tripped over Joan, who was curled up asleep on their doormat. Another time, Joan wildly pounded on the Mitelbergs’ door in the dead of night. When Zuka opened, Jean-Paul, in hot pursuit, rushed up, shoved his companion against the doorjamb, and started slamming the door onto her: “They were violent. They were just crazy!”
“Angel child,” Joan wrote Mike a few days later, following a brief but dreadful excursion at sea,
I miss you—forgive my silence—my life has been shitty shitty and I haven’t felt like writing about it—haven’t even written my Mother—“Divorce” or whatever it’s called has been imminent—still is I guess—I’m playing it by ear … the sailing trip was ghastly—Well—I don’t think I’ll ever have to do that again. And now there are no children, which is odd, and the maid’s on vacation and [the dog] Isabelle is in heat so [the other dog] Berty’s in the bathroom crying and I’m trying hopelessly to paint and of course it ain’t what I want and I’m certainly in the dark as to what it is I want or feel.
At Calvi one late night, a month or two earlier, a roaring-drunk Riopelle had stormed aboard the Serica where Joan awaited, and a memorably nasty battle erupted. The next day she had flown back to Paris with every intention of leaving him and France. But she hadn’t. For one thing, she still loved him. For another, he served as psychological ballast: to leap at his throat was at least to exist, to rage at him was to get traction in her art, not that life with Rip left her much time to paint. The thought of finding herself alone terrified Joan. But their sex life reportedly ended.
If Riopelle was (in Marc Berlet’s words) “absolutely resentful, couldn’t let go of certain things,” neither could Joan, who yelled about his mistresses and taunted him about wanting sex with even his daughter Yseult. Joan gave as good as she got: when Rip had a fling with painter Anne Weber, Joan seduced Anne’s husband, artist Hugo Weber. (It did not escape her attention that Anne was gorgeous and that she, tired looking and rail thin, was not aging well.) She also slept with eccentric painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author of erotic novels Norman Rubington, who, using the nom de plume Akbar del Piombo, was doing illustrations for Grove Press. And after her old lover Tim Osato, now a major, moved to Paris to take a position at the prestigious École Supérieure de Guerre, the two resumed their on-again, off-again romance. Once Joan took Tim’s daughter, Teru, dress shopping, as if, Teru thought, “compensating for something.”
While Joan’s loyalty to painting, the fullest expression, she felt, of what it meant to be alive, remained absolute and her self-demand extraordinary, the time and privacy painting demanded continued to elude her. Frustrated and furious over the impossibility of erecting a wall of privacy around her studio, which she’d always thought of as almost sacred space, she lived under siege and considered renting another apartment for herself. Often she phoned Zuka to rant about “how lousy she felt and everything was shit and everything was awful.” At times she tried to put aside all but the concrete and the particular, as when she titled one painting My Plant, My Other Plant.
The need to stake out her own territory may have played a role too in Joan’s acceptance of an invitation to the inauguration of President Lyndon B. Johnson as one of fifty representatives of American arts and letters. In Washington (where she traveled via Chicago and New York) that January, she rubbed elbows with Anne Bancroft, Saul Bellow, Alvin Ailey, Mark Rothko, Edward Albee, George Balanchine, Harper Lee, Jasper Johns, John Updike, and the Mitchells’ old family friends, poets Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, and W. D. Snodgrass. At the inaugural ceremony, she sat next to sixty-year-old New Mexican artist Peter Hurd and was charmed. (Two years later, presidential curator James R. Ketchum hung a Mitchell oil in the Johnson White House.)
Middle age—Joan stood at the threshold of forty—brought a series of losses, a struggle against a sense of narrowing possibilities, and an even more acute awareness of mortality. “I’m trying hard to be efficace and some years it’s uphill all the way—fuck death,” she wrote Mike. First Wilfred Zogbaum, dear old Zog, succumbed to leukemia. Then Giacometti died. Although Joan had not been particularly close to the Swiss artist, she and Riopelle saw him often (Giacometti liked her head, she told friends), and she deeply respected his probity and existential indifference to domestic comfort and material well-being. (In this regard, Giacometti and Riopelle, that lover of expensive toys, were diametrically opposed.) She respected too the fact that Giacometti had set a Sisyphean task for himself: to seek visual truth, to get it down right. At the time of his death, he had been completing Paris Sans Fin, a deluxe limited-edition book of 150 lithographs from drawings made in the streets, cafés, studios, and apartments their coterie frequented. Her copy of Paris Sans Fin became one of Joan’s most cherished possessions.
July 1966 brought devastating news of Frank O’Hara’s death. One late night during a weekend at Fire Island, Frank had been riding a jeep beach taxi when the vehicle lost a tire. As passengers awaited a backup, he had wandered off and been struck by another taxi. A day and a half later he died, at age forty, of internal injuries. Everyone had loved Frank: as Larry Rivers famously said at the funeral, “at least sixty people in New York … thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” Yet the ranks of those who, like Joan, cared about Frank’s work as intensely as he cared about theirs were much thinner. She undertook a series of paintings titled July 25, the day of Frank’s death.
Four months earlier, Joan’s mother had died. Alone in the bathroom of her Chicago apartment one morning, Marion had been felled by a stroke, but her body was not found for a day or two. After taking the phone call, Joan sped off to Chicago, Yseult in tow. The austere quality of Marion Strobel Mitchell’s crowded memorial service at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church several days later was “just right,” thought her old friend poet John Frederick Nims, “with death getting what he deserves—the coolest possible nod from Marion. Probably the closest the old bastard ever came to being totally ignored.”
After friends and relatives, including Yseult and Sally, departed, Joan stayed on in her mother’s sadly cluttered apartment, hiring their former maid, “dear darling Nellie,” to clean as she herself prepared furniture for shipment to California and other furniture, papers, letters, and books for shipment to France. A few of her mother’s thousands of books she set aside as mementos for friends: to George Dillon, she mailed a volume of Robert Frost inscribed to Marion, along with an old postcard that, George later told her, made him hear Marion’s laughter. Jimmie’s work fared less well at his daughter’s hands. Summoned for emotional and practical support, Ellen Lanyon rescued Tiffany lamps, Wedgwood dishes, and medals and trophies from Joan’s massive hauls down to the furnace room but was not present when Joan burned two hundred paintings, her own student works plus most of her father’s watercolors.
