Magical childhood land: harmony, refuge, shelter, quietude.
First concerts of insects, frogs, birds, breezes.
Color-territories: water-green meadows, yellows, blues, cobalt violet,
somber ditches, leper-lilies by the thousands. Wind.
Joan intensely felt la Grande Vallée, its presence,
its sweet-passionate vibrations.
She loved it, revisited it, re-entered it.
A shared land transmuted, pure painting, its soul thus affirmed.
The Paintings, each and every one, sublime, ignited into sonorous, luminous,
radiating cathedrals.
GISÈLE BARREAU, “La Grande Vallée”
Joan began her climb out of the wreckage of her twenty-four years with Jean-Paul Riopelle by scouting around for a dog-sitter—she found Noël Morel, a sweet, egoless local boy who became her all-purpose factotum—then flying to New York for a crash-shrink program with Fried, who forced her to face up to the “very creepy” masochistic side of her relationship with Riopelle, “like hitting a kid and it clings.” Back home, she worked with Fried by phone and, for a time, saw a French analyst too. Probably it was the latter who introduced her to what became a favorite conceit, that of “little Joan,” who stayed home and painted, and “big Joan,” a grown-up version of a child’s imaginary friend, who protected “little Joan” and functioned in the outside world.
Having broadcast that she needed a live-in companion and assistant, Joan heard from Betsy Jolas about a thirty-one-year-old French composer named Gisèle Barreau. Following a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Barreau had taken a job prepping desserts at One Fifth (coincidentally Joan’s favorite New York restaurant) as she mulled over her next move. At Joan’s interview of sorts with the round-eyed, curly-haired young woman, which took place at Barney’s West Houston Street home during that same trip to New York, each cheerfully acknowledged that she was ill-natured and each recognized the other’s aloneness. “I sleep like butterflies do, here and there,” Gisèle once told Joan. “[Life is] often hard—very lonely.” It was left “we’ll see,” but subsequently they agreed to try each other out.
Thus one sultry early-summer evening a few weeks later, Gisèle walked up to La Tour, jet-lagged and craving sleep, to find Joan leading “group therapy” for several young guests. Chiding anyone who did not work hard enough at the exchange, Joan would not hear of the new arrival going to bed. (“Young lady, you have to give and be part of the group!”) Later Joan fixed Gisèle a chicken sandwich and crudités to go with her Scotch. Later still—as one of the guests, Hollis Jeffcoat’s estranged ex-roommate, painter Carl Plansky, would recall—the very tanked-up mistress of La Tour locked Gisèle out of the house.
Carl too had found himself sucked into a complicated push-pull relationship, too knotty to sum up in a few phrases, with the impossible yet irresistible Joan. It brought haughty declarations (“You’re having a problem with me because you’re Jewish and I’m sort of an upper-class Wasp”), outrageous acts (because he vaguely resembled Riopelle, she more than once tried to beat him up when she was smashed), and jolting remonstrances (as one night when he walked downstairs in sandals: “You, what’s the matter with you? You think you’re a little boy! You don’t know how to put socks on properly?”). When he wanted to hit the sack at, say, four a.m., he’d get “Aw, you’re such a sissy!”
“Well, Joan, you’re right. I can’t hold my liquor. I’m about to be ungentlemanly.”
“Aw, you better go to sleep, ya weak sister!”
Over the next few years Joan would lean heavily on Carl: when he was at La Tour, he cleaned her brushes, took charge of the paint delivered by Lefebvre-Foinet, and moved her big canvases. Much of their relationship was drinking “and having this really creepy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? S&M show.” But she invited him to use her studio and materials, hounded him about getting active and making an effort, and paid for plane tickets for his several long stays in Vétheuil. (He supported himself as a cook and deli worker.) They shared a passion for opera, and Carl never loved Joan more dearly than when she sat mesmerized by the voice of Maria Callas. (She nursed a grudge against Aristotle Onassis because he had left Callas for Jackie—“That twig!”) Carl and Joan saw each other when Joan was in New York, but “the sweetest times” were at Vétheuil. “It was so painful, my relationship with Joan. It hurt so much. But I got so much out of it. It was fantastic.”
Among the least prolific painting periods of Joan’s career, the months leading up to the debacle of Riopelle and Hollis’s departure had seen her Tilleul (Linden Tree) canvases, which break stride with the rest of her oeuvre in that they resemble literal paint-drawings of the tree outside her house. Though most would disagree, she proclaimed them the best thing she’d ever done. Now, intermittently paralyzed in her studio, she undertook pastels of the same subject, pinning her paper to the wall atop layers of newspaper (for more “give” than the wall alone offered). Unlike most artists, Joan drew vertically, making use of the weight and drag mark of her hand. In the Tilleul pastels, as in the paintings, she sets up a central vertical axis and fills much of the rectangle with dense sheaves of dark lightning-stroke lines, here smothered in blue, there torched with yellow orange.
Painting again, if often badly, by November, Joan felt empowered by failure, in the sense that it spurred her to seek new directions in various works-in-progress in which she believed she was relying too heavily upon “ ‘pretty’ accidents.” She destroyed many. But some worked. Following a rather happy ten-day visit in September to the music-filled home of her painter friend Jean Lamouroux in tiny Sarrians, near Avignon—in the clarifying light of the Midi—Joan’s yellow suite had been gestating. (She had recently painted the great yellow-glowing Salut Tom, whose title pays homage to her late friend, the urbane writer, critic, and personification of her New York, Tom Hess.) In the 1980 diptych Cypress, a radiant welter of yellow orange strokes, Joan oddly but effectively placed two lumpy black oblongs—like the backlit dark cypresses of Provence—on either side of the divide at center canvas, as if they were longing to touch. Lest anyone make assumptions about her psychological state from such gloriously sun-filled canvases, however, Joan later told art historian Judith Bernstock that she had painted the yellow suite in the throes of despair.
Continuing to use painting constructively, Joan undertook the monumental half-ironically titled quadriptych La Vie en Rose (today in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In its four movements, as in a symphony, attenuated blued pinks and bruised yellow grays, tender and bleak, loom over blue blacks and blacks, and brutal stabs of pigment fringe an eloquent emptiness. One might say: fog, wharf, din, breakers, silence. Steeped in the memory-feelings of Rosa Bonheur/Malheur, Joan’s tour de force emotional reckoning of her long years with Jean-Paul Riopelle is poignant, elegiac, and haunting.
