Notes

Minor spelling and punctuation errors in the quotations have been corrected. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

PROLOGUE

  1 “My sister”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Sarah Mitchell Perry, n.d.

  2 “that dark idea”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Michael Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Box 1, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution. My description of Joan’s painting process is indebted to Irving Sandler’s “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ArtNews 56:6 (October 1957): 44–47, 69–70.

  3 “Ugghrrr”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

  4 “more available”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

  5 “no hands”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 33.

  6 “I ‘stop’ ”: Mitchell, quoted in Bernstock, 34.

  7 “how to come down”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

  8 “The painting has to”: Mitchell, quoted in Sandler, 45.

  9 “All vanitas”: Catherine Flohic, “Joan Mitchell,” Ninety (1993): 4.

INTRODUCTION

  1 “will attack”: Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Illustrated Edition (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 7.

  2 “Everyone is born”: Sharon Begley, “Why George Gershwin May Have Called It ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” Wall Street Journal, 28 June 2002.

  3 “community of feeling”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Michael Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Box 1, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  4 “love and death”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

  5 “I feel like”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ArtNews 56:6 (October 1957): 45.

  6 “an original relation”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Carl Bode, ed., in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin, 1981), 7.

  7 “Of course”; Liz Lufkin, “Triumph for ‘Lady Painter,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 May 1988.

  8 “Not bad”: Ibid.

CHAPTER ONE: JIMMIE AND MARION

  1 “Beams arch high”: “Bridges,” Marion Strobel, Lost City (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 40.

  2 “could console”: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 110.

  3 “glowing, all summer”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed by Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, “Joan Mitchell,” Bomb 17 (fall 1986): 24.

  4 “touching my own self”; “How strange”: “Barbara” [Joan], quoted in Edrita Fried, On Love and Sexuality: A Guide to Self-Fulfillment (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 40. In her survey of love and sex as instruments of healthy change, Joan’s analyst, Dr. Edrita Fried, addresses the ways in which ego regression refreshes and activates the normal ego yet may provoke anxiety or hostility in someone with a defective ego. She presents a case study of Barbara, a pseudonym for Joan Mitchell (as confirmed by Fried’s daughter, psychotherapist Jaqueline Fried). Although the analyst has concealed her patient’s identity (making Barbara a musician rather than an artist, for instance), her account of Joan’s psychological history and condition, consistent with other sources, appears to be accurate. However, cautions Jaqueline Fried, authors of case studies writing for a popular audience may take liberties with facts in order to make a point.

  5 “I feel too much”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 20 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  6 “It comes out”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Carla Hall, “And a Party for the Folks Who Put It Together,” Washington Post, 19 February 1981.

  7 “No one can”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Sarah Mitchell Perry, n.d. [1982]. Collection of Sally Perry.

  8 “means of feeling”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

  9 “If I can’t paint”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Sally Perry, interview with author, 14 April 2001.

10 “And it is”: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 20.

11 “the total influence”: Sally Turton, telephone interview with author, 28 December 2001.

12 “You’ll never”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Cindy Nemser, “An Afternoon with Joan Mitchell,” Feminist Art Journal 3:1 (spring 1974): 6.

13 “completely out”; “free [her]”: Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

14 “Oh, I’ll never”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

15 “a very mixed bag”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 14.

16 “pioneer stock”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Stephan Westfall, “Then and Now: Six of the New York School Look Back,” Art in America 73:6 (June 1985): 114.

17 “wife and children”: Democrat Clarion, 12 June 1874.

18 “Spartan courage”: James Herbert Mitchell in a letter to Gertrude Mitchell Sloan, 1 September 1914. Collection of Susan Sloan.

19 “Jim Mitchell hasn’t”: Mason County Democrat, 23 May 1890.

20 “genuine lover”: Ibid., 24 April 1891.

21 “He is quite”: Sarah Vaughan Mitchell in a letter to Eva Hostman, 6 July 1890. Collection of Sally Perry.

22 “had given”: Mason County Democrat, 26 September 1890.

23 “parlor tricks”: James Herbert Mitchell, quoted in Judith Cass, “Recorded at Random,” unknown newspaper, n.d.

24 “Jack of all”: Mitchell, interviewed in Cajori.

25 finally managed: Transcript of James Herbert Mitchell, University of Chicago, Office of the University Registrar, Chicago.

26 “you can be”: James Herbert Mitchell, quoted by Mitch Waters, telephone interview with author, 30 December 2001. Mitch Waters heard the story from his father, Jeffrey Waters, James Herbert Mitchell’s nephew by marriage.

27 “attending to”: James Herbert Mitchell to Gertrude Mitchell Sloan, 20 December 1907. Collection of Susan Sloan.

28 “faint voluptuous smell”: Marion Strobel, Ice Before Killing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 14. Although her book is fiction, Strobel modeled several characters on family members. Her Archie Soames appears to be based upon James Herbert Mitchell.

29 “It takes a man”: Herbert Sloan, quoted in a letter from James Herbert Mitchell to George A. Sloan, 3 October 1914. Collection of Susan Sloan.

30 “Please, please”: Marion Strobel in a letter to James Herbert Mitchell, 8 November 1921. Collection of Sally Perry.

31 “Marion Jimmied”: Ashton Stevens, “Wits Write Stevens on Names, Drinks,” Chicago Herald-American, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

32 “We are happy”: James Herbert Mitchell to Gertrude Mitchell Sloan, 17 December 1922. Collection of Susan Sloan.

33 “Will you go”: Marion Strobel to James Herbert Mitchell, 8 November 1921. Collection of Sally Perry.

34 “leaves, and crawling things”: Marion Strobel Mitchell in a letter to Morton Zabel, 26 August [1933], Morton Zabel Papers, Newberry Library.

35 “If I had a dandelion”: Mitchell to Zabel, n.d., Morton Dauwen Zabel Papers, Box III, Folder 10, University of Chicago Library.

36 Marion’s maternal grandparents: Among the children of Daniel Franklin Baxter’s great-great-great-great-grandparents was Abigail Baxter, who married Joseph Adams. That couple’s great-grandson was President John Adams. Thus the Chicago Baxters claimed kinship by marriage to both the second president and the sixth president, his son, John Quincy Adams. Joan never touted this connection, yet it added to her sense of herself as an American, which was to be thrown into relief by her living in France. My thanks to Susan Sloan for the information about the Baxter-Adams connection.

37 “a dashing and popular trio”: Article from unknown newspaper about the marriage of Charles Louis Strobel and Mary L. Wilkins, n.d. [August 1910]. Collection of Sally Perry.

38 “a structural signature”: Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 72. My understanding of Strobel’s role in the steel industry derives largely from Misa’s book as well as Strobel’s obituaries.

39 “He never spoke”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed by Linda Nochlin, 16 April 1986. Transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

40 “beautiful, fabulous”: Mitchell, quoted in Bernstock, 22.

41 “Toward Blue”: This notebook was among the belongings Joan never claimed after friends moved her out of her apartment at 60 St. Mark’s Place.

42 “recollected landscape”: Irving Sandler, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ArtNews 56:6 (October 1957): 45.

43 “a visual image”: Irving Sandler, “Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 56:1 (March 1957): 64.

44 Upend the steel sleeve: Jenney made this comment to the [New York] Times Herald, 27 August 1895, William L. B. Jenney and William B. Mundie Papers, Roll 10, Burnham Microfilm Project, Art Institute of Chicago, cited in Misa, 64.

45 he signed contracts: Misa, 74.

46 One of these: Art historian Joseph M. Siry makes this point on page one of his architectural and social history, The Chicago Auditorium: Adler and Sullivan’s Architecture and the City (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Amputated in 1952 when Congress Street was widened into Congress Parkway, this rather derelict dowager today occupies a noisy corner of the Loop, its glamour a thing of the past despite the renovation of its glorious theater. The offices and hotel have been turned into classrooms and offices for Roosevelt University.

47 “the ordeal of costumes”: “Society,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 January 1905.

48 “Tapering fingers”: Marion Strobel, “Hands,” Poetry 15:6 (March 1920): 315.

49 “In the morning”: “Mrs. C. L. Strobel Dies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 March 1905.

50 “more or less”: Sarah Mitchell Perry in a letter to Sally Perry, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

51 “To tear down”; “Poetry is”: William Carlos Williams, “Notes from a Talk on Poetry,” Poetry 14:4 (July 1919): 215. My information about Williams’s time in Chicago derives from Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); Marion Strobel’s 23 April 1919 letter to Williams (William Carlos Williams Papers, University at Buffalo); and William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951). (Williams’s autobiography, however, misdates his visit to Chicago.) Strobel and Williams enjoyed a long but never again close friendship. She got in the last word about the romance. His “A Goodnight” exhorted, “go to sleep, go to sleep.” As if in response, the final stanza of Strobel’s poem from the early twenties, “After a Quarrel,” reads, “But love / You told me I might keep / Has gone to sleep / Has gone to sleep.”

52 “Go to sleep”: William Carlos Williams, “A Goodnight,” Poetry 9:2 (November 1916): 184.

53 “But in the future”: Marion Strobel in a letter to William Carlos Williams, 23 April 1919, William Carlos Williams Papers.

54 “My dear Miss Monroe”: Marion Strobel in a letter to Harriet Monroe, 20 December 1918, Poetry Magazine Collection, Gen. 1912–1936, Box 24, Folder 27, University of Chicago Library.

55 “Provided”; “spirit of ’76”: William Carlos Williams, Poetry 16:3 (June 1920): 173.

56 “that timeless”: Marion Strobel, “543 Cass Street,” Poetry Magazine Collection, Gen. 1936–1953, Box 68, Folder 28, University of Chicago Library.

57 Yet, as Joan later noted: From September 1942 to April 1946, Strobel coedited Poetry with Peter de Vries, and, from May 1946 to April 1949, with George Dillon. The magazine’s “official” history is Joseph Parisi’s Poetry (Chicago: Modern Poetry Association, 1980).

CHAPTER TWO: SATIN CURTINS REDUX

  1 “a momentary vacuum”: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 139.

  2 Thus they were: Joan’s birth certificate fixes her date of birth as 12 February 1925. Many reference materials incorrectly state that she was born in 1926. According to the Mitchell family, this error stems from Joan’s fudging her year of birth in order to compete in a skating event in an age category lower than her own. At that time, however, eligibility for U.S. Figure Skating Association events was based on skill level, not age; hence, the event that provoked the date change must have been a local one. Joan sometimes used 1925 as her birth year; other times, she used 1926.