Two years earlier, Joan had painted Chicago, in which a rock-solid cerulean indigo presence retraces the familiar curve of Lake Michigan viewed from the Mitchells’ apartment, here dissipating into a foggy blue, there rimming a dense white, the forbidding chalky white of depression, that “absolute horror, just horror.” Now, acknowledging the irrevocable loss of part of her own past with the death of her second parent, Joan also titled a sixteen-foot-wide triptych-in-progress Chicago to honor her mother. So radiantly and deciduously green that one can almost smell the leafy fragrance of summer, yet shaded with sadness, this Chicago stirs with three large verdant clusters, stillness in motion, a kind of rondeau (a three-stanza lyrical poem). Joan had come to realize everything she owed Marion, including lessons about feeling and gallantry in the face of solitude, pain, and death.
“Suddenly, from all the green around you, / something—you don’t know what—has disappeared: / you feel it creeping closer to the window, / In total silence,” begins Rilke’s sonnet “Before Summer Rain.” Joan knew it, of course, as she knew all of Rilke’s work. It ends, “the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long / childhood hours when you were so afraid.”
Following Joan’s 1965 show at the Stable, her first in New York in four years, the artist’s long, warm relationship with Eleanor Ward abruptly curdled. Not only did Ward owe Mitchell a substantial sum, but also, with the Stable teetering toward bankruptcy, the dealer had attempted to raise funds by putting up for auction at Parke-Bernet five paintings whose ownership the two disputed. Infuriated, Joan contacted her bulldog lawyer, who launched a fierce two-year legal battle with Ward. Showing neither sympathy for Eleanor’s situation nor sentimentality over their long and important history together, she also threatened to report Ward to the Art Dealers Association. Not long after her work left the walls of the Stable, the painter signed a contract, vetted by her lawyer, with the Martha Jackson Gallery on East Sixty-sixth Street, which also represented Jenkins and Bluhm. She and Jackson’s aide Olivier Bernier then talked dates and crating for Joan’s first show at Martha Jackson—“no more dark centers alas,” promised Joan, “(I sort of miss them) and lots of color, saleable, no??”
Meanwhile, the most visible and powerful gallery in Europe had been courting Riopelle. Founded by Aimé Maeght, who had shrewdly and improbably leveraged a modest electrical appliance business in Cannes into an international art empire, the Galerie Maeght exhibited the work of its stable of heavyweights—Braque, Dubuffet, Chagall, Miró, Calder—at corporate-style galleries in Paris, Zurich, Barcelona, and New York. It also operated well-endowed printmaking facilities and published its own tony journal, Derrière le Miroir, replete with original prints. Although Joan and Jean-Paul knew Aimé and his wife Guiguite from Golfe-Juan, where the Maeghts too kept their yacht, Jean-Paul had been recruited by the dealer’s lieutenant, poet Jacques Dupin.
When she wasn’t trying to murder Rip, Joan was giving him her loving support, and now she participated in his long negotiating sessions with Dupin, culminating in a signed contract, champagne toasts, and Riopelle’s glittering opening at Maeght’s flagship gallery on the rue de Téhéran. Henceforth, Pierre Matisse and Aimé Maeght would divvy up the Canadian’s work by the square meter, their sessions—le partage—always starting with the flip of a coin. New York would underwrite his art supplies while Paris shelled out a substantial annual advance and played the roles of travel agent, tax accountant, and high-flown factotum.
Riopelle’s affiliation with Maeght tipped the couple’s social life toward the pretty walled village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, above Nice, where Aimé and Guiguite lived near the Maeght Foundation, the modern art museum and sculpture garden built to house a portion of their private collection. The foundation doubled as a kind of private club where Jean-Paul and Joan socialized around the pool with other art celebrities whose friendships the dealers cultivated. There, one balmy blue July evening, they fêted painter Joan Miró’s seventy-fifth birthday at an al fresco dinner, rubbing elbows with sculptor Alexander Calder, photographer Brassaï, Guggenheim Museum chief Thomas Messer, Vogue editorial director Alexander Liberman, and Miró himself. (“What a sweet lovely man he was,” Joan told a friend after the Catalan artist died in 1983. “His blue twinkly eyes just reached my tits.”)
On another occasion, Jean-Paul piled a gang into his old Citroën DS to drive up to his dealer’s château in the Pyrenees. On the last stretch of road, a vast black Rolls heading in the opposite direction popped into view. Jean-Paul crowed, “It’s Aimé!” Indeed, Aimé pulled up and stopped, but couldn’t manage to roll down his window. Much hilarity ensued. When at last Jean-Paul swung up the driveway of the Maeght estate, he accidentally plowed into a huge, pricy Greek urn. Scolded Aimé’s wife, Guiguite, very much the grocer’s daughter even in Dior, “Jean-Paul, you naughty boy! We are going to repair this because you are going to make me a large pot.” “Yes! And four hundred years from now some idiot will drive into it!” Garboesque behind her dark glasses, Joan smoked and coolly stared at the landscape.
Maeght had offered her nothing. Galleries know that artist-couples, particularly crisis-ridden artist-couples, spell trouble, and, in any case, the glitzy Maeght was not at all what Joan wanted or needed in a gallery. Nonetheless, with Riopelle joining the monstres sacrés on Maeght’s roster, she once again felt unhappily “under his shadow as an artist.” In the long run, however, his move would prove providential.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Galerie Jean Fournier had been including Riopelle’s work (and later sometimes Mitchell’s) in its group shows. Established as a bookseller in 1952, Fournier had soon begun handling paintings as well. By 1964, the year he moved to a luminous storefront on the rue du Bac, he was more gallerist than bibliopole, though visitors still had to pass among tables and shelves of books, as if following “a humanist initiatory path,” in order to stand before the art. As soon as Riopelle aligned himself with Maeght, Fournier invited Mitchell, who had no European gallery, to join, and she accepted.