Six months after her move to La Tour, Gisèle Barreau won the prestigious French Prix de Rome, which required her to live at the Villa Medicis in Rome for the next two and a half years, though she intermittently spent time in Vétheuil. Her departure left Joan to brave by herself the dull, sodden Île de France winter and to rattle around her big house “really hacking it alone,” she told a friend, “which is a challenge in this isolation.” Her cook and gardener, Raymonde and Jean, were there, of course, as were her “doggies” and Noël. At times it got so cold and drafty that she and Noël shivered as they watched TV wrapped in blankets. Occasionally Joan would throw on her black leather jacket and take a day trip into Paris to go to the bank, see a doctor, visit a friend or two, pop into an exhibition, and/or dine with Fournier at their favorite restaurant, L’Ami Louis. But mostly she holed up, unhappy and distraught, at La Tour.
Come spring, visitors arrived, lifting somewhat the sense of emptiness and loss. Bitter because certain mutual friends had chosen Jean-Paul and Hollis, not her, and because her stepdaughters too, she felt, had abandoned her (later they reconnected), Joan grew more dependent upon the young people with whom she surrounded herself. The number who passed through Vétheuil is astounding: ask among painters of a certain age in any serious art milieu in the United States and you will likely find someone who lunched or dined or spent a few days at La Tour, got drunk on Joan’s liquor, maybe painted in the cistern, and has a ready anecdote or two about some test of his or her character, some galvanizing conversation, some hair-raising episode. Carl returned in March 1980. California painter Katy Crowe, then living in Paris, was invited out after she called Joan at the urging of Mike Goldberg, whom she had met at an opening. Bill Scott, also a painter, met Joan at the Galerie Jean Fournier. And Joyce Pensato (who had made Joan’s acquaintance when the older artist, tough and glamorous in sunglasses and a fur coat, had dropped by the student studios at the New York Studio School) would begin visiting Vétheuil in 1981. There, many felt, something important lurked in the air. After his sojourn at La Tour, young guitarist Reed Bertolette, the son of Joan’s Smith College roommate, told the rowdy near-sixty-year-old: “You have a mind/energy/electricity/feeling that makes me feel like a kindling spark next to a roaring bonfire. But I can feel the oxygen draft surging to your flames.”
When it came time for her guests to leave, Joan always sidestepped good-byes, which she considered rehearsals for death. One was supposed to slink out without making a fuss. Even before they departed, some visitors received thank-yous steeped in Joan’s appreciation for the precious new memories their stays had afforded her. Preparing to leave for the airport one morning as her hostess slept, Joyce found a note:
You were lovely company, I wasn’t … And you’ll be glad to get home and work (I hope) and work very well. Your generosity is extravagant. Take some chocolate covered drops for airplane please. We can never eat them all. They are on billiard table. Thank you mostly for coming … I think autumn is perhaps exciting in the city and sad in the country. I think we must be quite strong to withstand this place by ourselves … Bon voyage.
Joan’s painting problems had persisted. Two Sunflowers had become “ ‘Ludwigs’ [meaning heavy and expressionistic à la Beethoven] and I don’t really want objects,” she confided in Joyce. “What do I want—space?” No Daisies, on the other hand, snugged up to the picture plane but achieved little else. The Petit Matin group felt unresolved. Her colors verged on the saccharine, and she felt she was repeating herself. “Joan is making a smashing effort,” she assured Carl and Joyce, “pics not good but making it alone … it’s a ‘challenge’ and if I make it I’ll feel really happy [crossed out]—not happy of course but ‘somewhere’ and not so frightened—panic—not that aloneness or thinking when I paint—what am I doing this for? Etc. When it’s the only thing I like to do or that interests me. My painting is bad now—but I’ve gone through so many periods.”
Bad painting—so what else is new? With the sagacity of four decades, she kept her perspective. In New York that March 1980 for the opening of her third show at Fourcade, Joan Mitchell, The Fifties: Important Paintings (so conceived because of the dearth of new work), she brightened somewhat. Xavier threw a festive dinner party in her honor: painter Norman Bluhm and his wife Carey, poet Karen Edwards, writer Eleanor Munro, novelist and later Frank O’Hara biographer Brad Gooch, curator Marcia Tucker, Barney, and pals Joe LeSueur, Hal Fondren, Pierre Boudreau, Carl, Joyce, and Elaine de Kooning, among others, attended. A few days later Joan trekked out to Long Island to visit Bill de Kooning, who had been living in Springs since the early 1960s. Depression, heavy drinking, and the onset of Alzheimer’s-like dementia having taken their toll on the master painter, his lawyer had brokered an arrangement with Elaine, still his legal wife despite three decades of separation, whereby she—that “miracle on roller skates,” as their mutual friend photographer Denise Browne Hare phrased it—had moved to Springs to supervise the seventy-five-year-old artist’s care. On this occasion, Joan lunched with Bill, Elaine, and poet Bill Berkson, who was living in Southampton. Berkson was struck by Joan and Elaine’s mutual affection as well as Bill’s warm, strong, collegial respect for Joan. De Kooning made her feel that, whatever else happened, that war was over. She had won.
Back at Vétheuil, Joan met twenty-five-year-old French painter Michaële-Andréa Schatt, a native of Mantes-la-Jolie who had childhood memories of spotting the famous Abstract Expressionist at her local train station. Their paths had crossed again, without the two actually meeting, when Schatt won a prize at the annual Salon de Montrouge competition thanks to the vote of juror Joan Mitchell. Now, by chance, Michaële had been invited by an American painter friend named Marilyn Riley to accompany her on a visit to La Tour.
Marilyn was beautiful and feminine, a combination that always set Joan to whetting her blades. At the end of their meal, rife with both tension and laughter, Gisèle served a cake, and, responding to some remark from Michaële, the by now very animated and drunk hostess clattered, “Here’s what I say about your—” as she slammed a knife into the cake. And clack! Not only did she slice the cake in two but also neatly bisected the ceramic platter. “Shit!” burst out Michaële, convulsed with laughter. “You don’t fool around!”