  3 “I kissed”: Marion Strobel, “Two of a Kind,” Lost City (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 49.

  4 As for Jimmie: So Joan told painter Paul Brach. Paul Brach, interview with author, 27 July 2004.

  5 “My father wanted”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Sally Perry, interview with author, 14 April 2001.

  6 “It seemed that”: Cindy Nemser, “An Afternoon with Joan Mitchell,” Feminist Art Journal 3:1 (spring 1974): 6. The interview took place in 1972.

  7 Painting, Joan believed: Joan Mitchell in Gisèle Barreau, “Porte Adieu, Joan Mitchell, souvenirs,” in Sandro Parmiggiani, ed., Joan Mitchell: La pittura dei Due Mondi/La peinture des Deux Mondes (Milan: Skira, 2009), 133.

  8 Joan’s earliest memories: Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 15; Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 5 January 2002; Joyce Pensato, interview with author, 14 July 2002. Both Marion and Jimmie spoke German and may have hired German nannies in an attempt to teach their children the language.

  9 “How do you decide”: Christopher Campbell, telephone interview with author, 10 February 2007.

10 “Dress them”: John B. Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (New York: W. W. Norton, 1928), 81. Watson’s behaviorist doctrine was at loggerheads with the theories of Francis Parker, founder of the Francis W. Parker School, which Joan attended. Like his colleague John Dewey, Parker presumed each child’s uniqueness and viewed education as a process of enabling the individual to develop from within; Watson believed there was nothing innate to develop. In Watson’s view, one molds a child using conditioned responses to various stimuli. Although there is no material evidence that Jimmie was a follower of Watson, the behaviorist’s theories were popular, and his appeal to science would have pleased Jimmie, who was unenthusiastic about Parker.

11 “Forced to admit”: “Correspondence: Marion Strobel Resigns,” Poetry 27:1 (October 1925): 54.

12 “the most vital”: Marion Strobel Mitchell in a letter to Harriet Monroe, 10 April 1929, Poetry Magazine Collection, Gen. 1912–1936, Box 24, Folder 27, University of Chicago Library.

13 “and if I don’t”: Mitchell to Monroe, 1 August, n.d., ibid.

14 “flapping around”: Mitchell to Monroe, n.d., ibid.

15 “A Cloak for Joan”: Strobel, Lost City, 57.

16 “Fuck shit”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, 22 April 1982. Collection of Sally Perry.

17 A doorman: Baird & Warner Portfolio of Fine Homes, 1928, Chicago Historical Society; 1932 Chicago Social Register.

18 “I remember”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, 12 April 1982. Collection of Sally Perry.

19 “nice to have”: Ibid.

20 “roosted inside me”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 20 July 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

21 “Most of the studies”: Richard E. Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002), 105. Primary sources on eidetic memory include Akhter Ahsen, “Eidetics: An Overview,” Journal of Mental Imagery 1 (1977): 5–38, and Ralph Norman Haber, “Twenty Years of Haunting Eidetic Imagery: Where’s the Ghost?” Behavior and Brain Sciences 2 (1979): 583–629. The most useful secondary sources are Rusiko Bourtchouladze, Memories Are Made of This: How Memory Works in Humans and Animals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); and Ulric Neisser, ed. Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982).

22 “an apparatus”: A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968), 76.

23 “learned clichés”; “very frightening”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

24 “She is”: Marion Strobel, “Chart,” New Yorker, 13 July 1940, 24.

25 “describes the rare phenomenon”: Daniel Mark Epstein, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 35.

26 “that robust reality”: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 77.

27 One July afternoon: In 1976, poet Alice Clay Judson Ryerson Hayes founded the Ragdale Foundation, a retreat for writers and artists in Lake Forest, Illinois. My thanks to John Holabird for sharing this photograph.

28 “as wild”: Marion Strobel, “Alice Clay and Sally Mitchell,” Lost City, 53.

29 “wild little brook”: Joan Mitchell, “The Snow,” 1932 Parker Record.

30 The school dates: My information about Francis Parker School derives principally from conversations and correspondence with Parker teacher and archivist Andrew Kaplan; the school’s archives; Marie Kirchner Stone, The Progressive Legacy: Chicago’s Francis W. Parker School, 1901–2000 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Marie Kirchner Stone, ed., Between Home and Community: Chronicle of the Francis W. Parker School, 1901–1976 (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1976); and conversations with Parkerites Robert McCormick Adams, Jerry Carlin, John Holabird, Ernst Jaffe, Consuelo Joerns, Jean Lyons Keely, and Barney Rosset. Over the decades, Parker has produced many notable contributors to the creative arts, among them architect Edward Barnes, actress Jennifer Beals, artist and writer Edward Gorey, actress Daryl Hannah (whose stepfather, developer Jerry Wexler, was Joan’s classmate), actress Anne Heche, architect John Holabird, actress Celeste Holm, writer and director David Mamet, artist Claes Oldenburg, and filmmaker Haskell Wexler.

31 “a catechism”: Robert McCormick Adams, “Reflections for Francis W. Parker School Centennial,” delivered on 5 October 2001.

32 Often she invited: Pauline Marks in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 1 December 1982. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

33 When Connie Joerns’s: Consuelo Joerns, telephone interview with author, 4 December 2002.

34 Joan’s goldfish: Gisèle Barreau, “Porte Adieu, Joan Mitchell, souvenirs” in Sandro Parmiggiani, ed., Joan Mitchell: La pittura dei Due Mondi/La peinture des Deux Mondes (Milan: Skira, 2009), 130.

35 “Joan has”: Mitchell to Monroe, 10 April 1929, Poetry Magazine Collection, Gen. 1912–1936, Box 24, Folder 27.

36 Intuiting: Deborah Solomon, “In Monet’s Light,” New York Times Magazine, 24 November 1991, 50.

37 “considered very”: Katharine Kuh, interviewed in Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power (New York: Praeger, 1984), 38.

38 “the cornfields”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Bernstock, 119.

39 In the evenings: Catherine Flohic, “Joan Mitchell,” Ninety (1993): 1.

40 “Dr. Mitchell”: John Holabird, interview with author, 25 November 2001.

41 “really beautiful”: Mitchell to Zabel, 7 August 1933, Morton Zabel Papers, Arts Club Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. Painter Herbert Katzman told me about the scar when we talked on 23 July 2001.

42 “I was”: Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

43 “Just have”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed by Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, Bomb 17 (fall 1986): 22.

44 “Joan didn’t play”: Sally Turton, telephone interview with author, 28 December 2001. The daughter of Gertrude Mitchell Sloan’s daughter, Sarah Sloan Waters, Sally Turton is actually Joan’s first cousin once removed.

45 “the most glamorous place”: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 483.

46 Chicago’s industrial employment: Allen Weller, “Lorado Taft, the Ferguson Fund, and the Advent of Modernism,” in Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 45; Margaret Marshall, “Chicago: Two Exhibits,” Nation, 28 June 1933, 715–17, in Neil Harris, “The Chicago Setting,” in Prince, ed., 18.

47 “I needed”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, 12 April 1982. Collection of Sally Perry.

48 To quell her terrors: Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews Article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

49 vividly colored: Patricia Lynne Duffy, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens (New York: Henry Holt, Times Books, 2001), 119–20. Duffy cites a study by neuroscientists Simon Baron-Cohen and John Harrison in which all participating synesthetes reported that they always dream in color. For Joan’s synesthesia, see below.

50 “It’s not”; “Don’t you love”; “Because I was”: Joan Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Entretiens,” in Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes/Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Joan Mitchell (Paris: Éditions du Jeu de Paume, 1994), 31.

51 What she was talking: During Joan Mitchell’s lifetime, not only was the general public unfamiliar with synesthesia, but also synesthesia lay outside the concerns of the scientific mainstream. Joan spoke openly about her mode of perception in interviews with Yves Michaud on 12 January 1986 and 7 August 1989.

The Rosetta Stone of Mitchell’s colored letters, a hand-done chart, appears briefly in Marion Cajori’s film, along with the painter’s note to herself: “This is very unclear and unfair to my letters. Of course in certain words, some letters merge as into water, esp. the greys—metallic—silver—cold blue—I can’t get with these crayons. I have ultramarine or cad green or red etc.” In describing Joan’s letters, I have been as faithful as possible to her color chart, verbal descriptions, and clues as to textures and affect. (Different synesthetes perceive the same letters as different colors with different characteristics. For example, Nabokov describes his D as creamy, whereas Mitchell’s was metallic blue.)

Researchers believe (subject to further testing and evaluation) that about ninety percent of synesthetes (so-called associators) see their colors and shapes as if in their minds’ eyes; ten percent (so-called projectors) see them as if on a screen floating before them.

52 Pale metallic O: This image appears in Marion’s poem “Snow,” published in the January 1939 issue of Poetry. Joan’s O was silvery white; the notion that Marion got the image from Joan is speculative.

53 “S is”: Mitchell, interviewed by Michaud, “Entretiens,” 31.

54 “Do you associate”: Cajori.

55 “Like prolonged echoes”: Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” in One Hundred Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947), 21.

56 Some investigations suggest: Daphne Maurer and Charles Maurer, The World of the Newborn (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 51.

57 “Every time”: Jaqueline Fried, interviews with author, 9 January 2003 and 11 January 2006.

58 In addition, Joan: Emotionally mediated synesthesia is the subject of a study at University College, London. See Jamie Ward, “Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia,” Cognitive Neuroscience 21:7 (October 2004): 761–72. My descriptions simplify.

59 “dark green and clinging”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Barney Rosset, quoted in Siri Hustvedt, “Joan Mitchell: Remembering in Color,” in Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 140.

60 “that white”: Mitchell, interviewed by Michaud, “Entretiens,” 31.

61 “vague nameless”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The White Whale (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1931), 128.

62 “I need to know”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

63 “suddenly felt”: Duffy, 3.

64 “chaos perhaps”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

65 “The divide between”: Marcia Smilack made this comment to Sean Day’s online Synesthesia List on 16 March 2007.

66 Psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann: See Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

67 “involves the whole”: Ahsen, 17–18.

68 “visualized now”: Vladimir Nabokov, “Torpid Smoke,” in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 28–29. On Nabokov’s eideticism, see Dann, 120–64.

