ONE RAIN-SPITTING FEBRUARY MORNING several years ago, I stood in a hallway at the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand in Paris, frustrated in my efforts to locate a certain document. The hallway had marble-smooth concrete walls, dim natural light, and a high ceiling. For some reason, I glanced up: above me hung a large, squarish oil painting tingling with a marvelous blue lavender, a blue lavender that washed over me as if, having never before seen—no, felt—blue lavender, I’d plunged into a bracing pool of it. I sensed in the painting mingled sun and shade, meadow tangle, lurking dusk, yearning, and the touch of a human hand. But most of all I was caught up in that tonic hydrangea color. Breached by a loamy green black, it drifted upward, urged along by a burst of vivid yellow. No color was block-solid: each felt airy, each sputtered with others. And, like a river viewed through binoculars, the image was both tangible and otherworldly, stirring and still. I felt as if I’d been whisked from the Bibliothèque Nationale to a secular Sainte-Chapelle. The radiant flicker of ecstasy hanging above me was Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallée V, and its ambush that day sealed my decision to write this book.
I insist upon my encounter with Grande Vallée V in part because, although this book includes illustrations, Joan Mitchell’s art survives reproduction almost as poorly as it does verbal translation. Not to experience it in the flesh is not to experience it at all. The real thing never lets you get too comfortable: it jams your sensorial circuits, it lures you in even as it keeps kicking you back to the surface. And whether thinned and smudged or thick and glistening, hesitating or razoring along an edge, the pigment itself—Joan could do virtually anything with the stuff—packs a powerful punch. The right Mitchell at the right time can lift a film from your blasé adult eyes and get you drunk on being alive.
That was Joan, too. Tough, vulnerable, loving, bawdy, bullying, embattled, generous, and enraged, she was as singular as her art.
Her bluntness staggered people. The first time you met her, she might insult you, even make you cry, but later she might be so understanding and nurturing that she felt like a soulmate. Then insults again. Moreover, Joan at times made strange comments, which people tended to chalk up to drunkenness (she was a prodigious drinker), metaphor, or the mark of the artistic personality. She spoke of her painting, for instance, as “a sort of scaffolding made of painting stretchers around a lot of colored chaos.”
How does a biographer cast a coherent account of such a character? In his preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey affirms that a certain amount of ignorance can be a good thing for a biographer, since it prevents him from loading up on information about his subject, then foundering under the burden. The wise biographer, Strachey continues, “will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank or the rear; he will shoot a sudden searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”
I didn’t lower a bucket so much as grab one thrust into my hands by Joan’s niece, Sally Perry, in the form of a Wall Street Journal clipping dated June 28, 2002: “Why George Gershwin May Have Called It ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” by Sharon Begley. “That’s what Joan had,” Sally told me. Begley’s article described synesthesia, an innate condition in which the stimulation of one sense (like hearing) triggers another (like seeing) as well. “Everyone is born with extra connections [among the senses], or synapses,” Begley had written. “Most get pruned away in childhood. In synesthetes, the extra synapses seem to remain, producing a rich web of circuitry that connects the cortex’s color processor to the numeral area next door, or links touch regions to vision regions.” Some synesthetes taste shapes, others hear smells, still others experience pain as color. Reportedly Gershwin saw music, hence Rhapsody in Blue. The creator of the legendary album Kind of Blue, jazzman Miles Davis, may have been an emotion-color synesthete: if so, he literally got the blues—or maybe the oranges or greens. The painter of Blue Territory (among scores of her own glorious rhapsodies in blue), Joan Mitchell had musical sound-color, personality-color, emotion-color, and grapheme-color synesthesia (meaning that she saw the letters of the alphabet in color), plus eidetic memory, which she described as mentally carrying around a suitcase filled with pictures.
I set about trying to understand the role of Joan’s neurology in the unfolding of her artistic and personal lives. We pay lip service to the idea that each of us sees the world differently, yet we operate as if ours were the only true way of seeing the world. Here was a highly trained, highly practiced artist who experienced the world in ways most of us do not: how did that matter? (The only other internationally renowned contemporary artist known to have synesthesia is David Hockney, but, except in his opera sets, Hockney has not intentionally used his synesthesia in making art. Among earlier artists, suspicion of synesthesia falls upon Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Charles Burchfield, to name a few.)
Joan’s synesthesia and eidetic memory, I came to realize, left their tracks all over her art. I don’t mean to suggest that she was a primitive who simply mapped her neurological experience onto canvas. On the contrary: the consummate painter, Joan used all of her craft plus every scrap of experience at her disposal, including the perceptual “otherness” that helped her to swing open a window beyond the narrow crack of everyday awareness and create art of a rare incandescence.
Having come of age as an artist on New York’s Tenth Street in the 1950s and reveled in its marvelous “community of feeling,” Joan Mitchell has been written into the mythology of Abstract Expressionism. She knocked back beers with the boys at the Cedar Tavern, caroused in the Hamptons, hung out with hip cats at the Five Spot, and felt the pain and the thrill of belonging, or nearly, to the little band of rebels operating below Fourteenth Street. Art historians have labeled her a Second Generation Abstract Expressionist. (The term itself is problematic.) Yet, despite her personal and artistic self-identification with Abstract Expressionism, Joan’s art confounds textbook classification. It has to do, she said, with memories of her feelings—feelings about “love and death and all that crap”—ensnared in lakes, trees, rivers, clouds, sunflowers, bridges, and so on. What other Abstract Expressionist would toss into a discussion of her painting process, as Joan did in 1957, the remark, “I feel like a little child coming up out of the basement and saying: who put the sidewalk there, who put the tree there?”
Given that the intellectual framework of modernism situated artists’ work in a logical progression of stylistic development and prized above all the invention of new formal languages, the label Second Generation Abstract Expressionist appeared to doom Mitchell to the status of follower. It’s true that she did not invent a new ism. But not only was her art formally idiosyncratic—above all, she was a supreme colorist—it also evinced what essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson terms “an original relation to the universe.”
Joan’s is also a story of her struggle to cope with the gender bias of her time. Raised largely by her father, who never let her forget that he needed a son, not a daughter, and who made his love for her conditional upon her athletic, intellectual, and artistic achievements, she came of age in an era when even the brightest “co-eds” were expected to marry, then happily melt away into the kitchen and nursery, and when a woman, by definition, had no shot at winning recognition as a great artist. Yet at age twelve, the gutsy Miss Mitchell decided to be just that. Her vaulting ambition was for painting itself. About her career she felt more ambivalent: “Of course, then there was no question of succeeding, because I was a girl. I just did it, do you understand?”
After she hit upon the ironic, defiant, aggrieved-but-not-whiny phrase “lady painter,” Joan trotted it out on every possible occasion. An incident that occurred during the installation of her 1988 traveling retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art conveys the affect. Wearing her nerves on the outside, as usual, the sixty-three-year-old artist roamed the exhibition-in-process, eyeballing her paintings through unfashionable yellowish magnifying-lens glasses. Always her own toughest critic, she started apologizing for the works’ shortcomings to the curators, critics, and installers milling around. With an imperious sweep of her arm, her tone abruptly shifted to sarcastic: “Not bad for a lady painter.” A brisk toss of her hair. “I think everything is magnificent.” Then, as a mock aside: “I’m trying to act like a male painter. You know, where you say that everything you do is wonderful.”
Behind her hung many of the great Mitchells: Cross Section of a Bridge, Hudson River Day Line, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole but It Got Too Cold, Couscous, Calvi, Sunflower, Blue Territory, Salut Tom, La Grande Vallée, and Faded Air I. Not bad indeed for a lady painter.