Later that evening, Joan blurted, “Michaële, shall we play tennis? You’re Borg, I’m McEnroe. Okay, let’s go!” A vociferous tennis fan who followed all the major tournaments on TV and demanded the same concentration, precision, and excellence from athletes as from artists, Joan disliked Jimmy Connors, liked John McEnroe, and adored Björn Borg for “that fixed determination, that calm, that self-containment, that obstinate confidence.” She started serving Michaële questions about various painters. Apropos of so-and-so’s work: “So what do you think? Do you feel something or what?” Michaële would answer, Joan would counter. The two went back and forth, back and forth, Joan enthusiastically cheering Michaële’s glowing yes-reaction to van Gogh: “Okay, you’ve hit a smash! Excellent, excellent!”
Quickly nicknamed “Françoise Sagan” for her bookishness, mettle, and vague resemblance to the author of Bonjour Tristesse, Michaële was for Joan another younger surrogate self. A student of philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the experimental University of Paris 8 in Saint-Denis, she, like Joan, perceived an indispensable link between reading and painting, which is not to say that painting should be literary but rather that both can break the seals on everyday time and space. The two discussed Joan’s art in terms of stratification of memory, poetic space, and painting as fabric: while Manet’s pictures, for instance, are so tightly woven as to allow virtually no holes, Joan’s, like Cézanne’s, abound in marvelous slippages, dilations, and discontinuities. Joan sometimes visited Michaële’s studio, ordering her protégée to clean it up (“Quel bazar! What the hell is all this crap? Get it out of here!”), the better to focus on the work at hand, then delivering the brutally honest critiques.
Michaële conceived of Joan as a sort of pinball wizard:
When she met someone, she would say to herself: “Okay, move over. I’ll get this one!” And hup! She pulled the lever and sent out the ball. And she played a game. She played a game of pinball. Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting! … When she had in front of her someone who was a player—Joan was such a player!—both would play. Superb!
The following February brought another Fourcade exhibition (Joan Mitchell: New Work). After the opening Joan traveled to Washington, D.C., for the 1981 Corcoran Biennial featuring recent art by five veteran Americans: Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Richard Diebenkorn, and Joan Mitchell. During its installation, according to Washington Post art critic Paul Richard, Joan smoked in the gallery, an absolute no-no, but no one dared speak up. Staffers were scared of her. Mobbed at the reception by friends, fellow artists, and admirers, she responded coyly when a Post photographer asked her to pose with Stella: “I’m not sure if I’m famous enough for him.” But she did pose, grinning and goofy looking.
As avidly as she sought the company of artists, Joan now kept her distance from the art world as such, which she equated with competition, sycophancy, and tinsel. A few days earlier, in Manhattan, she had conceded to painter Katy Crowe, whom she had once blasted for not moving to New York after graduate school, that Crowe might have been right: “I understand why you didn’t come to New York. This is the most backbiting, high-pressure, unsupportive place I can imagine.” Joan’s own New York scene was long dead, she even seemed a bit lost in New York, yet she had no particular reason to remain in France. Where did that leave her? Mulling over her future, she told her old friends Joanne and Phil Von Blon,
I wouldn’t know where else to go [except Vétheuil] or I’m too lazy to move. I don’t think “the Dakota” in N.Y. would suit me or the dogs even if we could afford it—or Southern Italy—good light and cheap real estate—either. Being an outsider anyway i.e. painter and having become even more so, foreigner, in a foreign country, I wonder … Yet I feel American whatever that means, perhaps just a label—but no—a feeling—and an objectivity.
After she lost St. Mark’s Place to a huge rent increase the following year, Barney urged her to take part of the twenty-three acres he owned in Three-Mile Harbor and build a house. She hesitated but finally said no. Her feeling of unbelonging in New York did not translate into a feeling of belonging in France, however. Though no one would mistake her for a native, her French was very good, and she was savvy about the French system. Still, like many who live abroad, she felt intensely American and detested the word “expatriate.” As for Vétheuil, she had never nested there as she had at Frémicourt, and the house had seen better days. It needed a new roof and, Joan still refusing the corruptions of creature comforts, lacked even a single well-cushioned chair. Often passive and despondent, she viewed herself as a prisoner. But the garden remained paradisiacal, the lilacs still bloomed, and, on certain sunny days, she wanted to “drink the landscape.”
From Washington, Joan traveled, via New York City, to Bedford in Westchester County, where she collaborated with master printmaker and publisher Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics. Originally from East Chicago, Tyler had graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a few years after Joan, then founded the Gemini print workshop and Gemini GEL publishing house in Los Angeles before coming east in 1974. He had worked extensively with David Hockney, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and other art stars, and had long since invited Joan to Tyler Graphics, but, reluctant to leave her dogs for more than a week or two, she had taken her time in accepting.
Joan and master printer Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics, 1981, photographed by Hans Namuth (Illustration credit 14.1)
Ken and Joan immediately hit it off. Genial and unflappable, Ken had no problem with Joan’s bluntness, cantankerousness, heavy drinking, or need to nose around in everybody’s business (including his own six-month-old but already rocky marriage to printer Lindsay Green)—in fact, he found her “a hoot.” He admired her quickness to notice and absorb everything, playing her artistic likes and dislikes “like a game of cards,” taking lessons even from work she didn’t care for—Rauschenberg’s, for instance—and then moving on.
That late winter, Joan collaborated with Ken and his staff on four sets of lithographs printed from aluminum plates using up to ten colors each. Officially, no one was allowed in the room when the artist was drawing, yet Ken managed to observe her quick, decisive stroke making: Joan would approach the piece of Mylar pinned to the wall knowing exactly what she intended to do, do it, and then walk away. On to the next color. She had mentally visualized each intricate print before she began. At intervals, she lounged in an old barber chair that stood in the studio, a cigarette in one inky-fingernailed hand, a mug of coffee or glass of Scotch in the other, and scrutinized the results. She and Ken bantered about the Great Abstract Expressionist Mark, and sometimes she jokingly summoned him, “Ken, this might be it!” The truth was, says Tyler, there was a rare, magical purity in Joan’s drawing, which was “as close as you’re going to get to Zen drawing. You think about it, and then you make the stroke. You don’t go back on it. You just leave it.”
He also observed that, of the hundreds of artists with whom he’d worked, Mitchell had the most complex color sense, based in a lifetime of empirical observation as well as a profound and acutely visual knowledge of art history. She was highly demanding. “God damn it, Ken! Can’t you make viridian green?” she piped up at one point. And again: “Ken, I want to try a color like the color of dying sunflowers.” (So reported art historian Barbara Rose, who visited both Bedford and Vétheuil that spring, for her feature story “The Landscape of Light: Joan Mitchell,” photographs by Hans Namuth, which appeared in the June issue of Vogue.)