69 “At concerts”: Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light (New York: Parabola Books, 1998), quoted in Duffy, 43.

70 Maybe she: In an article in Newsweek, Anne Underwood cites neurogeneticist and synesthete Julian Asher, who as a child attended symphony concerts with his parents and supposed that the lights were dimmed so that the audience could see the colors better. Anne Underwood, “Real Rhapsody in Blue,” Newsweek, 1 December 2003, 67.

CHAPTER THREE: THE LAKE

  1 “Music often takes”: Charles Baudelaire, “La Musique,” in One Hundred Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 135.

  2 “I’m having”: George Dillon in a letter to Harriet Monroe, postmarked 2 May 1932, Poetry Magazine Collection, Gen. 1912–1936, Box 6, Folder 27, University of Chicago Library.

  3 “feeble as a rag”: Mitchell to Zabel, 10 July 1933, Morton Zabel Papers, Arts Club Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.

  4 “I don’t like”: Mitchell to Zabel, n.d., ibid.

  5 “what kind”: Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 239.

  6 “Bleakness, through the trees”: Joan Mitchell, “Autumn,” Poetry 48:3 (December 1935): 129.

  7 “that eerie line”: Paul Richard, “Joan Mitchell’s Bleak Horizons: At the Corcoran, A 40-Year Look Back,” Washington Post, 27 February 1988.

  8 “a perfectly normal”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Phyllis Tuchman, “Joan Mitchell Paints Chaos in Color,” New York Newsday, 13 April 1986.

  9 “perilous leaping”: Marion Strobel, “Perilous Leaping” [review of Poems by T. S. Eliot], Poetry 16:3 (June 1920): 157.

10 “weighed and balanced”: Marion Strobel, quoted in Dorsey McCarthy, “A Chicago Poet Who Writes Whodunits for Relaxation,” Chicago Sun Book Week, 26 May 1946.

11 “matted with”: Mitchell, “Autumn.”

12 “Have you ever”: Marion Strobel, Ice Before Killing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 83.

13 “Dear H.M.”: Mitchell to Monroe, 22 October 1935, Poetry Magazine Collection. Gen. 1912–1936, Box 24, Folder 27, University of Chicago Library.

14 “Dear Mr. Dillon”: Joan Mitchell to George Dillon, 12 December 1935, George Dillon Papers. Folder 3 [Marion Strobel], Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

15 “splendid”: Eunice Tietjens to the “Poetry Family,” 30 September 1936, Harriet Monroe Papers, Box IV, Folder 12, University of Chicago Library. Subsequent winners of the Oscar Blumenthal Prize included Dylan Thomas, Muriel Rukeyser, John Ciardi, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Pinsky.

16 readings by poets: On the subject of the literary lions Joan reportedly met as a child, John Russell’s 31 October 1992 New York Times obituary is typical. “As a child,” writes Russell, “[Mitchell] came to know T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas and others as visitors to the family home.” Certainly, the family home was filled with writers. However, Joan probably never met Eliot, Pound, or Thomas, at least not as a child. In the fall of 1950, when she was twenty-five and living in New York, Eliot did travel to Chicago, where he did a benefit reading for Poetry and made an appearance in the Mitchells’ living room. But I found no evidence of any meeting with Joan. As for Pound, he came to the United States in 1939 for the first time in three decades but never ventured beyond the East Coast. He was not to return until 1945, when he was flown from Italy to Washington, D.C., to be indicted on charges of treason and subsequently imprisoned. Any encounter with Thomas also appears highly unlikely. Thomas first traveled to Chicago in March 1950; on his second visit in April 1952 he too read for Poetry and was fêted in the Mitchell home. But, again, Joan was in New York. In the fifties and sixties, the Mitchells also entertained Richard Wilbur, W. H. Auden, Nelson Algren, and Oliver St. John Gogarty.

17 hence, he joked: Gilbert A. Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (New Haven and New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), 129.

18 “Now we are having”: James Herbert Mitchell, quoted by Alfred Adler, interview with Barney Rosset, 1 April 2000.

19 “Let loneliness”: George Dillon, “To Losers,” quoted in Alfred Kreymborg, A History of American Poetry: Our Singing Strength (New York: Tudor, 1934), 587.

20 “weak, queer”: Charles Ellis, quoted in Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty (New York: Random House, 2001), 367.

21 “NOTHING is”: Marion Strobel Mitchell to George Dillon, “Tuesday” [June 1937], George Dillon Papers, Syracuse University Library.

22 “his full stature”: Marion Strobel Mitchell to Adah Dillon, 24 July 1937, ibid.

23 “if I find”: Mitchell to Adah Dillon, 1 October 1937, George Dillon Papers.

24 And discipline was: Martha Bertolette, telephone conversation with author, 21 March 2005.

25 “practically jealous”: Adler, interview with Rosset, 1 April 2000.

26 “You do”: Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

27 “Do you remember”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, 25 April 1982. Collection of Sally Perry.

28 “And then”: John Gruen, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

29 “That you take”: “Bon Voyage,” George Dillon Papers, Syracuse University Library.

30 “long and lovely”: “To James.” Collection of Sally Perry.

31 “best progressive father”: Sarah Mitchell Perry in a letter to Marion and James Herbert Mitchell, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

32 “The day was”: “The Inn” appeared in the 1937 issue of Parker Prints.

33 “beet red noses”: “Street Scene” was published in 1939, also in Parker Prints.

34 “diddle with things”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Joyce Campbell, “In the Land of Monet, American Painter Joan Mitchell More Than Pulls Her Weight,” People Weekly, 6 December 1982, 83.

35 “no reason”: John B. Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (New York: W. W. Norton, 1928), 41.

36 “pressure to become”: Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 241.

37 “You can’t”: James Herbert Mitchell, quoted by Joanne Von Blon, telephone interview with author, 22 March 2005.

38 “a solitary arrangement”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

39 “brutal, primitive”: Eleanor Jewett, “November Holds First Promise of Art Activities,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 October 1923, quoted in Sue Ann Prince, “ ‘Of the Which and the Why of Daub and Smear’: Chicago Critics Take On Modernism,” in Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 105.

40 “violent”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 233.

41 the Tribune’s Eleanor Jewett: Eleanor Jewett, “An Old Blotter Becomes Art in Miró Exhibition,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 November 1938, in Avis Berman, “The Katharine Kuh Gallery,” in Prince, ed., 166.

42 the Ropp School: Underwritten by Arthur and Mary Aldis (the parents of Graham Aldis), the Ropp School operated for many years from the third floor of the Aldis home at 100 East Chicago Avenue and, in the summer, from the family’s Lake Forest estate. In 1937 it merged with the School of the Art Institute. An artist from Pekin, Illinois, and best boyhood friend of Senator Everett Dirksen, Hubert C. Ropp painted murals for Chicago’s Palmolive, Montauk, and Champlain buildings. See the typescript “The Aldis ‘Compound’ ” in the collection of the Lake Forest–Lake Bluff Historical Society.

Joan once told Michael Goldberg that “The Artist,” a short story by Sally Benson published in the 3 September 1955 issue of the New Yorker, reminded her of the Ropp School. Benson’s setting is an old farmhouse in Monroe, Connecticut, the meeting place of a painting class popular with the moneyed summer people. When an outspoken nine-year-old latches onto the group, his forthright comments irritate his adult classmates, comfortable in their mediocrity. The boy then paints a crudely beautiful still life, and the teacher sends him packing.

43 “do for Chicago”: Gerald Nordland, “Aaron Bohrod,” in Milwaukee Art Museum, Leaders in Wisconsin Art, 1936–1981 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1982), 25.

44 using casein: Chicago artist Ramon Shiva, working from his factory at 433 Goethe Street, first marketed casein paints in tubes in 1933.

45 “I loved”: John Holabird, interview with author, 25 November 2001.

46 “aggressive, masculine”: Consuelo Joerns, telephone interview with author, 4 December 2002.

47 “Five little sub-debs”: Chicago Herald and Examiner, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

48 “Joan, in a dream”: Marion Strobel Mitchell, “Joan,” Hygeia 15:9 (September 1937): 804.

49 “as well as”: Eldon Danhausen, interview with author, 24 November 2001.

50 “close enough”: Robert McCormick Adams, telephone interview with author, 24 January 2005.

51 “I was”: Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 15.

52 In that era: John Holabird, interview with author, 25 November 2001.

53 “irritated-at-the-uncoordinated-slob”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Marion and James Herbert Mitchell, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

54 Having first put: My information about Joan’s skating career comes primarily from the Lake Placid News, Skating magazine, the Chicago Daily Tribune, and Mitchell family documents. Tim Specht, Mary Lela Wood Bogardus, and Helen Davidson Maxson kindly shared their remembrances of Bobby Specht. The best source on Gustave Lussi is the Mountain Lake PBS documentary Gustave Lussi: The Man Who Changed Skating (Plattsburgh, 1989).

55 “little girls”: Unknown Chicago paper, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

56 “remote like”: Strobel, Ice, 32.

57 Joan was: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 18 January 2001.

58 “Chicagoans often”: Thalia, “Women Aids of Symphony Celebrate 10th Anniversary,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 March 1945.

59 “Do the best”: Gustave Lussi, interviewed in Gustave Lussi.

60 “courting their nine”: Strobel, Ice, 4.

61 “who had had tough luck”: Ibid., 34.

62 Well aware that: Martha Bertolette, interview with author, 26 July 2004.

63 Decades later: Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 5 January 2002.

64 “Damn beautiful city”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Evans Herman, 30 August 1954. Collection of Frances Herman.

65 “looked vast”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 239.

66 “The Lake”: Ibid., 247.

CHAPTER FOUR: WAR AND PEACE

  1 “I remember”: Mitchell, quoted in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 233.

  2 “bright, poignant”: 1942 Parker Record.

  3 “marching to her own”: Shirley Petry, telephone interview with author, 20 November 2005.

  4 Consider that: Morris L. Ernst and Alan U. Schwartz, Censorship: The Search for the Obscene (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 95. Some of the Mitchells’ help had to chuckle at Joan’s language. Once, kidding around with Sally as the two rode the elevator at 190 East Chestnut alongside their mother, twelve- or thirteen-year-old Joan accidentally whooped, “Oh, balls!,” to which Marion blithely responded with some banality about tennis. Charlie, the elevator man, discreetly signaled his amusement, while Joan and Sally practically died laughing. In a letter to Sally dated 4 May (probably 1982), Joan reminisces about this incident.