As low-key and tactful as Maeght was high-powered and brash, Fournier had won respect in the French art world for his rejection of commercial showmanship and his loyal faith in painters including Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, and Simon Hantaï. Male and female, young and old, French and American, Fournier’s artists—but they were not “his!” he objected—gravitated to abstraction and color. Joan teasingly dubbed this slender, balding, bespectacled shopkeepers’ son “Quai d’Orsay” for his discretion and finesse, worthy of a French diplomat. Indeed, he always addressed her using the formal “vous.” A “lay monk,” as one critic put it, “who never failed to recognize the distance that separated him from the choir,” Fournier worshipped Joan and her painting, attempting to meet its authenticity with comprehension at the deepest level and to respond with “my truth.” Joan’s French dealer for the rest of her life, Jean Fournier worked devotedly and effectively to establish her reputation in Europe. During her first exhibition on the rue du Bac, however, opening in May 1967, the spotlight fell elsewhere and sales were few.
Two summers earlier, Joan and Jean-Paul had underwritten a trip to Paris for their sailor René so that he could undergo back surgery. One of his doctors had been Gabriel Illouz, a rheumatologist and amateur painter married to French American composer Betsy Jolas, the daughter of famed translator Maria Jolas and avant-garde publisher Eugène Jolas. Not long after meeting Gabriel, Joan and Jean-Paul had invited the couple to dinner. “You are a lady composer,” Joan pointedly observed to Betsy on that occasion, “and I am a lady painter.”
The following summer, Betsy and Gabriel had rented a splendid castle with a crenellated Genoese watchtower on a Corsican promontory high above the sea, installed a piano, and invited a gang of friends including Joan and Jean-Paul, who had sailed over from Golfe-Juan. During their sojourn, these four Corsophiles decided to purchase together a house on the island. In the year that followed, they toured several properties, going so far as to gather estimates for renovations from carpenters, masons, and electricians. Jean-Paul was crazy about the idea of owning a country estate, and the embattled Joan felt this was perhaps just what was needed to “cheer up” their relationship.
Then one day they heard from Betsy, who had stumbled upon an ad in Le Monde, of something markedly different: a two-acre property in the village of Vétheuil, about thirty-five miles northwest of Paris, not far from Betsy and Gabriel’s country place in Chérence. The property consisted of an imposing stone house called La Tour for its nineteenth-century tower, a scattering of smaller structures including a fourteenth-century portico, a broad sloping lawn, the vestiges of an ancient orchard, and a splendid garden, all perched atop a limestone bluff overlooking the Seine—plus a stucco cottage, once the home of Impressionist Claude Monet, on the road below. The seller was Liliane Schneider, the widow of French steel and armaments king Charles Schneider. Interested parties included future French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his wife Anne-Aymone.
Instantly enamored of Vétheuil, Joan cataloged the reasons to buy. Not only would a country house eliminate the need to dog-walk (she was up to three Skyes and two Brittany spaniels), but also the stone pavilion the Schneiders used as a game room could be turned into a reasonably large and very private studio. Moreover, the fact that the pavilion was one story meant she could remove big paintings without having to roll them up to negotiate a stairwell, as she did at Frémicourt, sometimes causing the paint to crack. They could keep Frémicourt. Joan bargained with Jean-Paul: she would purchase Vétheuil if he paid for remodeling, utilities, and maintenance. She threw in that she never again wanted to hear the name “Roseline Granet.” (Jean-Paul and Roseline now owned a foundry together in Meudon, where both made sculpture.) Fine, he replied, you’ll never hear it. Almost on a whim, Joan proceeded. She was able to do so because their mother’s death had left her and Sally the wealthy income beneficiaries of testamentary trusts from both parents.
So Jean-Paul stood the cost of the carpenters, cabinetmakers, electricians, glaziers, plasterers, and locksmiths hired to repair and improve their folie à deux and perhaps also the salaries of Jean and Raymonde Perthuis, the gardener and cook, respectively, who lived in Monet’s cottage and “came with” the house. Joan forked out for the installation of heat and skylights in her studio. Ever frugal, she also cut a deal with Louisiana-born artist Ed Clark, whom she had met at La Coupole: Ed and his wife Hettie would house-sit La Tour as a deterrent to the robbers who plague country estates, and he would paint her studio in exchange for its use. Living at Vétheuil for fifteen months, Ed at times felt less like the struggling artist he was than like an aristocrat on the eve of the French Revolution.
In May 1968, after almost a year of shuttling between city and country during the renovations, Joan and Jean-Paul made the full move to Vétheuil just as student protests escalated into street fighting and massive strikes rocked France, threatening at one point to topple President Charles de Gaulle. One might expect two freewheeling artists to enter into the spirit of the street-theater revolution that was extolling the imagination and shutting down creaky institutions, but the apolitical Jean-Paul shrugged and went fishing with Norm Bluhm, while Joan pronounced May ’68 “absolutely awful.” Egalitarian and left in her politics (she had recently donated a painting to the Black Panthers), she rarely lost an opportunity to egg on radicals and dissidents. Yet, respectful of what merited respect, she scorned May ’68 for its collective chaos, romantic naïveté, and indiscriminate trashing of tradition, including painting. She kept a full tank of gas so they could get across the border if necessary, but, other than that, tried to ignore it, attending instead—a harbinger of days to come—to domestic matters, including Prunelle, the stray bird dog they had adopted, who scarfed up rather than retrieved the pheasants Jean-Paul shot, then broke into Yseult’s new duck cage and finished off its occupants as well.