According to Tyler, Joan further distinguished herself by her mental process:
If she saw the landscape, she recorded it, thought about it. It was like making poetry, right? She probably had fifteen different ways of expressing that in her mind. When she went to paint that or draw that, those fifteen different ways became thirty. By the time she was done, they became ninety. It was that kind of investigative thinking that she was capable of … Her painting came from a catalog of visuals that Joan had that no one else had.
That September, Gisèle returned for good from Rome. The two would live together at La Tour until Joan’s death eleven years later. As both a convenience and a safety valve, however, Gisèle kept a place on the other side of Paris, near the National Conservatory of Music, where she had once studied and would soon teach. Each woman deeply respected the other’s art. “Your paintings are so beautiful,” Gisèle once affectionately encouraged Joan. “I am moved. Go on, Peanut [her nickname for Joan]. Tu es sur la bonne voie [You’re on the right track].” Having substituted a piano for the table in the formal dining room, which became the music room, Joan loved to listen to Gisèle play. What the composer described as “verbal percussion, sound color, sound/light, subtle vibrations, sympathy, empathy, breath” music lent wings to Joan’s painting, and the reverse was true too. Beginning with the 1980 Aires Pour Marion for six percussionists and a chorus (its libretto based on the poetry of Saint-John Perse), the feelings of certain Barreau pieces resonate with Mitchell’s, as underscored by their mutual titles: A Small Garden, Two Pianos, A Garden for Audrey, Blue Rain, and so on.
Joan and Gisèle dining at home, early 1980s (Illustration credit 14.2)
Born and raised in a small town near Nantes and abused as a child, Gisèle believed that, except for her music, there was nothing special about her. Joan dubbed her companion “Gizée” because not only did she vaguely resemble Joan’s late Skye terrier “Izée” (Isabelle) but also she had that same spunky and friendly yet cautious personality. As practical and capable as she was soulful and sensitive, Gisèle knew (and taught Joan) about birds and gardening, keeping her own little plot at La Tour and eventually getting Joan too to scratch around in the dirt and grow plants from cuttings. Joan fussed over her forsythia and raspberry bushes, birthday gifts from Gisèle. Moreover, Gisèle made Joan’s appointments, purchased her socks, took her driving in the country, helped her move paintings, set out vitamin C when she was fighting a cold and leftovers when she was dining alone, and scribbled hundreds of notes to her, often upbeat and soothing.
Alternately treated as friend, housekeeper, fellow artist, employee, companion, and dog-sitter, Gisèle frequently bore the brunt of Joan’s displeasure with this or that. Warm, thoughtful, and generous one minute, the artist would turn arrogant, hypercritical, and nasty the next. She set up rivalries between Gisèle and others—Noël, for one—and, hawk-eyed defender of Gisèle though she was, at times cruelly walked all over her in front of their friends. More than once the younger woman stalked out of La Tour, steaming mad and intending never to return, but always she did: fundamentally tough, she found that the emotional and artistic rewards of Joan’s friendship outstripped the pain. On at least one occasion, after Joan had put her through more hell than usual, Gisèle laid down a blunt ultimatum, thus winning greater respect from Joan, who liked it when people confronted her.
Putting their two lonelinesses together, the pair muddled through everyday life, there for each other when it mattered. “I realize I love you so much, and the puppies, and the house—why is it so painful …,” Gisèle once told Joan. “You are not alone—and we have a bet. Remember? Let’s be strong for each other.” On another occasion a visiting Joe LeSueur intercepted “a rapturous, transfixed expression” on Joan’s face “when, during an unguarded moment, she had eyes for no one in the room” but Gisèle. Love with a capital L was emotionally risky, however, and Joan fretted that people would assume she and Gisèle were a couple. “You broke my heart last night,” Joan wrote her companion from the studio one dawn, “all the scaffolding [Fried] tried to give me I would gladly give you—more selfishly—I can’t bear your sadness—your eyes and the silent dripping. I’ll never forget your face—something Romanesque.”
Joan had just received news of Edrita Fried’s death. Profoundly affected, she wavered between “the awareness that Edrita is no more, and the unwillingness or inability to accept this.” Over the years she had continued to see Fried regularly in New York, and she cherished the memory of one “enchanted day” at La Tour with Edrita and her husband John when, surrounded by dogs, the trio had lingered on Joan’s terrace, chatting, teasing, and gazing upon the landscape before moseying up to her studio, a day when “the world [had] felt as if it had no gravity and no grief.”
Joan’s note to Gisèle continued,
Haven’t finished her joint or pad in Paradise yet—it’s forming—semi-Viennese and semi-N.Y.—piscine [swimming pool]—tons of comfort—2 male cooks—young (she orders them around—they adore her). Females also—very intelligent however and up to the minute. Intellectuals who drop in for tea and cookies—Freud and Anna … and then someone like Franz Kline who comes in for booze and to pour charm. Eventually she’ll put my Mother at ease. She’ll flirt with my Father and put him at ease. Flowers—flowers—plants—blue sea—books—and travel. (I haven’t developed that part of Paradise—except sea and mountains) … Well kiddle doo—I have no choice but to take your nice challenge … Perhaps this pic with a little effort could mix your dying asters garden I loved—kitchen window—in the wind with Edrita and with a bit of courage on my part. What can I complain about? I knew her and I know you and the dogs.
The feeling of those desolate, wind-flung asters outside Joan’s kitchen window endures in her four-panel Edrita Fried, its bitter oranges battling their way out of tumultuous whitened blues—surely Edrita’s colors. For the analyst’s daughter, Jaqueline Fried, in any case, the painting’s oranges nail her mother’s energy and rage, and its blues, her profound sadness. Edrita Fried appeared in the 1983 Whitney Biennial, which Jaqui attended. When the museum’s elevator doors opened to reveal this twenty-six-foot-wide painting, Jaqui jumped, “because it was as if my mother were standing there … It was really my mother!”