  5 clipping editorials: Anonymous, telephone interview with author, 11 July 2004.

  6 “the unusual”: Marion Strobel, A Woman of Fashion (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931), 179.

  7 “a wolf’s nose”: Marion Strobel, Ice Before Killing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 33.

  8 “Isn’t it hard”: John Holabird, interview with author, 25 November 2001.

  9 “a flaw”: Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 5 January 2002.

10 Joan’s new French teacher: My sources on Helen Richard include Paul Richard, telephone interview with author, 16 August 2002; interviews with various Parkerites; and Marie Kirchner Stone, ed., Between Home and Community: Chronicle of the Francis W. Parker School, 1901–1976 (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1976).

11 Her French “bleu”: Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film. Vladimir Nabokov thus describes the differences between his English and French letters: “The long a of the English alphabet … has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and y (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass.” See Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 34.

12 “get their goats”: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 18 January 2001. Rosset is paraphrasing Joan’s psychology teacher, Alfred Adler.

13 “Joanie was”: Helen Richard, quoted in Paul Richard, “Joan Mitchell’s Bleak Horizons,” Washington Post, 27 February 1988.

14 “Your mother”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Paul Richard, telephone interview with author, 16 August 2002.

15 “held court”: Ernst Jaffe, telephone interview with author, 14 April 2002.

16 “vast visions”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 242.

17 “Oh, Christ!”: Herbert Katzman, interview with author, 23 July 2001.

18 “a cartoon Abstract Expressionist”: Paul Richard, telephone interview with author, 16 August 2002.

19 “Wipe that”: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001.

20 “fact that”: Edward Gorey, quoted in Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 33.

21 painting his toenails: Consuelo Jourgensen [Consuelo Joerns] in Amy Benfer, “Edward Gorey,” Salon 15 (February 2000), www.salon.com.

22 “Ted was”: Consuelo Joerns, telephone interview with author, 4 December 2002.

23 “a lot of”: Gorey, quoted in Ross and Wilkin, 11.

24 “figure (ah!)”: Tim Osato in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 1 September 1939. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

25 “just to show”: John Holabird, interview with author, 25 November 2001.

26 “Dear Enigma”: Osato to Mitchell, 28 June 1943.

27 “I suppose”: Osato to Mitchell, n.d.

28 “He was”: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 24 July 2001. According to Rosset, Joan’s parents disapproved of her friendship with Timmy because he was Japanese American.

29 “verged on the sensational”: “Dorothy Goos Wins U.S. Junior Skating Crown,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 February 1942.

30 Her fans’ attention: Soon after Bobby Specht won the 1942 U.S. Men’s Figure Skating Championship, he joined the Ice Capades as he waited to be drafted. When Joan and her friend Martha Burke (Bertolette) traveled to New Haven that fall to watch him perform, Bobby told Joan that his off-the-charts performance in the Vertigon test (a dizziness test administered to Air Force pilot candidates) had amazed his military testers, and the two old spinning partners had a good laugh. During the war, Bobby flew for the Air Force. He was also named to the 1944 U.S. Olympic team; the games were canceled, however. Later he returned to the Ice Capades as star skater and then director, and he appeared twice on the cover of Life magazine. One of the first major athletes to speak openly about his homosexuality, Bobby retired in 1972 and died in 1999.

31 “underlying tension”: Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994), 4.

32 “BOBBY SPECHT”: Howard Barry, “BOBBY SPECHT TAKES FIGURE SKATING CROWN; Joan Mitchell Wins Senior Women’s Title,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, 18 January 1942.

33 “women were”: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001.

34 “on the inside”: Nathalie Sarraute, quoted by Ann Jefferson, “Nathalie Sarraute comme comédie de la critique,” remue.net, collectif littérature,
http://remue.net/article.php3?id_article=187&var_recherche=Sarraute.

35 “whirl in”: Robert Goodnough, “Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 52:2 (April 1953): 41.

36 “If you use”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 242.

37 “Painting is”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

38 “I don’t close”; “meaningful and sensitive”: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

39 “I’ve won”: Mitchell, quoted in Joyce Campbell, “In the Land of Monet, American Painter Joan Mitchell More Than Pulls Her Weight,” People Weekly, 6 December 1982, 84.

40 “S.R. [Social Register]”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, 25 April 1982. Collection of Sally Perry.

41 Of the three: Out of concern for the integrity of secondary education, Parker was taking part in the College Board’s experimental Eight-Year Study, which waived entrance exams and guaranteed students from participating schools admission to any college.

42 “death warmed over”: Mitchell, interviewed by Linda Nochlin, 16 April 1986. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

43 “study of liberal arts”: “Smith College Class of 1945.”

44 “What does”: Martha Bertolette, interview with author, 26 July 2004.

45 “wallowing walks”: Joanne Von Blon, telephone interview with author, 22 March 2005.

46 “a wonderful friend”: Joanne Von Blon, interview by Mary Abbe, “Difficult Beauty,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 12 November 1999.

47 “Can you imagine”: Anonymous, interview with author, 12 July 2002.

48 “didn’t really”: Martha Bertolette, interview with author, 26 July 2004.

49 “Is there anything”: Mitchell, interviewed by Nochlin, 16 April 1986.

50 “sense of justice”: Joanne Von Blon, telephone interview with author, 22 March 2005.

51 “sexy as hell”: Martha Bertolette, interview with author, 26 July 2004.

52 “dirt with a capital D”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Joan Mitchell, 25 June 1943. Other letters cited here are either undated or dated between 25 June and 16 November 1943. Collection of Sally Perry.

53 Back in Chicago: For information about James Bullock Hathaway, I am grateful to his niece Amanda Carver, along with Martha Bertolette and Joanne Von Blon. See also Harvard Class of 1944, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report.

54 “crazy about Joan”: Martha Bertolette, interview with author, 23 July 2002.

55 Founded as: At the time, the Ox-Bow School was loosely associated with the Art Institute of Chicago. Later that affiliation was formalized.

56 “really Frenchy”: Mitchell, interviewed by Nochlin, 16 April 1986.

57 “My decision”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 240.

58 “J-child”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Joan Mitchell, 23 October 1943. Collection of Sally Perry.

59 “I’d always”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 243.

60 “the first teacher”: Margaret Shook, obituary of Helen Randall in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly (winter 2000–2001).

61 “lover of Nature”: Margaret Drabble, Wordsworth (New York: Arco, 1969), 11.

62 “I hate”: Mitchell, quoted in Sandler.

63 “the spontaneous overflow”: William Wordsworth, “Of the Principles of Poetry and the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798–1802),” in Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 2 (1876; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1967), 96.

64 “The surface of”: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, lines 473–75, in Andrew J. George, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 130.

65 “a dull body”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 240.

66 “not a dead”: Drabble, 89.

67 “adult memory”: See Ernest G. Schachtel, “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia” in Ulric Neisser, ed. Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982), 193.

68 “a vision”: Ibid.

69 “emotion recollected”: Wordsworth, “Of the Principles of Poetry and the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798–1802),” in Grosart, ed., Prose Works, 96. Among the commentators on Mitchell’s use of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” are Hayden Herrera, “Reviews and Previews: Joan Mitchell (Whitney Museum of Art),” ArtNews 73:6 (summer 1974): 111–12, and Richard Francis, “Mnemotechny,” in Joan Mitchell: Memory Abstracted, Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, 20 June–9 August 2002, 10–11.

70 “For oft”: Wordsworth, “The Daffodils,” in George, 312.

71 “mental gymnastics”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, n.d. [1944]. Collection of Sally Perry.

72 “There is no”: Mitchell, quoted in Sandler.

73 Nor, she believed: Bill Scott, interview with author, 31 March 2004.

74 “I don’t think”: Mitchell, interviewed in Cajori.

75 “This is”: Helen Randall note on Joan Mitchell, “Tolstoy’s Theory of Art and Its Relation to War and Peace,” 15 April 1943. Collection of Sally Perry.

76 Back at Ox-Bow: Author’s interviews with Zuka Mitelberg, 5 January 2002 and 24 March 2003.

77 “little dinner with painters”: Jane Wilson, interview with author, 17 July 2003.

78 “very Anglo-Saxon”: Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 5 January 2002.

79 “get good”: Richard Bowman in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 27 March 1950. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

80 On one wall: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001.

81 Four months: “Chicago Marine Honored Posthumously for Heroism,” Chicago Sun, 14 October 1945; Harvard Class of 1944: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge: Printed for the Class, 1969).

82 “really broken up”: Martha Bertolette, conversation with author, 21 March 2005. A year and a half earlier, Stuyvesant Van Buren, the brother of Joan’s close friend Joan Van Buren, had been killed at Guadalcanal.

CHAPTER FIVE: TAKING FROM EVERYBODY

  1 “I am learning”: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 5–6.

  2 Founded in: Charlotte Moser, “ ‘In the Highest Efficiency’: Art Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 193.

  3 “Well, unroll them”: Leon Goldin, interview with author, 6 January 2003.

  4 “Her manner”: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001.

  5 “You deserved”: Anonymous interview with author, 11 July 2004.

  6 “Oh, poor”: Sally Turton, telephone interview with author, 28 December 2001.

  7 “Both parents”: Joan Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

  8 “skin and siph”: Mitchell, interviewed by Linda Nochlin, 16 April 1986. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  9 “Man’s dearest possession”: V. I. Lenin, quoted by Joan Mitchell in a letter to Martha Bertolette, n.d. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

10 Picasso had won: Gertje R. Utley, Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 3.

11 “terribly sick”: Joan Mitchell quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell at Zog’s Studio, July 4, 1958,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Center, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

12 she had modeled: Judith Cass, “Ravinia Festival Style Show to Be Next Friday,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 June 1943; Cass, “Most of 1943 Debut Parties Will Be Teas,” 24 June 1943; and Cass, “53 Debutantes to Make Bows, Tho War Will Curtail Parties,” 13 September 1943.

13 “powerful abstractions”: “The Passing Shows,” ArtNews 49:3 (15–31 March 1945): 25.

14 “unless he was”: Richard Bowman, interview with author, 26 August 2001.

15 Marion promised: Consuelo Joerns, telephone interview with author, 4 December 2002.

16 “a lousy”: Herbert Katzman, interview with author, 23 July 2001.