Nearly every window at La Tour commanded a dazzling view: between the river and the road below lay a wonderfully unmanicured wet-grass field dotted with locusts, pines, pear trees, willows, ginkgos, and sycamores. Balls of golden mistletoe hung in the trees, their roundness contrasting with the dark rectangularity of a rigorously pruned hedge. Everything moved. Birds twittered and swooped. Wind ruffled the foliage. Church bells rang. Passing blue black and rust barges, laundry flapping on their decks, roiled the Seine, a meandering ribbon of light. Houses clustered on its opposite bank, but Joan mentally ceded that midsection to Monet, focusing instead on the lake beyond, the rolling blue-wooded hills, and the sky, an “immense overturned bowl” often teeming with clouds, swelling or scattershot.
From the time she acquired Vétheuil, its colors and lights pervaded her work. Loose allover quilts of limpid blues, greens, pinks, reds, and yellows, early oils such as My Landscape I and II fairly burble, their colored lines and shapes registering a painter’s fast-moving hands as they rise steeply, floating between inner and outer worlds, to jostle and bank at their tops. In the no less intoxicated River and Tree cycle that followed—certain canvases as spare and unfinished looking as late Cézannes—the blue and green spheres of My Landscape, now detached, levitate.
A month before moving, Joan had shown the new work, done at Frémicourt but bursting with Vétheuil, at Martha Jackson in New York. She had arranged for her old friend and lover Evans Herman, married with children and living on a farm upstate, to attend her opening. Afterward the two went to a party thrown by their friends Edi and Lucy Franceschini, where Evans’s eight-year-old daughter and Joan entertained the crowd by standing on their heads. But as Evans walked Joan home to St. Mark’s Place, her mirth ceded to despondency and she expanded upon “the horrors with Riopelle and how drunk she was always and how ugly he was and how violent he was.” Evans found her like a restless, unhappy child.
Back in France, she took refuge, as usual, in landscape and painting. Some weeks later (the events of May having disrupted the mail) came a letter from Evans enclosing his poem “A Gift of Violets for Joan Mitchell,” and she reciprocated with the small tender drawing “Violets.” “Out of your poem I’m [also] painting an enormous violet (cobalt violet),” Joan wrote. Her half-finished reply lay neglected, however, until winter, by which time “the violet pic [had] turned into a sunflower—apologies to Vincent [van Gogh]—and now it’s snowing like hell—and beautiful.”
The following spring, Joan’s gardener, Jean Perthuis, planted beans, tomatoes, pumpkins, carrots, asparagus, basil, squash, and corn. But flowers would always dominate at La Tour: dahlias, tulips, gladioli, hyacinths, bachelor’s buttons, poppies, carnations, lilacs, petunias, morning glories, marigolds, jonquils, violets, daisies, roses, zinnias, geraniums, begonias, forget-me-nots, and irises, Joan adored them all. Most afternoons she would climb the thirteen stone steps from her kitchen door up a knoll with ancient cherry trees whose blossoms carpeted the grass each early spring. Before entering the studio to check her colors in daylight, she would pause to cast a loving look at the garden. When Pierre Schneider asked, “Why do you live in France?” she replied, “Because the lilacs are blooming in Vétheuil.”
Joan’s favorite flowers, sunflowers, were soon blooming too, some varieties eight or ten feet tall. She loved their little bonnets and turning heads, but their colors affected her most. And their dying. She experienced the spent, stooped giants as beautiful and tragic, and she physically felt their demise: “If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it, and draw it, and feel it until its death.” Sunflowers were the yellow satin curtains of Vétheuil.
Whether sun spangled and summery or autumnal and bleak, Joan’s eidetic feeling-memories of sunflowers had begun infusing her art. In her 1969–70 sunflower paintings, all heightened aliveness, they metamorphose into stirring air, pouring light, and flurries of blazing gold, alizarin crimson, celadon, and blue. Wildly espaliered against radiant matrices of white, these deceptively improvised-looking marks never coalesce into still life or landscape. From a formal point of view, too, the early sunflower paintings are audacious, masterful works in which the artist adroitly juggles emptiness and fullness, balance and unbalance, lightness and weight.
With the move to Vétheuil—a window thrown open—Joan intensified her focus on color and light. She looked with new appreciation at Sam Francis’s exuberant stained glass–colored paintings built around luminous voids and fell in love all over again with Vermeer’s and Matisse’s “lights and whites to get luminosity.” (She had seen the 1966 Vermeer show at the Orangerie and found it divine.) Above all, she gravitated to the work of van Gogh, especially his sunflower paintings. The graphic strokes of Mitchell’s Sans Pierre, for instance, evoke those of van Gogh’s Sunflowers (in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum), and her palette mirrors his, except that Joan added white. (Joan’s 1969 Sunflowers is today also in the Metropolitan, a gift from Pierre Matisse.) Surely she felt, in van Gogh’s words, “the desire to renew myself, and to try to apologize for the fact that my pictures are after all almost a cry of anguish, although in the rustic sunflower they may symbolize gratitude.”
Joan, her beloved sunflowers, and, just beyond her garden wall, the Église Notre-Dame, often painted by Monet, 1972 (Illustration credit 12.1)
One entered La Tour through a bright, spacious living room with a wood-beamed ceiling, white walls, a fireplace, an ocular window overlaid with wrought iron tracery, and a parquet floor. A few fine antiques stood cheek by jowl with a cot, a billiard table, an ordinary cocktail table and chairs, and a rocking chair prone to tipping backward (in which Joan seated selected victims). A flight of stairs led up to everyone’s favorite spot, the cozy, dusky octagonal library with its scattered chairs, desk, TV, wall-mounted rifle case, Matisse charcoal nude, and profusion of books. Across the hall beckoned the no less charming dormered and marble-fireplaced bedroom of Joan and Jean-Paul, where a small window framed a particularly lovely view of the Seine. The second-floor vestibule connecting these two rooms also opened onto a spiral staircase mounting to another bedroom, high up in the tower. The tower’s ground floor was occupied by the seldom-used formal dining room, its eight angles marked by faux-marble stucco columns. Down the hall were the rather primitive bathroom and kitchen, to the right, and, to the left, another bedroom and the pleasant breakfast room, aka “the little dining room,” where books, newspapers, mail, and odds and ends of all kinds accumulated, a bedsheet protected the sofa from dog hair, a phone sat on a ledge above the radiator, and everyone gathered.