As Joan was putting the final touches on Edrita Fried, her sister Sally, 5,700 miles away, learned she had stomach cancer. A month later, Sally underwent surgery but did not tell Joan. A rift had opened between the two siblings, the major issue for Sally being Joan’s “indescribable rudeness.” Sally had declared that she never again wanted to hear from or see her younger sister. Even so, Sally’s thirty-four-year-old daughter Poondie sensed that Joan had to know, so, after much hesitation, she phoned her aunt to break the news. Joan said she’d hop on the next plane. But Sally objected. So Poondie phoned again, this time putting Joan on strict notice that she would have to be on her very best behavior. And, for three weeks in Santa Barbara, she was.
Though Sally’s anger ran deep, the visit was rather like old times: the sisters drank together, gossiped, and criticized everyone. One of their favorite targets was First Lady Nancy Reagan, who had attended Chicago Latin with Sally and briefly dated Sally’s ex-husband, Newt. (The Perrys had divorced in 1969.) Newt’s society band had played at the debut of the then Nancy Davis, accompanying her when she sang “Oh, You Crazy Moon.” Not only did Sally and Joan abhor the Reagans’ politics, but also they were adamant that the White House was lying about Nancy’s age.
After her divorce from Newt, Sally had become a dog trainer, an international authority on the Belgian Malinois, and the author of the definitive handbook on the breed. Among friends and neighbors, stories about Sally’s sometimes terrifying guard and attack dogs (so people called them)—Yakie, Pinhead, Lisa, and Studly—are legion. Sharing an adoration of canines, Sally and Joan talked endlessly about their darlings, Joan on the defensive because, unlike Sally’s dogs, her Iva, Maddie, and Marion were not trained athletes.
Back in Vétheuil, Joan pressed on with efforts at sisterly closeness. Deeply distraught, sometimes weeping as she wrote, and, judging from her big, scrawled handwriting, often very drunk, she dispatched loving and encouraging letters, rambles through present and past, filled with childhood memories, dog gossip, and news of her upcoming show. After twenty-three years in France, Joan had finally been tapped for her first French museum exhibition, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She was the first female American artist so honored (she said) by a major French museum since nineteenth-century Impressionist Mary Cassatt.
Joan painted fiercely that spring: “Sal—I’m saying—all I can do is painting and I’m doing it also because you are sick—hard to explain—because it is all I can do.” She was especially pleased with Chez Ma Soeur and Pour ses Malinois, both of which drew upon Santa Barbara memories, alluded to Sally in their titles, and would be included, if she had her way, in what she envisioned as the “Balls to Cancer” section of her show. (She was battling the curators, Béatrice Parent and Suzanne Pagé, over every inch of the installation.) “Anyway I’ll try not to embarrass you—as my sister—I’ll make it the best I can possibly do (but I sure ain’t Van Gogh—that perfection).” Painting, Joan had explained to the curators, is “the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live. For me, Chez Ma Soeur, for example, is profoundly sad … it’s sadness in full sunlight as there is joy in the rain.”
Joan strolls in her garden at Vétheuil, 1984. (Illustration credit 14.3)
It became obvious that Sally was not going to make it. After she left the hospital that May to die at home, Joan returned to Santa Barbara, taking along a beautiful poem Marion had written shortly before Jimmie died, “When that time comes.” Her second visit wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t as good as the first. Joan drank heavily and pushed people’s buttons until finally Poondie told her it was time to leave. When someone took a last-minute Polaroid of her with one of Sally’s friends, Joan looked at it—she was reed thin with tired, parchmenty skin and bags under her reddened eyes—and murmured, “We both look kind of funny, don’t we? We both look kind of sad. Well, it’s okay to be sad.” The silver linings to Sally’s cancer, Joan decided, were that she once again considered herself a capable person, that Riopelle had been chased from her mind, and that Sally now understood that Joan loved her.
On June 24, 1982, Joan Mitchell: Selected Paintings, 1970–1982 opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, accompanied by a handsome catalog. That evening she arrived at the crowded event having traded her usual battered running shoes for red sneakers. When Paul Auster arrived, along with his new wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, Joan rushed to give him a huge hug and later talked nonstop about her sister.
A few days later, young painter Elisabeth Kley visited Vétheuil from New York and was immediately recruited to help with the dogs. Elisabeth found La Tour cluttered and carpeted with dog hair and Joan in a strange paranoid state, “really hooked into tragedy.” Yet somehow the atmosphere wasn’t gloomy: the phone rang often, and Gisèle, Noël, and others came and went. Elisabeth had never before met anyone so famous, and she certainly never expected someone so famous to be (in certain ways) as open as Joan, who was in the habit of peeing with the bathroom door ajar and yelling at the same time, not to mention that she wrote disarmingly self-revealing notes. One dawn that late July, as Sally was approaching the end, Joan left this message for Elisabeth on the billiard table before heading for bed:
I called and talked to nurse. Sally couldn’t talk … 4 AM I am painting. Sally just called and said she loved me etc.—oh God. You are right. This is heavy. This is the first time Sally has called. Magic Flute ce soir and tomorrow—les Noces de Figaro [The Marriage of Figaro].
The next day:
I did call Calif and I talked only to Beverly (the lovely nurse). Sally is in a state of “withdrawal” (I said you mean terminal? and she said yes). Much less morphine now—“the body takes over its own death” (let’s learn). She can’t walk of course and barely talks. Seems “very serene” and looks “serene” and Sally said this morning—let’s hope it’s over now … Bev will call me when she dies … I too somehow feel serene with the Strauss record [the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss] and the end of such horror and pain for her.
Sally Perry died on July 25, 1982, at age fifty-eight. After arranging by phone for the flowers at her sister’s memorial service, Joan once again picked up her pen:
I’m still listening to Kiri—Strauss—beautiful dawn. Puppies asleep and she’s in heaven—my paradise now. Oh fuck how horrible—all of it—I can’t even fight with her anymore—merde. Well I’m still having a hard lousy time. Fuck it—must shake it. Nice though to care about somebody or love. Really—painful but worth it like painting I guess.
The very day Sally died, art critic Michael Gibson’s review of Joan’s exhibition appeared in the International Herald Tribune:
This is obviously painting of the highest quality in a modern idiom. But the life the viewer senses in the work comes from an area quite beyond the realm of painting. This has always been the case with all true painting and it is all the more unusual today because circumstances do not favor the sort of slow maturation that gives an artist [such] qualities and scope.