17 “Michelangelo had”: Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 5 January 2002.

18 audaciously bisects: Her Parker classmate Ernst Jaffe remembered that, in the fourth grade, Joan was fascinated with the stereographic photographs (double images that imitate human binocular vision when viewed in a stereoscope) that someone brought to school.

19 “the lost and silver”: Marion Strobel, “Joan,” Hygeia 15:9 (September 1937): 804.

20 “bearing Catholic”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Barney Rosset, 21 March 1947. Collection of Barney Rosset.

21 “it was”: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 18 January 2001.

22 “Talented painter”: Louis Ritman, transcript of Joan Mitchell, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

23 “This is”: Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 85.

24 “Only the”: Ibid., 238.

25 Over coffee: Peggy Bowman, interview with author, 13 October 2001.

26 “Idle hours”: “Society Artists,” Chicago Sunday Times, 14 March 1947.

27 “inscribes art”: Ann Bermingham, “The Aesthetics of Ignorance: The Accomplished Woman in the Culture of Connoisseurship,” Oxford Art Journal 16:2 (1993): 7. Bermingham is discussing eighteenth-century Britain.

28 “What’s this?”; “just the Bohemian”: Cholly Dearborn, “The Smart Set: Cholly Dearborn Observes—Hint Joan Mitchell Wed Last Summer in Mexico,” Chicago Herald-American, 28 May 1947. Joan’s denial appears in Judith Cass, “North Avenue Nursery Party Set for June 13,” Chicago Tribune, 29 May 1947. That Joan did not marry Manuel is confirmed by an official letter from C. Teresa de Jesús Granados Mares, Dirección del Registro Civil, Guanajuato, Mexico, 19 May 2005. She wore this ring, or one like it, more or less all her life. In the fall of 1992, it went with her to New York, where she was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. By mid-October, when she arrived back in Paris, where she would die on October 30, it had vanished.

29 “bruja”: Richard Bowman, interview with artist, 26 August 2001.

30 “If anyone”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Marion and James Herbert Mitchell, 5 April 1961. Collection of Sally Perry.

31 “like hell”: Mitchell to Rosset, 21 March 1947.

32 She briefly had: Jean Lyons Keely, telephone interview with author, 6 July 2002.

33 “hell I miss you”: Mitchell to Rosset, 27 January 1947. The excerpts that follow are from letters dated 29 January, 30 January, 4 February, 11 February, and 24 February 1947.

34 “My darling empathy”: Mitchell to Rosset, 18 March 1947.

35 where she scandalized: Kim Bowman, telephone interview with author, 23 July 2003.

36 “taking Ropp”: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001. Joan told critic Lucy Lippard that she won a second-place fellowship and that “a man who has not been heard of since won the first.” See Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 182.

37 June brought: See “Youth Wins in the Windy City: The Art Institute’s Local Annual,” ArtNews 46:4 (June 1947): 20. ArtNews misidentifies the work, however.

38 “the great”: Mitchell to Rosset, 4 June 1948.

39 “like the plague”: Mitchell, interviewed by Nochlin, 16 April 1986.

40 What these paintings missed: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews Article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Center, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

41 “neurotic child”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Joanne Von Blon, 8 February 1949. Collection of Joanne Von Blon.

42 Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings: Mitchell, interviewed by Nochlin, 16 April 1986.

43 Back in Chicago she had: “$7,000 Awarded Four Students: Art Institute Foreign Travel Fellowships,” News Release from the Art Institute of Chicago, 26 May 1947, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago.

44 “They were only”: Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 17.

45 “squat like”; “charm all over”: Mitchell to Von Blon, 8 February 1949.

46 “Christ how I’m missing”: Mitchell to Rosset, 9 July 1948.

47 “this view”: Mitchell, interviewed by Nochlin, 16 April 1986.

48 “fuck for canvas”: Mitchell, quoted by Christopher Campbell, personal communication to author.

49 “Why don’t I”: Mitchell, quoted in Munro, 244.

50 “and she’d reply”: Eldon Danhausen, interview with author, 24 November 2001.

51 “eat enough”: Mitchell to Rosset, 16 July 1948.

52 “so much”: Mitchell to Rosset, 14 October 1948, in Richard Milazzo, “Barney and Joan: Barney Rosset’s Photographs of Joan Mitchell and Joan Mitchell’s Letters to Barney Rosset,” Caravaggio on the Beach: Essays on Art in the 1990’s (Tangiers: Éditions d’Afrique du Nord, 2001), 123.

53 “strange how”: Mitchell to Rosset, October 1948, in Milazzo, 120–21.

54 “married just so”: Mitchell to Rosset, 16 July 1948.

55 “I wait”: Mitchell to Rosset, 14 October 1948.

56 “Let’s be”: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 18 January 2001.

57 Later it was purchased: John Frederick Nims, “Augustine Bowe, Poet,” Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1967.

58 “He cared”: Cynthia Navaretta, interview with author, 25 July 2001.

59 “marriage deal”: Mitchell to Rosset, 6 February 1947.

60 “in the deep sense”: Marion Strobel Mitchell to Joan Mitchell, 19 July 1948. Marion’s letter makes clear that the phrase is a quote from Joan’s letter to her. So too is the phrase “maybe I’ll close my eyes and do it quickly.” Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

CHAPTER SIX: TENTH STREET

  1 “It’s so”: Franz Kline, quoted in Fred W. McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah, The Artist’s World in Pictures: The New York School, intro. Thomas B. Hess (New York: Shapolsky, 1988), 9.

  2 “Well, we don’t”: John Ferren, “Epitaph for an Avant-Garde,” Arts Magazine 33:2 (November 1958): 26.

  3 “Timid practitioners”: Thomas B. Hess, “Reviews and Previews: ‘Life’s’ Young Artists,” ArtNews 49:2 (April 1950): 42.

  4 “What’s going on”: Milton Resnick, quoted in Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 292.

  5 “The first half”: Philip Pavia, quoted in ibid., 292.

  6 An old incorruptible: Stevens and Swan, 232.

  7 Grace Hartigan: Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), 18.

  8 “You couldn’t”: Philip Pavia, interview with author, 26 July 2001.

  9 “toughness and pressure”: Thomas B. Hess, “Seeing the Young New Yorkers,” ArtNews 49:3 (May 1950): 23.

10 “no manifestoes”: Irving Sandler, “The Club,” Artforum 4:1 (September 1965): 30.

11 “searching itself”: Ferren, “Epitaph,” Arts Magazine 33:2 (November 1958): 25.

12 “It is disastrous”: Willem de Kooning, in Robert Goodnough, ed., “Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950),” in Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, eds., Modern Artists in America (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), 22.

13 “Gee, Joan”: Deborah Solomon, “In Monet’s Light,” New York Times Magazine, 24 November 1991, 50.

14 “ivory tower”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Joanne Von Blon, postmarked 24 March 1950. Collection of Joanne Von Blon.

15 “horrible”: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews Article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

16 As she pushed: Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 244. A document in the archives of the St. Paul [Minnesota] Gallery and School of Art establishes 1950 as the year of Mitchell’s Subway, The Bridge, Main Street, Mother and Child, The City, Backyards, Figure and the City, and Landscape. Joan showed in St. Paul that year. Her mother had arranged for a May 1950 exhibition of ten paintings done in Brooklyn and Paris at the Bank Lane Galleries, a tiny Lake Forest venue recently opened by society painter Ruth Meeker Roberts. Still-powerful Chicago Daily Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett reviewed the show, calling it “stunning.” A modified version then traveled to the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art. In a perceptive article, St. Paul Dispatch art critic John H. Harvey judged Joan’s work immature and indecisive, yet admirable for its organization of complex form and evocation of feeling and almost sound. See John H. Harvey, “Joan Mitchell’s Paintings Displayed at Art Gallery,” St. Paul Dispatch, 27 October 1950. These shows meant little to Joan.

17 “taking things out”: Willem de Kooning, quoted in Aline Louchheim, “Six Abstractionists Defend Their Art,” New York Times Magazine, 21 January 1951, in Stevens and Swan, 250.

18 he loved: Pete Hamill, “Beyond the Vital Gesture: A Fifties Art Student Turned Journalist Remembers Franz Kline, the Man Behind the Theory,” Art & Antiques (May 1990): 115.

19 “the most beautiful”: Munro, 244.

20 “seedy, exciting”: Ibid., 245.

21 “Which reminds me”: Franz Kline quoted in Frank O’Hara, “Franz Kline Talking,” Evergreen Review 2:6 (autumn 1958): 62.

22 “crudeness and accuracy”: Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell (6) on March 21, 1957,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

23 “about other painters”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in a transcript sent by Betsy Zogbaum to Joan Mitchell, 5 July 1972. Kline’s companion in later years, Zogbaum was gathering tributes to the recently deceased painter from artists and other friends. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

24 “the dream”: Franz Kline, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Al Held (1928–2005): A Maverick in the New York Art World,” American Art 20:1 (2006): 108.

25 “Why doesn’t he”: Mitchell quoted in Munro, 245.

26 “a glimpse”: Willem de Kooning, quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 50.

27 “Do you know”: Robert Harms, interview with author, 18 July 2002.

28 “Flesh was”: Willem de Kooning, “The Renaissance and Order,” a talk delivered at Studio 35, in Stevens and Swan, 325.

29 “the flow of paint”: Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 23.

30 “this hell of a nice”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

31 “leap of space”: Pat Passlof, “1948,” Art Journal 48:3 (fall 1989): 229.

32 “to get”: Mitchell quoted in Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell (6) on March 21, 1957.”

33 “You don’t”: Ibid.

34 “my father”: Lynda Benglis, telephone interview with author, 7 November 2006.

35 Bill and Joan: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 18 January 2001.

36 “visually illiterate”: Joan Mitchell quoted in S. E. Gontarski, “Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of a Countercanon,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10:3 (fall 1970): 10.

37 “was not”: Marilyn Stark, interview with author, 21 July 2004.

38 “I don’t know”: Cynthia Navaretta, interview with author, 25 July 2001. Goldberg denied that this happened.

39 “a marvelous”: Howard Kanovitz, interview with author, 18 July 2002.

40 “a great and charming”: Cynthia Navaretta, interview with author, 25 July 2001.

41 “quite crazy”; “Mike used to”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 27 July 2004.