For the next twenty-four years, Joan’s domestic life would shape itself to the gentle eccentricities of La Tour, which continued to have full play in her art. Off the little dining room, for instance, the small terrace where she liked to linger in the midday sun offered a transfixing panorama she called, referring to Vermeer’s masterpiece, “my View of Delft” and used in My Landscape and many other works. On another side of the house, the living room opened onto a gravel-surfaced terrace crowned by a stately linden tree more than a century old. Thick and airy green in summer, Mondrian stark in winter, it would prove no less useful to Joan’s painting than did the garden beyond.
That garden shared a wall with the cemetery (where Monet’s wife, Camille, was buried) of the thirteenth-century Gothic Notre-Dame de Vétheuil, whose tower served as scenic backdrop to Joan’s flower beds. This little church figures prominently in some of the three hundred paintings Monet did in Vétheuil between 1878 and 1881, as do the river, streets, houses, and fields, including the famous poppy fields, surrounding La Tour.
Like Monet and other Impressionists, Joan adored the rain-washed, cloud-scudding Valley of the Seine for its moody weather and grainy-white light that intensified colors. Everything greened and grew: even the stone walls sprouted climbing roses. The space-feelings were ordered yet open, and the colors—the clear yellows of colza and forsythia, the foamy whites of hawthorn, the tender violets of predawn skies, the grass greens, the evanescent blues of late-spring twilights—deliciously “Frenchie.”
The closeness to Jean-Paul that Joan had hoped to gain by her purchase of Vétheuil did not materialize, however. The golden boy was crowding two or three lives into one: meeting important people, having important shows, charging down to Nice. Or into Paris. In his Bristol, he calculated, he could do La Tour–La Coupole in twenty-two minutes flat. He gave Joan a Citroën, but, acknowledging that her drinking made her a menace on the road, she quit driving, managing solo trips into Paris by cab to Mantes-la-Jolie, eight miles south, then the milk-run train to the St.-Lazare station. At night, she usually stayed home. Mute and pitch dark, Vétheuil felt light-years away from the Cedar or even the Rosebud.
But Joan invited easily: artists and poets she’d met here and there, friends and friends of friends from the States, old pals from Paris, everyone mixed at La Tour. Betsy and Gabriel dropped by for a drink almost every afternoon at five; Jacques Dupin, Pierre Schneider, and many others drove out for Sunday lunches or lively dinner parties with superb wines and Raymonde’s cuisine bourgeoise. Sam Francis’s assistant, John Bennett, frequently stayed a few days. Joan had met John one afternoon at the Galerie Jean Fournier, where John was doing an errand for Sam. “You’re George Mitchell,” he greeted her. Speaking slowly and wryly, she replied, “George Hartigan [Grace’s once pseudonym]. Joan Mitchell.” Then she invited him to toddle up the street for a drink at the Pont Royal, where they were joined by Paul Jenkins and Joan proved “very lively and funny.”
After her move to Vétheuil, such spontaneous encounters were fewer. Joan once told a friend,
Abandonment is death also. I mean: somebody leaves and other people also leave. I never say goodbye to people. Somebody comes for dinner and then leaves. I am very nervous. Because the leaving is the worst part. Often in my mind, they have already left before they have come. I guess this is why everyone is reproduced in my imaginary photography album.
“It really looks dreamy—if I may say so,” Joan boasted to Sally after hanging her second show at Fournier that May, “just one little pic and all the rest big and spaced.” Having recently purchased a pantsuit and three dresses, made to order and expensive, she aimed for a certain chic at the opening, thus palliating, to a degree, the awfulness of “standing in front of one’s underwear ie painting and saying Bonjour M. So and So.” The following day, she, Jean-Paul, Betsy, and Gabriel flew to Nice, put out from Golfe-Juan, and navigated in marvelous weather to Monte Carlo for the Monaco Grand Prix, the faint rumble of which they picked up from the sea.
But their Serica era was fading. Jean-Paul’s newfound zeal for hunting and fishing took him elsewhere, and, when he did sail, he usually invited other women. He now called Joan “Rosa Malheur”—Rosa Unhappiness. Their mutual photographer, Jacqueline Hyde, “never saw them do anything but yell. Always stuff about his sleeping around. He was cheating on her, etcetera. It was pathetic.” Roseline Granet had the impression of Joan as a little girl, angry, hurt, and longing for unconditional love “beyond what any human being was capable of giving.”
During the winter of 1970, tensions spiked: Joan would hammer away at Jean-Paul until he exploded, walloped her, and either stormed out or lapsed into brute silence, in which case she would continue to rub his nose in whatever it was until she set off another fracas. At sober moments, they talked separation. The following April, however, Joan wrote her niece Poondie,
Rip’s on his “I love Joan” behavior … He’s trying out a new Bristol and a Bentley (always raises his spirits) and Tantine [children’s French for “little aunt”] bought beautiful—dreamy clothes that even Poo would approve of … Poo, I have weathered the winter—there have been worse—and much has been cleared up—I’m not leaving your favorite uncle and he’s very much not leaving me … Sometimes it pays to put things in question. Certainly it stops stagnation—you know—keep the relationship moving or whatever—God—Rip just arrived (back way—studio) with a mess of things to plant—living and growing. He sends his love to you—and now I guess I’ll play togetherness and bend my back.
Riopelle planted a maple tree on the property. One could read: Canada, putting down roots.
But no sooner had the relationship mended than it was once again coming apart at the seams. Visiting from New York, Howard Kanovitz and Mary Rattray witnessed plenty of ugly scenes. On one particularly awful evening, a very soused Riopelle wanted to show them how fast he could drive “this dumb little car, a little Morris Minor that was all fitted up with special engines, special brakes.” With the three others as passengers, he was soon flying at over a hundred miles per hour. Mary was getting sick, Joan begging him to take his foot off the gas, Jean-Paul gleefully stomping on the pedal.