One senses that painting is something of a religion to Mitchell, at least in the sense implied by Alfred North Whitehead when he says that “religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” The important word here is “solitariness” and it probably explains why there are so few authentic artists—that sort of solitariness is something that most people want to avoid at all costs.
Having shared with her tantine the heartache of Sally’s final months and having received from her such loving letters, Poondie traveled to Paris that September believing that Joan’s hurtful ways had ended. Instead she found her aunt “meaner and meaner,” her suffering asserted in the pain she inflicted on others. When she was alone, however, Joan reacted to little and saw mostly no-color. She did not touch her brushes for a very long time.
That same year she quit drinking. According to Carl Plansky, Joan “must have been nauseous a lot. She was hungover a lot.” One night in particular “she looked awful, and she said, ‘I don’t want to have a drink.’ It was the only time she ever said that. And then around eight she stood up, and I could see she was shaking, and she said, ‘Why don’t you put some beers on?’ She really, really needed a drink.” Yet, acting on her own, Joan now managed to quit, and even to paint without liquor. In December 1983, a year and a half after the loss of her sister, Joan wrote to Elisabeth Kley, who was back in New York, “It’s so nice to paint after that awful long period of not working. I also stopped drinking entirely for a long time. Now I just drink a bit. Whisky is only for a needed goose in the studio.” Within weeks, however, she was drinking full-bore.
Inspired by a story from Gisèle, Joan had plunged into a new cycle of painting. Only three days before Sally’s death, Gisèle’s twenty-eight-year-old cousin, Jean-Philippe Halgand, had succumbed to cancer. Gisèle’s memories of Jean-Philippe centered around la Grande Vallée, a solitary, semi-hidden place, not far from her childhood home, where peasants pastured their cows and where wildflowers, dandelions, birds, and trees abounded. One couldn’t see the Loire River, but one felt its presence. There, at age six or seven, Gisèle had begun taking refuge from her troubled home life, arriving by bicycle, sometimes accompanied by her younger cousin, and bringing along pieces of cardboard, a wooden xylophone, and other childish treasures. Years later, as he lay dying, Jean-Philippe had asked Gisèle to take him once more to la Grande Vallée, but that never happened. Enchanted by this story, which she found “very true and very simple” and which her rereading of Proust (for whom “the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost”) helped bring into mental focus, Joan decided to paint la Grande Vallée as a place for Sally and Jean-Philippe.
No sooner had she begun, however, than she was blocked, both by practicalities (the studio’s heating system died, the house urgently needed reroofing, Christmas had to be organized for her entourage) and by the devastating feeling that painting was “all meaningless again.” She fell prey to despair. A few weeks later, she once more set to work.
La Grande Vallée consists of twenty-one paintings (including five diptychs and one triptych), the last five of which Joan conceived for four people who were among her emotional mainstays—Carl Plansky, Jean Fournier, art critic Yves Michaud, and Philippe Le Thomas, a medical student who was taking steps to become a Benedictine monk (his ecclesiastical name was Frère Luc)—plus Iva, her dog. In a sense, these were Territory paintings. Each had a strict relationship with its inspirer, and they were not at all interchangeable. Jean Fournier described his as “an emblematic painting: yellow, fog, and blue.”
Packed nearly edge to edge, as if with tumbling, overgrown bowers, the Grande Vallée paintings—their blues, yellows, reds, pinks, oranges, and greens radiant with inner light—exude the feeling of a teeming, prelapsarian world. Yet shadows lurk and scatterings of black dart “in and out …,” as curator Klaus Kertess once put it, “like an auguring flock of crows.” The artist’s color changes are sometimes abrupt, sometimes sustained, and she moves with unfailing grace through a multitude of painterly situations. Spots of canvas dance like stray sunlight. Built with compact, bold, multidirectional, often hydrangea-textured strokes, the paintings are shallow yet spatially complex, further complicated, in the multi-paneled works, by the effects around the cuts. Their stark frontality—everything piles up on or near the picture plane—means that one cannot walk around in La Grande Vallée. Like all childhood memories, it leaves one yearning at its edges. At the same time, it reminds viewers that, for Mitchell, “painting is like music—it is beyond life and death. It is another dimension.”
On the occasion of Joan’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, People magazine had profiled her: “In the Land of Monet, American Painter Joan Mitchell More Than Pulls Her Weight.” (Having never heard of this publication, Joan at first called it “People’s Magazine.”) Nervously anticipating the arrival at La Tour of the journalist and photographer, Joan had told Carl, “Look, when they come, tell them I make a good ratatouille.” Though rarely did she prepare a meal, someone had given her, and she had mastered, a recipe for ratatouille. So when People’s Joyce Campbell fished for information from Carl, he casually mentioned that Joan made a good ratatouille. However, when Campbell tried to engage the artist about her cuisine, “Well, I hear you make a good ratatouille,” Joan snarled, “I don’t cook!”
The feature in People also afforded her a choice opportunity to swipe at Hollis and Jean-Paul. “Three years ago, her lover of 23 years, Riopelle, left with the 26-year-old woman the artist had hired as a dog-sitter,” the magazine informed its readers. “The betrayal still darkens Mitchell’s disposition and, at times, her peppery vocabulary.”
Not long thereafter, Joan started running into the “The Twenty-Four-Year Live-In” on the Paris–Mantes-la-Jolie train. (Still suffering from knee problems, Riopelle was unable to drive to his studio in St.-Cyr.) This happened, she told Elisabeth Kley,
twice with her and once alone, at which time we talked at both ends (I was in first class after all—he in second) oddly enough—and honestly it didn’t bother me at all—he seemed a bit ill at ease however. Well I deserve champagne, or Fried does (she isn’t dead to me). It’s only taken me 4 1/2 years of hard work—but I made it. Whee. He has a show tomorrow—[the] opening [of] which he seemed to want me to see. Unfortunately I can’t make the opening—n’est-ce pas!—(who is he kidding?). I’m very proud of myself. He looks pitiful too and old and shrunk [Riopelle suffered from osteoporosis] and he’s only 60—and I didn’t no way feel no compassion.
Not only Fried but also time, painting, and music had played important roles. Over and over, Joan had listened to the cathartic Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell’s opera of love and betrayal, with its powerful lament by the despairing and dying Queen Dido. Joan now spoke of her erstwhile intimates with sadness, bitterness, indifference, and/or pride at having worked through her loss: “That garbage can won’t ever be totally rinsed out, but it’s in a dark corner.” Yet the minute Hollis left Jean-Paul in 1986 and returned to Paris (the couple had been living chiefly in Canada), Joan rang her up: “Will you come back?” Hollis never again set foot in La Tour, but time and again they spoke by phone and saw each other in Paris.