42 “Hey! Gimme a pig’s foot”: Joan uses the phrase “gimme a pig’s foot” repeatedly in her letters to Mike.

43 “Painting could”; “vision of what life”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 13 January 2003.

44 “Darling”; “I know a man”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

45 “I was very”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

46 “dizzy and silent”: “Is today’s Artist with or against the Past? Part 2, Answers by: David Smith, Frederick Kiesler, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 57:5 (September 1958): 41.

47 “a highly concentrated”: Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (New York, San Diego, and London: Center for Documentary Studies in association with Harcourt Brace, 1999), 4. The other characteristics of lyric poetry mentioned here are also set forth by Hirsch.

48 “I confess”: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 139.

49 a lesson learned: Dore Ashton writes of this aspect of Gorky’s and de Kooning’s work in “A Straggler’s View of Gorky,” Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years, org. Michael Auping (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in association with Rizzoli, 1995), 57.

50 “our function”: John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 41–42. According to Rosset, this never occurred. Yet Gruen and Wilson agree on details down to the green glass bowl from which Joan plucked the tangerine.

51 One day: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 10 January 2003; Michael Goldberg, interviews with author, 20 June 2002 and 13 January 2003; letters from Joan Mitchell to Michael Goldberg, Michael Goldberg Papers.

52 “I have”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., ibid.

53 “extremely nice”; “for once”; “someplace without”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., ibid.

54 “I’ve decided”: Pat Passlof, interview with author, 18 June 2002.

55 “along fine”: Mitchell to Rosset, n.d. Collection of Barney Rosset.

56 “Fucked up”: Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell at Zog’s Studio, July 4, 1958,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

57 “When Barbara”: Edrita Fried, On Love and Sexuality: A Guide to Self-Fulfillment (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 17.

58 “Mike is in”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 19 June 2002.

59 “Michael”; “If I could”; “I’m kissing”; “Someday”; “Darling Michael”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

60 Yet Joan had: Evans Herman, interview with author, 27 March 2004; Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 24 March 2003; Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

61 “the dark side”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 27 July 2004.

62 “He seemed”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

63 By one of several: Celia Stahr, “The Social Relations of Abstract Expressionism: An Alternative History” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1997), 140. In a 1994 interview, Resnick told Stahr this version of the exhibition’s origins. On the other hand, writer Robert P. Metzger credits Kline and Conrad Marca-Relli with the idea, while gallerist Louis Newman states that Pavia chose the site, handled much of the organizing, and paid some of the bills. (The two write in the catalog of the 2006 exhibition 9th ST.: Nine Artists from the Ninth Street Show, at David Findlay Jr. Fine Art.)

64 So arresting: Max Kozloff, “An Interview with Friedel Dzubas,” Artforum 4:1 (September 1965): 52.

65 “all said”: Munro, 245.

66 “And you”: Mitchell interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

CHAPTER SEVEN: SAVAGE DEBUT

  1 “Bound by”: “Anne Ryan,” Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists: From Indian Times to the Present (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 301. Rubinstein’s source is Josephine Withers, “Anne Ryan,” Women Artists in Washington Collections (College Park: University of Maryland and Women’s Caucus for Art, 1979), 82.

  2 Leaving a party: Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 104.

  3 “looking like”: Pete Hamill, “Vital Gesture,” Art & Antiques 7 (May 1990): 110.

  4 “too blatant”: Cynthia Navaretta, interview with author, 25 July 2001.

  5 MoMA’s curator: Paul Brach, interview with author, 27 July 2004.

  6 “most celebrated”: “Women Artists in Ascendance,” Life, 13 May 1957, 75.

  7 “pronunciamentos”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  8 “make-it-tough-even-ugly”: Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 71.

  9 “tasty French”: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews Article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

10 “in a corset”: Alfred Leslie, interview with author, 22 June 2002. Hartigan and Frankenthaler shared this opinion.

11 “and all hell”: Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life (New York: Picador, 1999), 248.

12 “did not go”: Helen Frankenthaler, interview by Barbara Rose, 1969. Helen Frankenthaler Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

13 “that Kotex painter”: Christopher Campbell, telephone interview with author, 10 February 2007. Joan used this phrase or, as a variant, “that tampon painter,” repeatedly. For the latter, see Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 245.

14 “so what”; “doesn’t like”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d. [spring 1951], Michael Goldberg Papers. German expressionist painter Max Beckmann had died in New York on 27 December 1950. His late work was shown that April at the Buchholz Gallery.

15 “why did”; “millions of”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers. The term paper resurfaced two years later when Barney took an art history class at Columbia from Meyer Schapiro. Schapiro gave it an A, and was surprised when Barney scored only a D on the final.

16 “tried to take”: Mitchell, quoted in “Is Today’s Artist with or against the Past? Part 2, Answers by: David Smith, Frederick Kiesler, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 57:5 (September 1958): 41.

17 “Renaissance look”; “with the help”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

18 “terrified”: Mitchell, interviewed by Linda Nochlin, 16 April 1986. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

19 prevailing attitudes: April Kingsley, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 255.

20 Clem Greenberg had advised: Jane Freilicher, telephone interview with author, 8 January 2003.

21 when veteran painters: ArtNews 48:10 (February 1950): 49 and 47 respectively.

22 “because of”: Eric Brown, conversation with author, 25 June 2002. Brown got this phrase from Tibor de Nagy, who got it from Joan.

23 “this fat queer”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002. A review by Lawrence Campbell of Goldberg’s show at Tibor de Nagy appeared in the October 1953 issue of ArtNews. However, according to Leslie, reviews were based on studio visits preceding the actual shows.

24 “dirty”; “hollow”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

25 “Greta Garbo style”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

26 “stylish, girlish”: Roland Pease, personal communication to author, 14 September 2002.

27 “When I go”: Grace Hartigan, quoted in John Bernard Myers, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World (New York: Random House, 1983), 127.

28 “was rated”: Miriam Schapiro, quoted in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with Polk Museum of Art, 1999), 25.

29 “community of feeling”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

30 “a strange combination”: Cynthia Navaretta, interview with author, 25 July 2001.

31 “like an energy”; “a chop”: Jane Wilson, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

32 “something really”: John Gruen, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

33 “Ah, no”: Alfred Leslie, interview with author, 22 July 2002.

34 “Joan was”: Marilyn Stark, interview with author, 21 July 2004.

35 “how to live”: Howard Kanovitz, interview with author, 18 July 2002.

36 “very anti-woman”; “a tendency to”: Pat Passlof, interview with author, 18 June 2002.

37 “I’m ten”: Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 551.

38 “gladiatorial”: Jane Wilson, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

39 “Go fuck”: Walter Kamys, telephone conversation with author, 2 January 2006. I am grateful to Sonja Marck for first telling me this story.

40 Not only: Rose Slivka, interview with author, 19 July 2002.

41 she was drinking: Irving Sandler, telephone interview with author, 23 May 2006.

42 “a lovely girl”: Nic Carone, interview with author, 13 January 2003.

43 “very serious girl”: Philip Pavia, interview with author, 26 July 2001.

44 “get away with”: John Gruen, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

45 Yeah, Joan bragged: Joan Mitchell, interview by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, spring 1991, cited in Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 21.

46 “on a decade-long”: Elaine de Kooning, quoted in David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 65.

47 “wonderful person”: Edi Franceschini, interview with author, 26 July 2002.

48 “The men”: Miriam Schapiro, “Notes from a Conversation on Art, Feminism, and Work,” in Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, eds., Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 287.

49 “I have a message”; “phony friends”: Evans Herman, interview with author, 27 March 2004.

50 “They loved”: John Gruen, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

51 “She never”: Evans Herman, interview with author, 27 March 2004.

52 “a pocket”: Evans Herman in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 15 July 1968. Collection of Frances Herman.

53 “only … the moonlight”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

54 “had a big impact”: Grace Hartigan, quoted in Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with University of California Press, 2002), 21.

55 “And I think”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 13 January 2003.

56 “My heart”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d. [1957], Michael Goldberg Papers.

57 had “the great”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 15 September 1965, ibid.

58 “very French”: Jane Freilicher, telephone interview with author, 8 January 2003.

59 “B. Holiday”: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 10 June 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

60 “wasn’t really”: Howard Kanovitz, interview with author, 18 July 2002.

61 Two flights: Eugene V. Thaw, telephone interview with author, 10 October 2005. On the mezzanine was Thaw’s New Book Shop, which was supposed to turn a profit and support the gallery but never did. Jackson Pollock’s visit was the only time Thaw ever set eyes upon the painter. However, Thaw later developed a close friendship with Pollock’s widow, artist Lee Krasner, and became the first president of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

62 “a fantastic display”: Grace Hartigan, The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951–1955, ed. William T. La Moy and Joseph P. McCaffrey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 22.

63 “remarkable artist”: John Gruen, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

64 “full of talent”: Miriam Schapiro, quoted in Gouma-Peterson, 35.

65 “proclaimed ruefully”: Thomas B. Hess, “Sensations of Landscape,” New York, 20 December 1976, 76.

66 “Oh!”: Nicolas Calas, untitled essay in Joan Mitchell (New York: The New Gallery, 1952).

67 “endlessly interrupted”: Ibid.

68 “savage debut”: Betty Holliday, “Reviews and Previews: Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 50:9 (January 1952): 46; Stuart Preston, “Chiefly Abstract,” New York Times, 20 January 1952.

69 “tense tendons”: Paul Brach, “Fifty-seventh Street in Review: Joan Mitchell,” Art Digest, 15 January 1952, 17–18.

70 Shortly after: Eugene V. Thaw, telephone interview with author, 10 October 2005; letter from William Rubin to Joan Mitchell, postmarked 12 May 1952. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

71 “She already knew”: Eugene V. Thaw, telephone interview with author, 10 October 2005.

72 “absolutely marvelous”: Mitchell to Von Blon, 1–8 December 1952.

73 “airy and perfumed”: Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 299.

74 “why it was”: Marcel Proust, Time Regained, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 262.

75 “not motion”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

76 “You sat”: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 26.

77 Rilke wrote: Ibid., 60, 61, 55, 32, and 88, respectively.

78 “neurotics club”; “the most collective”: Mitchell to Von Blon, 1–8 December 1952.

79 “Well, I’m sorry”: Evans Herman, interview with author, 27 March 2004.

80 “first girl artist”: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 35.