Tempers flared anew when Madeleine Arbour, a popular Quebecois television personality, arrived to film a documentary about Riopelle for Radio-Canada and was singled out for a central place in Joan’s gallery of mistress-villains. In Arbour’s televised portrait of the artist, ironically titled Strings and Other Games (also the name of his major 1972 exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Center and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), La Tour appears in full glory, and Riopelle plays lord of the manor. When Joan’s dog Bertie trots down a path, a subtitle flashes: “BERTI.” But Joan, who, if nothing else, owned the place, rates nary a mention, even as she pops up in one scene, pseudo-playfully—like a child wanting attention—plucking a beret from the head of her gardener, who stands chatting with Riopelle and Arbour, and depositing it on Arbour’s. The journalist whisks it off and keeps right on talking.
Painter Ellen Lanyon’s account of the day she spent with Joan in April 1973 attests to the effects of the couple’s prodigious drinking. Beginning that morning, when her hostess led Ellen from the train station in Mantes-la-Jolie to the nearest café, Joan never stopped sipping white wine. In her studio that afternoon, she started in on beer from cases stacked in one corner as she pulled out virtually every painting for Ellen’s inspection. What did Ellen think of this? What did she think of that? Ellen suddenly perceived Joan as “the most distraught, lonely, agonized person in the world.”
After cocktails that evening, Jean-Paul, Joan, and Ellen drove to his huge studio in nearby St.-Cyr, where the Canadian’s assistants busied themselves amid acres of perfectly stretched canvases awaiting his touch. There, as if the alcohol had built up and now demanded immediate release, Joan turned scathing and sarcastic, lashing out at Riopelle for what he had and she did not, hurling at him years of accumulated resentment that men wielded all the power. As abruptly as her tirade had begun, it stopped. And the three set off for a country inn.
Toward the end of their rabbit dinner, the liquor still flowing, Joan and Jean-Paul drifted over to the restaurant’s bar where they chatted with locals, leaving Ellen to sit and watch as they got even more staggeringly drunk. Soon the two were barking at each other, Jean-Paul socking Joan a few times, Joan once pitching off her bar stool. Several hours elapsed. Around three a.m., a car pulled up outside, and a man entered the restaurant, scooped up Joan, who had passed out, carried her to his car, and motioned to Ellen to follow. “Oh, my God!” she mentally gasped. “What now?” But she went along. They ended up at a pleasant house where the man laid Joan on a bed and gestured to Ellen (who did not speak French) to get some sleep. The next morning, she was fed and driven to the train station. Joan never apologized or explained. As the years went by, Lanyon sometimes compared notes with mutual friends who had recently traveled to France. “ ‘Did you visit Joan?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, my God!’ ”
Lanyon’s tale notwithstanding, Joan was rarely a tottering drunk—in other words, she was a true alcoholic. She drank to ward off anxiety and bolster her feelings of self-worth, even though alcohol exacerbated the self-doubts she projected as hypercritical hostility and kept her in depressive cycles. But most fundamentally she drank to get her conscious mind out of the way when she painted. Painting had to rise above the ordinary. Reason had to fall to the wayside. Joan told one friend that if she did not drink she could not paint. “I will use anything that will encourage me or inspire me,” she said to another. “Anything at all to feel something. I might read a poem. I might have another Scotch. I might talk to one of my dogs.”
In the early 1970s, Joan bestowed upon three major paintings titles that obliquely allude to the irreducibles, birth and death. One was the triptych Bonjour Julie, named in honor of Riopelle’s first grandchild, recently born to Yseult. (Joan fawned over baby Julie, who lived with her mother on the rue Frémicourt, yet slighted Julie’s younger brother, Jim, born the following year, because he was a boy, thus mirroring the behavior of her own father, whose name the child, ironically, shared.) Another, also a triptych, was Ode to Joy: its title referred to the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth but also to Frank O’Hara’s “Ode to Joy,” a paean to erotic love as a means of flouting death. The third was Mooring, whose landscape-filtered feelings are congruent (according to Joan) with those stirred by T. S. Eliot’s “Marina.” Eliot continued to hold a place of honor in the painter’s pantheon of poets: characterizing his work as “death warmed over,” she responded with all of her being to the sensory language he crafted for “direct communication with the nerves” by means of “a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.”
Derived from a scene in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, “Marina” begins with Pericles’ description of a paradisiacal coastal landscape that restores to life his drowned daughter, Marina—“grace dissolved in place”—thus overriding spiritual death and rekindling a feeling of joy. But, he wonders, are his perceptions, “less strong and stronger,” truly wakeful or only illusory? Memories of Marina’s conception and childhood put his doubts to rest and bring full realization that she is an extension of his own decrepit self/boat. (A boat-like form is decipherable in Joan’s painting, recalling John Ashbery’s remark that “one’s feelings about nature are at different removes from it.”) Pericles then senses that the landscape visions with which he is flooded bear directly upon his self/boat, guiding it forward. Worlds mingle. Something lost has been found. Time and death drop away. His soul is renewed.
Like most of Joan’s work of the early 1970s, Mooring, its misty lavenders and luminous oranges ballasted with black, registers as weather filled. Contrasting scumbled clouds of paint with soft-edged block forms, the cycle of work to which it belongs is more cluttered than those that precede and follow. With their carefully disposed shapes and colors nudging the eye by fits and starts, these paintings bear less resemblance to the fragmented, immediate, and energized work of Willem de Kooning than to the ripe, lyrical, and disorienting work of Pierre Bonnard. Moreover, their highly original syntax takes cues from the formal ideas of Hans Hofmann. Effecting plasticity through color, their resonant orange, green, lavender, blue, and black planes assert themselves as parts yet relate to the whole, luring viewers into the canvas and pushing them back out. The sumptuous Wet Orange, for instance, a thesaurus of Hofmannian rectangles—painting as field—is held together by the tensions and harmonies of orange and blue. (Something Joan had seen, perhaps a flower, made her fall in love with tangerine orange, a color she had long disliked. She decided to pair it with the lavender-tinged blue of the Gauloises cigarette pack. The result was Wet Orange.)