And Joan and Jean-Paul communicated. One winter evening in 1988, he and his new companion, the Quebecoise Huguette Vachon, accompanied Jean Fournier to Vétheuil, where Joan sized up, challenged, and won over Huguette. Following dinner, the artist briefly absented herself to change into her work clothes, then reappeared in black pants and an ancient, oversized, paint-smeared sweater of Jean-Paul’s, unraveling so that it hung in clumps under her arms as she flung them up and announced, “My painting outfit!” Huguette found her beautiful like a wild bird.
Several years earlier, the Galerie Jean Fournier had moved from the Left Bank to the Right, near the new Centre Pompidou. With its stunning luminosity, the gallery’s rue Quincampoix incarnation, in an ancient building with one slightly crooked wall, proved the perfect setting for the show, which opened on May 28, 1984, of the first sixteen of the Grande Vallée paintings.
Joan always pursued her vision until she exhausted it, yet the Grande Vallée cycle feels exceptionally unified, both formally and thematically, a feeling enhanced by its installation at Fournier, where it became an environment. The work sold briskly, mostly to Europeans, and never again has it been seen as an ensemble.
For many observers, La Grande Vallée clinched the connection between Mitchell and Monet, the vibrant, vegetal lushness of her canvases and the cohesion of the whole bringing to mind his large, semiabstract, multi-panel paintings of water lilies, in which plants, water, air, and sky inextricably mingle. Given Mitchell’s enchantment with gardens, love of the pastoral landscape familiar from the Impressionist’s scenes, and ownership of the cottage in which Monet had once lived (her address was 12, avenue Claude Monet), on one hand, and the lyricism and radiance of their two oeuvres, on the other, this pairing had long been irresistible to critics. Moreover, as artist Ora Lerman (who worked for a time at Monet’s home in nearby Giverny) points out, the moisture-laden atmosphere of the Valley of the Seine “[weaves] all the colors together in a way that allowed Monet and other Impressionists … to conceive of form as comprising a whole spectrum of interconnected colors without discrete edges,” and Mitchell too had soaked up that soft confluence of color.
Writing in Artforum, reviewer John Yau, for one, states that Mitchell’s “absorption of Impressionism, particularly late Monet, has played a decisive role in her recent work.” A once-tough New York School painter, such comments imply, had succumbed to the temptation of life-is-beautiful Abstract Impressionism.
“The whole linkage is so horrible,” objected Joan, who accused “Monette” (as she relished mispronouncing his name) of being a mediocre colorist and of not even tipping the plane forward in his landscapes. Moreover, Monet was concerned with shifting effects of light whereas Mitchell was attempting to capture emotionally charged memories, something fundamentally different. And, unlike Joan, Monet painted directly from nature. Once, after a visit to his home and garden in nearby Giverny, which opened to the public in 1980, she returned to her studio, painted a beautiful Monet water lily, and then, appalled, destroyed it. Yet people assumed that, if administered truth serum, Joan would confess her love of Monet.
She added to this misunderstanding by characteristically seeming to quarrel with her own opinions. If she bothered with Monet at all, as she did, notably in the early 1970s, it was because she felt she had something to learn from him. Following her afternoon in Vétheuil in 1972, writer Cindy Nemser—who saw “the spirit of Monet [hovering] over all of Mitchell’s work”—passed along to her readers that “Joan openly admits her adoration of Monet and urged me repeatedly to visit the Marmottan Museum in Paris where many of his best paintings are to be found.” Other visitors at other times noted Joan’s mild interest in or cheerful disdain of the Impressionist master.
The matter of Monet leads to the larger issue of the genealogy of Mitchell’s art, the distinctly French cast of her later work begging the question of whether or not it merits the label Abstract Expressionist. Certainly, her previsualization had always distinguished her work from that of improvisatory New York action painters, as had her disposition to work in a mode of egolessness. Yet her canvases bristled with Abstract Expressionist energy and love of paint as paint.
As early as 1960, critic Pierre Schneider had argued that Mitchell’s New York School connection “helps little to explain the peculiarities of her work, for she is a complex, thoroughly unpredictable, artist.” And, in 1974, curator Marcia Tucker had declared Mitchell “no longer an Abstract Expressionist,” thereby eliciting strenuous objections from critic Harold Rosenberg. Now, in an essay for the Grande Vallée exhibition, French art critic, philosopher, and director of the École des Beaux-Arts Yves Michaud weighed in on the issue. Introduced to Joan by her dealer in 1984, Michaud would champion her work over the several years that followed. A systematic and highly intellectual thinker, he nonetheless understood painting in painting terms, and Joan felt, had the right fix on what she was doing. (Moreover, she liked the brawler in Yves.) “To get right to it,” states Michaud,
the painting of Joan Mitchell is as removed from the visuality of Impressionism as from a kind of Expressionism in which raw subjectivity seeks to go beyond itself. She finds and pursues her path between the two, between nature and subject, between a mental disposition for things and one for interiority.
A decade later, in 1994, Robert Storr, then curator of painting and sculpture at the New York Museum of Modern Art, would argue that
as time passes, it would seem that [Joan Mitchell’s] New York period was more interlude than decisive moment in her career, even if, without it, she would never have reaped the marvels of her last and most fertile decades. Retrospectively, the years in Vétheuil reordered the critical equation that condemned her reputation. Far from being only a precocious talent who joined a movement assured of its triumph—second wave but thus, implicitly, second-rate—Mitchell, despite her early successes, was in many ways a late-blooming painter who, a second wind having given her wings, ended up constituting a one-person group …
Rarely did Joan venture into the center of town any longer: not only was she coping with the constant hip pain that made walking difficult but also she had had run-ins with many locals, thus earning a reputation as sauvage: “You’re supposed to be diplomatic, which I call hypocrisy and lying, really.” Direct and tough as she was, however, Joan bruised easily in some respects. She didn’t get the toilet in her studio fixed for the longest time because she couldn’t bear the thought of the plumber telling everyone that the crazy lady up on the hill had a building full of huge, smeary, childlike paintings. So private was the studio that Joan slept with the key under her pillow. Her studio felt, noted one friend, “like a place that an animal goes to for safety.”