81 “I imagine”: Mitchell to Goldberg, Michael Goldberg Papers.

82 a second chance: My discussion of Joan’s analysis derives primarily from my 9 January 2003 interview of Dr. Jaqueline Fried and from Dr. Edrita Fried’s book, On Love and Sexuality (New York: Grove Press, 1960), which includes Fried’s case study of Joan (“Barbara”). I also used The Drama of the Gifted Child (first published as Prisoners of Childhood), Alice Miller’s study of the potentially devastating impact of narcissistic parents upon the lives of talented children. Joan read and loved this book, a gift from her niece Sally Perry.

In the 1950s, Joan’s analysis continued to center on the early childhood damage to her ego that impeded normal ego regression. Psychologically healthy people, Fried explained, take pleasure in the self-forgetting that goes hand-in-hand with falling in love, having sex, drinking, listening to music, and so on. But the normally pleasant sensation of the floating away of selfhood easily triggered panic in Joan: spinning out of control, she would lash out at others in order to rebuild a psychological bulwark and thus recover a sense of self. What people saw as indiscriminate antagonism was really the psychological equivalent of the self-protective gesture one makes in the split-second mental registration of an imminent fall. In striking back or distancing themselves, however, people left Joan devastated by feelings of abandonment and tortured by yearning for real intimacy and dependable love.

Notwithstanding her efforts to control Joan’s “hostility addiction,” Fried stopped short. Respectful of her patient’s integrity and artistic achievement, the analyst made allowances and thus failed to tone down behavior that went beyond the impolite and the difficult to the offensive and hurtful. Moreover—a blind spot in the liquor-loving fifties—Fried never addressed the heavy drinking that set off Joan’s alarm bells, compromised her judgment, and kept her in cycles of depression.

83 “believing in yourself”: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

84 “Just while I”: Mitchell to Rosset, n.d., quoted in Robert Miller Gallery, Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1950 to 1955, unpaginated.

85 “There was nothing”: Barney Rosset, interviewed by Win McCormack, “The Literary Fly Catcher,” Tin House 2:4 (summer 2001): 7.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE HURRICANE

  1 “White dawns”: Stéphane Mallarmé, “Renewal,” in Keith Bosley, Mallarmé: The Poems (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977), 77.

  2 “a good, kind”; “without any”: Divorce Files of the Superior Court, Cook County, no. 52-S 5260, filed 4 April 1952.

  3 “he was actively”: Patricia Faure, interviewed by Susan Ehrlich, 17, 22, and 24 November 2004. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  4 “Very bouncy”: Mitchell to Von Blon, 1–8 December 1952.

  5 “melting staircase”: Robert Gottlieb, telephone interview with author, 27 August 2005.

  6 “choice young men”: Mitchell to Von Blon, 1–8 December 1952.

  7 “the real New York”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by David Amram, “East Village: An Island Within an Island, August 27, 2004,” www.ekayani.com.

  8 “one of the most”: Linda Nochlin, “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint,” in Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with University of California Press, 2002), 52.

  9 historians of neuroscience: See, for example, Amy Ione and Christopher Tyler, “Was Kandinsky a Synesthete?” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12:2 (2003): 223–26. Organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Kandinsky exhibition was on view at Knoedler from May 12 to 28, 1952.

10 “The violins”: Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, ed. and trans., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 364.

11 So enamored: Mitchell to Von Blon, 1–8 December 1952.

12 “was in”: Written statement by anonymous neighbor, 2005.

13 “an extension”: Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Artist Against Background,” New Yorker, 29 April 1974, 72.

14 “music heard so deeply”: T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (“Four Quartets”), in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 136.

15 “I use it”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Gisèle Barreau, interview with author, 29 March 2003.

16 “very tough”: Anonymous, telephone interview with author, 4 September 2005.

17 “a great guy”: Robert Gottlieb, telephone interview with author, 27 August 2005.

18 “Why don’t you”: Howard Kanovitz, interview with author, 18 July 2002. Probably Joan learned such skills at Francis Parker, where girls were required to take shop.

19 “could raise walls”: Miriam Schapiro in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with Polk Museum of Art, 1999), 214.

20 “Shit”: Mitchell to Michael Goldberg, postmarked 10 June 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

21 “family affair”: John Ferren, “Stable State of Mind,” ArtNews 54:3 (May 1955): 23.

22 “bitchy in the grand manner”: Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life (New York: Picador, 1999), 96.

23 “six people”: Elaine de Kooning in a letter to Bill Brown, n.d. [1955]. My thanks to Celia Stahr for making this letter available to me.

24 “The rain”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

25 “strikingly vital”: Frank O’Hara, “Reviews and Previews: Ernest Briggs, Dugmore, Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews 54:5 (September 1955): 52. Many have noticed similarities between Joan Mitchell’s paintings of this period and those of Philip Guston, but all evidence points to a matter of synchronicity rather than any direct influence.

26 “warmth and ideas”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to May and Patia Rosenberg, 18 July 1978. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

27 After a rocky start: Paul Jenkins, interview with author, 11 January 2003.

28 “to appear”: Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ArtNews 52:5 (December 1952): 22, 49.

29 “Oh! You’re not”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 19 June 2002.

30 “to look upon”: Edrita Fried, On Love and Sexuality: A Guide to Self-Fulfillment (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 40.

31 “even enjoy”: Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency,” in Donald Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1971), 197.

32 Scholar Marjorie Perloff: Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 124–39. Perloff quotes art historian Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.

33 “boisterous”; “unexpectedly generous winning”: Jane Freilicher, telephone interview with author, 8 January 2003.

34 “I’m serving”: Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 123.

35 “going on”: David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 111.

36 “a festive quality”: John Ashbery, interview with author, 16 May 2006.

37 “embracing a rose bush”: John Ashbery, quoted by Jane Freilicher, telephone interview with author, 8 January 2003.

38 “flying circus”: May Rosenberg, quoted in Gruen, 175.

39 “by the floods”: James Schuyler. My account of the relationship between New York School poetry and painting is indebted to David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde and “Poetry and the Abstract Revolution,” in David Acton, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Worcester Art Museum, 2001), 27–38.

40 “world about us”: Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 169.

41 “Kisses and falling-downs”: Frank O’Hara in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 4 May 1956. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

42 “were sitting”: John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 219.

43 “Micha, why aren’t”: Hofmann, quoted by Mitchell, interviewed in Marion Cajori, director, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (New York: Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Christian Blackwood Productions, 1992). Film.

44 Mike’s neighbor: Alvin Novak, telephone conversation with author, 28 June 2004.

45 “really black and blue”: Stark, interview with author, 21 July 2004.

46 “as a louche”: John Bernard Myers, The Poets of the New York School (Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, 1969), 14, in Lehman, 22.

47 “violent affair”: Alison Lurie, V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays with a Memoir by Alison Lurie (New York: Random House, 1975), 8.

48 “You are”: V. R. Lang in a letter to Michael Goldberg, “Wednesday 8:30,” Michael Goldberg Papers.

49 “ask her old man”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

50 “at a great distance”; “I would like”: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 10 June 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

51 after a party: Schueler, 248.

52 “Oh, boy!”: Hélène de Billy, Riopelle (Montreal: Art Global, 1996), 161.

53 “charming and unshaven”; “At least”: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 10 June 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

54 “Now you’re”: Eleanor Ward, interviewed by Paul Cummings, 8 February 1972. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

55 “Why don’t”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Paul Brach, interview with author, 19 June 2002.

56 Pavia swung: Thomas B. Hess, quoted in Fred W. McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah, The Artist’s World in Pictures: The New York School, intro. Thomas B. Hess (New York: Shapolsky, 1988), 12.

57 “a bourgeois”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 19 June 2002.

58 “What’s so sacred”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Carol Braider, telephone interview with author, 30 December 2005.

59 “Seuratish”; “My hand doesn’t”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 19 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

60 “one blue”: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 10 June 1954, ibid.

61 “I distrust”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 13 August 1954, ibid.

62 “a complete synthesis”: Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell (4),” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

63 By accuracy: Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Wed., Feb. 20, 1957, for ArtNews article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles. By 1974, Mitchell had conflated the terms “accuracy” and “intensity.” Curator Marcia Tucker writes, “What she seeks is ‘accuracy,’ by which she means the successful transposition onto the canvas of a feeling about a remembered landscape—or a remembered feeling about a landscape.” See Marcia Tucker, “Joan Mitchell” (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1974), 8.

64 “that Van Gogh intensity”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

65 “maybe mystically”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., ibid.

66 “an absolute”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 13 August 1954, ibid.

67 “fucking, emotional”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 23 August 1954, ibid.

68 “on the edge”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 June 1954, ibid.

69 “It was sad”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 August 1954, ibid.

70 “All through”: Lurie, 52–53.

71 “You stopped”: Lang to Goldberg, 13 July 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

72 “knifing and competition”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., ibid.

73 pronunciamentos: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 August 1954, ibid.

74 “Gatsby-like”: Gerald Jonas, “The Story of Grove,” New York Times Magazine, 21 January 1968, 59.

75 “pressure of the summer”; “I feel”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 31 July 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

76 “pleasant but nightmarish”: Elaine de Kooning, quoted in Joseph Liss, “Memories of Bonac Painters,” East Hampton Star, 18 August 1983.

77 “crappy clothesline”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

78 “the rat race”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 13 August 1954, ibid.

79 “How very weak”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 August 1954, ibid.

80 her adored George: Carol Braider, telephone interview with author, 30 December 2005. Joan claimed she had cured George of distemper, an incurable canine disease.

81 “put all”: Mitchell in a letter to Goldberg, 10 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

82 “Sweetie pie”: Mitchell in a letter to Goldberg, 13 August 1954, ibid.

83 “another kind of blue”: Mitchell in a letter to Goldberg, 23 August 1954, ibid.

84 “bastard affair”: Mitchell to Herman, postmarked 30 August 1954.

85 “We have no”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 20 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

86 “was very beautiful”: Michael Goldberg, quoted in Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 374.

87 “old at last”; “sad about us”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 23 August 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

88 “I painted”: Mitchell to Herman, postmarked 30 August 1954.

89 “levitate about six feet”: Paul Brach, interview with author, 27 July 2004.

90 “she [had] had to risk”: Written statement by Anonymous, 2005.

91 “It was”: Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell (5), March 14, 1957,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

92 as Mallarmé: Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862–1871 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 103.