The painterly intelligence and practiced hand of this veteran artist were not only pulling off unexpected yet felicitous meetings of color—witness the lavenders and oranges of Mooring—but also breaking rules of all kinds, sinking yellow behind lavender, for instance, and clumping dark colors at the upper edges of a canvas. Moreover, Mitchell appeared to transubstantiate pigment into light: indeed, light is simultaneously visual sensation and, in the words of curator Marcia Tucker, “part of an expressive tradition that includes radiance as an image of revelation.”
From the cobalt blues in Salut Sally to the cornflower blues in Les Bluets to the inky blues in Barge Péniche to the effulgent rain-squall blues in La Ligne de la Rupture, blues now came into their own. The paintings hold dear the great French blues of Cézanne, Bonnard, Matisse, and Miró and weave together present and past: the blues of the Seine, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the East River, the ur-blues of Lake Michigan. Water “is the Seine, it’s Lake Michigan too … it’s rather the feeling I have for these things.” In her landscape spaces, which are also mental and metaphorical spaces, one blue feeling-memory lapses into another, in enfilade.
In Blue Territory, for instance, the artist arranges patches of sensate color, rather like her mental picture gallery, on either side of a central axis to effect a late-winter feeling. This marvel of painterly metamorphosis mobilizes a woolly lavender white, a pale maculated yellow—a spill of light—glazed with green, the brown of a fallow field blurred with frosty lavender (reminiscent of a Monet Snow Effect), and, most spectacularly, a purified, star-splashed ultramarine. Mitchell might have had Blue Territory in mind when she bemoaned to a colleague that art had “lost some of its ‘spirituality,’ ” acknowledging that “spirituality” is “considered a ‘hokey’ word, but it was what painting had once been about.” Not only does Blue Territory conjure a book of hours (a devotional book of prayers and meditations specific to various days, months, and seasons) but also shines as Mitchell’s Starry Night.
On March 25, 1972, an exhibition of forty-nine paintings by Joan Mitchell titled My Five Years in the Country opened at the I. M. Pei–designed Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. The Everson’s director, James Harithas, had originally scheduled Norman Bluhm for that slot, but the timing wasn’t working for Bluhm, who suggested Joan in his place. Thus Harithas, long a Mitchell fan, offered the artist her first solo show at a major museum. “Do I have to sleep with you?” she lipped.
Joan attended her opening surrounded by old pals, including Hal Fondren, who came up from New York, and Jean Fournier, who flew over from Paris. (Jean-Paul, on the other hand, did not make it to Syracuse until two weeks later, when he and Joan, livid over some fresh incident involving Roseline Granet, battled their way through the museum’s galleries.) On the same weekend as Joan’s reception, the Everson hosted a big, lively conference on prison reform (on the heels of the bloody revolt at nearby Attica), which merged with an anti–Vietnam War rally and various art events into a wild, woolly two or three days. At dawn that Sunday, peace activist and poet Reverend Daniel Berrigan, recently freed after eighteen months’ incarceration for burning draft records, celebrated his first post-prison Mass in a “garden” of Mitchells.
Yet the only noteworthy critical response to Joan’s show came from New York Times writer Peter Schjeldahl, who saw the artist’s insistence upon “pushing her mastery to the limit, willfully throwing it against ‘impossible’ problems” and declared that Mitchell deserved recognition “as one of the best American painters not only of the fifties, but of the sixties and seventies as well.” Other critics, however, spilled little ink over either the Everson show or the pared-down, two-part version thereof that opened on April 26 at Martha Jackson in New York.
In 1969 Jackson herself had unexpectedly died and her son, David Anderson, had taken the reins of the business. The amiable Anderson found Joan warm, brilliant, and difficult. That summer following the Everson show, in fact, he had to draw upon his every diplomatic skill in guiding her response to a letter from Marcia Tucker, a curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Whitney Museum. Tucker was offering a major show at the Whitney in 1974, yet the painter had forwarded her message to Anderson as “this Whitney bit which of course we cannot do,” ticking off the reasons why. First, the only pictures she would want to show would be traveling. (Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute was organizing a three-person show of Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Walasse Ting, which would go to Toledo, Oklahoma City, and Austin.) Second, she objected to the Whitney’s plan to pair her exhibition with one by painter Lee Krasner. Not only did Joan feel that her work clashed with Krasner’s but she also held her nose at the idea of ghettoization as a woman artist. Tucker was using her, she ranted, to build her own reputation as a feminist curator. So Joan would just continue her strategy of staying underground, meaning showing outside New York City as she waited out tough times. Besides, she was once again “practically in ‘divorce’ ” with Jean-Paul and her future was one huge question mark. Anderson countered that turning the Whitney down flat would be a terrible career move and argued for asking for more than the museum was offering. He then requested Joan’s permission to meet with Tucker. That past spring in New York, art critic Phyllis Tuchman had, in fact, brokered a lunch meeting between Joan and Marcia Tucker, but Tucker had canceled when she came down with the flu, and Joan then accused the curator of standing her up: “sick—balls.”
After Anderson talked with Tucker, she uncoupled Mitchell’s show from Krasner’s and again pressed for Joan’s commitment in principle. Anderson urged that she accept.
At this point Joan was producing no more than twenty major paintings annually, albeit some of them mammoth, and this was perhaps another factor in her foot dragging. David attributed this paucity of work to her alcoholism, Joan blamed it on the monumental difficulty of painting. A painting had to be felt. Eventually, however, she backed into the show, writing Anderson,
Lelong has offered me a show at the Maeght Foundation. [This never occurred.] I said in 2 years. I cannot paint 35 pics for a Whitney show—or in 2 winters … I cannot commit myself to anything—I might paint well in the next two years and I might not—disaster. If I had the pics I might say yes. Don’t want to fall flat on my face on half a floor at the Whitney for 2 winters’ work that I haven’t seen—Of course I’ll paint and do my best—what’s the matter with showing at Jackson—do we need the Whitney? Say whatever you want—you know me (I’m just getting underway—have no idea where it’s going). I’ll take a crack at it.