When she wasn’t painting, Joan would read. Besides poetry (she always had two or three volumes at hand) she devoured art catalogs and monographs, mysteries, the New Yorker, French magazines, and the Grove Press books Barney sent by the carton. Favorite novels included V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and everything by Milan Kundera (whom she had met). Joan was also exceedingly fond of The Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a gift from Yves Michaud. In von Hofmannsthal’s imaginary 1603 communication to philosopher Francis Bacon from Lord Chandos, a man of letters, the latter accounts for his loss of the ability to write. Overwhelmed by a sense of the deadening inadequacy of language in the face of a “watering can, a harrow left standing in a field, a dog in the sun, a run-down churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse,” he perceives that “any of these can become the vessel for my revelation.” “That’s it, that’s it,” amen’d Joan.
Joan also took pleasure in sitting on her terrace, watching the light shift, the barges bevel the Seine, and the titmice dart around and peck at the seeds she put on the table. She phoned friends at any hour, hugged the kitchen radiator as she chatted with Raymonde, made sure her doggies got the choicest cuts of meat, did crossword puzzles, and religiously followed tennis, figure skating, and the news on TV. (She was furious about the rise of French right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front Party and appalled by the Iran-Iraq War.) In warm weather, she puttered in the garden or soaked up the sun on the stoop of her studio as her dogs milled around. She also liked organizing little fêtes for friends’ birthdays or openings. When there were no guests, she and Gisèle would linger over one of Raymonde’s simple country dinners: roast chicken with rosemary, vegetable soup, whatever was fresh from the garden. La Tour had its moments of ordinary well-being, yet photographer Jacqueline Hyde was not alone in feeling in “that house and that atmosphere … something tragic.”
Come spring and summer, La Tour again stirred with visitors, especially the young artists Joan cultivated and inspired, many of whom considered this unreconstructed painter’s painter a hero as well as a friend. Besides talking, drinking, and hanging out, painting lessons wove themselves into life at La Tour. Joan was wont to bring up with her young acolytes the vital importance of feeling and seeing, really seeing, color and light. Once, when a yellow flower in a vase caught the light, she took Joyce Pensato aside: “That’s what I mean by color and light.” Bill Scott recalls how Joan would “hold a lemon against a black patch on the coat of one of her dogs and say that this color juxtaposition, for her, epitomized Manet. Or at dinner she might challenge anyone to tell her how they would mix the color of an apple she held, the color of her drink or the red of her sweater.” Guests would paint in the garden or the cistern. Assuming that everyone was an artist as serious as she, Joan encouraged both dependence and independence but was open to many ways of working. Her critical comments were typically brief: “It’s not visual.” Or: “Here you’re just cleaning your brush.” If she felt someone’s colors weren’t right, she would leave tubes of paint (the finest Lefebvre-Foinet) on the billiard table. She also purchased her young friends’ art, at prices beyond what most would ever dream of assigning, and hung it in the house, alongside originals by Kline, Matisse, de Kooning, Francis, Mitchell, and “lady painters” like Shirley Jaffe, Elga Heizen, and Zuka.
“Let’s organize,” Joan once admonished her young guests,
please finish open beer bottles … please look for clothes and where you have put them—please have them washed … I opened some portfolios to show paper for fusain [fine charcoal] the other night—no one seems interested so I’m putting them back on billiard table … If someone wants to cry, I have kleenex but I don’t like tears in my curry, which was already too salty. If someone wants to talk about their Mothers, I have plenty of tuscany olive oil—or preferably petrol. “Oily Mothers.” … The “trick” is to care about anything that exists outside of oneself (not what the oilies did to you).
As evening descended, people would gather in the little dining room, liquor would flow, and Joan, dropping the needle on her Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong album, would inquire, “How was today?” While she operated from the principle that one should never scotch one’s true feelings by seeking the approval of others, ironically, she “brought out the sycophant in everybody.” Wanting to know people in ways that went beyond the superficial, utterly unimpressed with her own fame or importance, she would ask a million questions. Her ability to sniff out precisely what one did not want publicly exposed was astounding. Flattered by her attention and often half smashed, people would let slip things they had never dreamed of revealing to anyone. Then, typically at the dinner table, the unlucky victime du jour (no one, including important curators, collectors, or artists, was automatically exempt) would feel the wind shift, and everything swiftly and very publicly fly back into his or her face. That person’s insecurities would be “out for dissection so fast that you couldn’t believe it.” No one dared defend Joan’s prey. She considered this “outing” a form of therapeutic honesty that pulled off people’s masks and got them to where they might be after, say, six months of psychoanalysis. “It would look so aggressive, and at times it frankly was,” reports one observer, “but there was this enormously generous interest inside that was driving it.” Yet frequently victims were reduced to tears. Their impulse was to bolt, but that proved difficult and not only for practical reasons.
Joan and her “doggies” relaxing in front of her studio, 1984 (Illustration credit 14.4)
Artist Robert Harms, for instance, on his first visit to Vétheuil, met with unmerciful criticism for both his Levittown accent and his failure to properly care for the dogs while Joan was out, criticism delivered with such withering authority that it seemed well nigh impossible to contest. Feeling that he had to leave, Harms announced he was going to Paris. Then—following her usual attack, seduce, attack, seduce pattern—Joan “looked at me, and she said, ‘What’s the matter? You lose your sense of humor?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, God!’ We stayed up that night until six in the morning, drinking Scotch and talking and looking at the paintings. And then she had me.”
Following the long, boozy dinner that was the social centerpiece of any day, Joan would begin moving toward the library to watch late-night news or toward her studio to paint. But first, even when she was so drunk she could barely stumble around, she would collect the ashtrays and glasses, carry them to the kitchen, and fastidiously wash every one. Dirty paper napkins and tissues were gathered for use in cleaning her brushes. Nothing should be wasted! If she was painting that night, she would then exit via the back door, toting the box of napkins and tissues, along with her survival bag bulging with a jug of Johnnie Walker, two or three books of poetry, and perhaps a few letters. Along the way she might sing a children’s song accompanied by her yowling dogs. Later, the strains of Bach would float from the studio and, much later still, from her bedroom, come a muffled France Culture broadcast, her security sound as she dropped off to sleep.