In her fourteen-by-thirty-foot space on an isolated hill 3,600 miles from Madison Avenue, Joan then put shoulder to the wheel,
wondering [as her young friend, aspiring writer Christian Larson, put it] whether the upper right area of [her] latest canvas needs something or works as is; singing along with rambunctious Verdi who thumbs his nose at the abyss and fills it with music; squeezing innumerable tubes of paint; making squiggly turds of color in pie-tins; and squeezing tubes of cool ointment that ease the itch of Bertie’s back; and lifting Bertie up onto the bed from time to time so he can get some rest and a change of perspective; and maybe, if today is a good day, [she’ll] lose all track of time.
Plans of the Whitney’s fourth floor were tacked to the wall, next to a bulletin board covered with art postcards, snapshots of dogs, and Peanuts cartoons clipped from the International Herald Tribune. To its right, near the door, a wide plank resting on sawhorses groaned with books, letters, maps, ashtrays, used coffee cups, and bottles of wine, cognac, and Scotch. Pungent odors of turpentine and stale smoke hung in the air. Looking down the long studio toward the painting area, the dogs’ daybed stood on the left; completed works leaned against the wall to the right, along with the pre-primed, pre-stretched canvases Joan now used, six or eight deep. Beyond sat her hi-fi and record collection of “painting music”: Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Puccini, Bellini, and Verdi. Italian opera served her well, especially when sung by Montserrat Caballé, Renata Tebaldi, Kiri Te Kanawa, and her beloved Maria Callas. “Music, poems, landscape and dogs make me want to paint,” Joan told Tucker. “And painting is what allows me to survive.”
In order to paint, the artist established not only auditory and emotional spaces but an optical space as well. Remnants of canvas blacked out all four windows, and, in any case, Joan usually worked at night, which meant that her light was artificial and thus constant. The completed paintings lining the walls faced away. A big piece of plywood covered the fireplace. Thus her setup inscribed the targeting of a single canvas at the far end of her studio. One visitor who watched Joan mix her colors in aluminum loaf and pie tins scattered on the floor among Loyal Dog Food cans stuffed with brushes, then shift her attention to that canvas, likened her gearing up to paint to “a locomotive building up steam.”
With the move to Vétheuil, Joan’s paintings had grown larger, more expansive, and more often multi-paneled. At Frémicourt she had first become serious about diptychs and triptychs as a way of making large paintings in a small studio. Bigger but never big enough, Vétheuil could accommodate at most two moderately sized adjacent panels, no higher than nine feet two inches, however, because of the ceiling beams. (Joan planned to enlarge the studio, yet, despite Anderson’s scolding, never got around to it.) The restrictions on width meant that she could not view large multi-paneled paintings-in-progress in their entirety but, rather, had to put the parts together in her mind.
Joan’s favorite multi-panel format was the horizontal triptych composed of vertical modules: she loved the way the cool vertical cuts between the panels undermined the landscape effect and loved too everything she could make happen around those vertical cuts. In the diptychs and triptychs she grappled with likeness and difference, wholeness and parts. Moreover, the panels served as forms to go up against, like stanzas in lyric poetry, which also weds structure to emotional release.
Since moving to Vétheuil, Joan had been painting in cycles ordered around subjects such as the Seine, river and tree, and sunflowers, each cycle opening with two dozen or so small canvases to warm her up to that mode of painting. For the Whitney show, she pursued the field and territory cycle that had already held her attention for over a year.
That cycle points up Joan’s lack of a decent sense of direction, which was part and parcel, she felt, of her sometimes frighteningly disoriented self-concept: “For my identity,” she claimed, “I need to know where I am, to look at maps.” Yet she evinced a keen territoriality. The field and territory paintings functioned as pictorial spaces but also, in a very real way, as physical and emotional sanctuaries, places of psychological protection, and escape from the contingencies of time. She painted them for herself and for her loved ones, human and canine, mapping out each and selecting her colors specifically for the people or dogs she had in mind. Field for Two, for instance, she intended as a realm of well-being for her friends Joanne and Philip Von Blon; Field for Skyes, for Bertie (who had just died) and her two other dead Skye terriers. The fields and territories also emerged from visual memories far (the cornfields of the Midwest) and near (“You know, those fields near Mantes-la-Jolie”).
One afternoon three months before Joan’s opening, Whitney curator Marcia Tucker walked through the open door at La Tour, where she planned to spend several days interviewing the artist and finalizing the show. “Alors, Madame Whitney has arrived,” Joan tossed out, never budging from the living-room chair where she sat chatting with friends. Her cat-and-mouse games had begun. A day or two later, having stalked out of Mitchell’s studio after the artist’s nth arbitrary attack, Tucker went to get a cup of coffee in the kitchen, where she met Riopelle, who was drunk. After mentally undressing her, he took her hand to kiss it. Just then, the back door burst open: Joan had followed Tucker back to the house. “She’s here for my work, asshole,” she bellowed, in French, “and don’t you forget it. I’m a better painter than you’ll ever be!” In a flash, his oeufs au plat were hurtling toward Joan’s head. Tucker too ducked—and fled.
The following morning, as Joan slept, the curator packed and departed, leaving a note asking Joan to meet her for lunch in town at one o’clock. Right after the artist arrived, in big sunglasses and a green scarf, Tucker laid down the law: “I’ve had enough. I can’t work this way, and I won’t. If you want the show to happen, then you’re going to start behaving, stop insulting me, and get to work. If not, then I’m finished here. I don’t need to do this show, and I’m just about at the point where I don’t want to.” Silence. Then, surprisingly, a mumbled apology from Joan.
No sooner had Tucker left Vétheuil, several days later, than Joan dashed off a letter to Sally: “ ‘Miss Curator Whitney’ was here. Joan feels Miss Whitney is using her for Women’s Liberation … I have a whole floor at the Whitney, lots of footage, am not entirely in accord with the choice of paintings and feel uptight about recent paintings. Please come to the opening and hold my hand.”