CHAPTER NINE: HUDSON RIVER DAY LINE

  1 “And in the same”: Vladimir Nabokov, “Torpid Smoke,” in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 28.

  2 “I am”: V. R. Lang, I Too Have Lived in Arcadia, in V. R. Lang, Poems & Plays with a Memoir by Alison Lurie (New York: Random House, 1975), 289. Excerpts of I Too Have Lived in Arcadia appeared in the April 1955 issue of Poetry; that October, Poetry awarded it the Vachel Lindsay Prize. Peter Sellars revived Lang’s play in 1980 in his New York directorial debut at La Mama. V. R. Lang died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma on 29 July 1956.

  3 “Quelle femme”: Lang, 278.

  4 “so collapsed”; “Oh Mike”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 10 December 1954, Michael Goldberg Papers.

  5 “Pose for me”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 27 December 1954, ibid.

  6 “cross-eyed”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 28 December 1954, ibid.

  7 “I can see”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 27 December 1954, ibid.

  8 “the city”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 23 August 1954, ibid.

  9 “huge sprawling”: Al Newbill, Arts Digest 29:11 (1 March 1955), 28.

10 “changed much”: Mitchell, quoted in Stephen Westfall, “Then and Now: Six of the New York School Look Back,” Art in America 73:6 (June 1985): 114.

11 “I ‘frame’ ”: Mitchell, interviewed by Yves Michaud, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell,” in Xavier Fourcade Gallery, Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade Gallery, 1986), unpaginated.

12 “secret magic”: Patricia Lynne Duffy, conversation with author, 16 June 2005.

13 “I’ve never”: Mitchell, quoted by Jaqueline Fried, interviews with author, 9 January 2003 and 11 January 2006.

14 “waking dream”: Marcia Smilack, communication to Sean Day’s Synesthesia List, 22 January 2006.

15 “album of photographs”: Mitchell, interviewed by Michaud, Joan Mitchell.

16 she started prodding: Elaine de Kooning in a letter to Bill Brown, n.d. [1955]. My thanks to Celia Stahr for a copy of this letter.

17 “you do know”: Mitchell to Goldberg, 15 September 1965, Michael Goldberg Papers.

18 “grand dernier”; “where the barges squat”; “hideous numbness”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., ibid.

19 “silent hostility”: Ibid.

20 “horizontal propositions”: Hélène de Billy, Riopelle (Montreal: Art Global, 1996), 117.

21 But she found him: Connie Lembark, telephone interview with author, 18 March 2008. After Joan made the acquaintance, in the 1960s, of art consultant Connie Lembark, who was close to Francis, the two women never got together without Joan launching into a monologue about his deficiencies as a lover.

22 “watered-down Pollock”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

23 “de Kooning’s emissary”: Mitchell to Barney and Loly Rosset, n.d. Collection of Barney Rosset.

24 “a small town”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

25 “Not much art”: Joan Mitchell in a postcard to Harold Rosenberg, 24 April 1959. Harold Rosenberg Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

26 “puking in that”; “like a garbage pail”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

27 “fuck you kind”: Ibid.

28 “one small child”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in letter from Marion Strobel Mitchell to Joan Mitchell, 9 June 1954. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

29 “white walls”; “How did I”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

30 “I wonder”; “people who”: Ibid.

31 “dished [so much]”; “I want”: Ibid.

32 a great deal: Ibid.

33 “Well—fuck”: Joan Mitchell in a note to Gisèle Barreau, n.d. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

34 “been living”; “What are”: David Amram, interview with author, 9 January 2008.

35 “the machinations”: David Amram, personal communication to author, 8 December 2007.

36 “great romantic”; “soul connection”: David Amram, interview with author, 9 January 2008.

37 “People will”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in David Amram, “Seeing the Music, Hearing the Pictures,” in David Acton, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Worcester Art Museum, 2001), 21.

38 “quit midstream”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

39 “I don’t want”: Ibid.

40 “[buying] out”: Ibid.

41 “paint … with”: Ibid.

42 “fraught, drunken”: Ibid.

43 “The great Riopelle”; “The party”: Ibid.

44 “Tonight I will”: Jean-Paul Riopelle, quoted by Irving Sandler, telephone interview with author, 23 May 2006. Sandler heard the story from Joan.

45 “I impressed”: Mitchell, quoted in Hélène de Billy, Riopelle (Montreal: Art Global, 1996), 117.

46 “I go”: Jean-Paul Riopelle, quoted by John Bennett, interview with author, 28 June 2002.

47 “seems hardly”: Georges Duthuit, “A Painter of Awakening: Jean-Paul Riopelle,” trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1954), 1.

48 “the art of”: André Breton in Monique Brunet-Weinmann, “Birth of a Signature,” in Yseult Riopelle, Jean-Paul Riopelle: Catalogue raisonné, 1939–1953 (Montreal: Hibou, 1999), 131.

49 he bragged: Elga Heinzen, interview with author, 9 January 2002.

50 “Decisions”: Marion Strobel Mitchell to Joan Mitchell, 25 September 1955. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

51 “If I stayed”: Mitchell to Barney and Loly Rosset, 23 September 1955. Collection of Barney Rosset.

52 “Michael”; “I wanted”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

53 “My memories”; “mess with a sky”: Ibid.

54 “little spidery man”: David Amram, interview with author, 9 January 2008.

55 “We never”; “Oh, my God!”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Stanley Karnow, telephone interview with author, 6 June 2006.

56 “a charming patent leather”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

57 “Yes—I’m changed”: Mitchell to Rosset, 19 September 1955, quoted in Robert Miller Gallery, Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1950–1955, unpaginated.

58 “And look, baby doll”; “knifing and competition”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

59 “I think of”: Mitchell to Rosset, 19 September 1955.

60 “I will write”: Jean-Paul Riopelle in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 29 November 1955. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

61 “tell everybody”: Mitchell, interviewed by Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, Bomb 17 (fall 1986): 22.

62 But sales picked up: Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, The Art Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Tell How the Art World Really Works (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1984), 39.

63 There were now: Clarence Dean, “Peak Demand for Pictures,” New York Times, 25 February 1957.

64 As both leader: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 387–88.

65 “till they rolled”: Philip Pavia in Natalie Edgar, ed., Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), 64.

66 “the transient”: Charles Bernstein, “Composing Herself,” Bookforum (April/May 2006): 50.

67 “things as they are”: David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 243.

68 “open, lively”: Patricia Bailey, “Joan Mitchell in 1950’s Remembered Landscapes,” Art/World 4:7 (19 March–18 April 1980): 4.

69 “bright white”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

70 “crazy about Joan”: David Amram, interview with author, 9 January 2008.

71 “all [the old] shit”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

72 Meanwhile, Joan had: Teru Osato Lundsten, telephone interview with author, 27 November 2005.

73 “had a liver”: Alfred Leslie, interview with author, 22 July 2002.

74 When Bill was drunk: Stevens and Swan, 505.

75 “I hate it!”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

76 “a damn good”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

77 “Homely and hasty”; “only loss”: Hal Fondren, “Sunday Afternoons with Joan,” in Robert Miller Gallery, Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1950–1955, unpaginated.

78 “impossible to criticize”: EM [Eleanor C. Munro], ArtNews 55:4 (June-July-August 1956): 50.

CHAPTER TEN: TO THE HARBORMASTER

  1 “To the Harbormaster”: Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 1.

  2 Spreading a drop cloth: Howard Kanovitz, interview with author, 18 July 2002. Kanovitz saw Mitchell in Paris during this time.

  3 Jean-Paul tackled: Robert Bernier, Jean-Paul Riopelle: Des Visions d’Amérique (Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1997), 94–95.

  4 “Such joy”: Willem de Kooning, quoted in Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 244.

  5 “the greatness of Jackson Pollock”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in “Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium, Part 2,” ArtNews 66:3 (May 1967): 29.

  6 “hazard and decision”: Leo Steinberg, “Month in Review,” Arts 30:4 (January 1956): 46.

  7 For a time: According to painter Paul Jenkins, Joan tried this method, invented by Willem de Kooning, at the time she was living and working at Jenkins’s studio in Paris.

  8 “I don’t make”: Mitchell, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1957, for ArtNews article,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

  9 “little snow cave”: Robert Chiarito, interview with author, 21 November 2002.

10 “You make it”: Sandler.

11 “dark and blue feeling”: “The Vocal Girls,” Time, 2 May 1960, 74.

12 “Domination of Black”: Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), 8. Notes from critic Irving Sandler’s interview of Joan three months later read: “I get images from words. Wallace Stevens’s ‘Domination of Black.’ ”

13 “the feeling”: Mitchell, quoted in Sandler.

14 “what is being said”: Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (New York, San Diego, and London: Center for Documentary Studies in Association with Harcourt Brace, 1999), 10.

15 “Sentimentality is”: Irving Sandler, “III Feb. 27, 1957,” Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library Special Collections and Visual Resources, Los Angeles.

16 “Joan Mitchell continues”: Irving Sandler, “Young Moderns and Modern Masters: Joan Mitchell (Stable),” ArtNews 56:1 (March 1957): 32.

17 “flatly refused”: Stable Gallery Records, Joan Mitchell File, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

18 “I urgently”: Ibid.

19 “YOU!”: Joan Mitchell, quoted by Jane Wilson, interview with author, 17 July 2002.

20 “Best of all”: Rudi Blesh, Modern Art U.S.A.: Men, Rebellion, Conquest, 1900–56 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 291.

21 “Hey, why don’t”: Michael Goldberg, interview with author, 20 June 2002.

22 “was not always”: “ ‘Village’ Is Scene of Jazz Concert,” New York Times, 17 June 1957.

23 “The Day Lady Died”: Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1978), 27.

24 Knowing that viewers: See Susan Shawver Leonard, “The Influence of Henri Matisse in the Art of Richard Diebenkorn, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Mitchell.” Master’s thesis (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990), 3–7, 26–33, and Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 52.

25 “painting as cathedral”: Joan Mitchell often used this phrase in writing to Michael Goldberg.

26 “a wonderful airiness”: Sandler, “Conversation with Joan Mitchell.” Sandler and Mike Goldberg talked Joan out of destroying Bridge, which she eventually came to see as a completed work and gave to Sandler, who bequeathed it (keeping a life interest) to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

27 “her memory”: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 218–19. Joan later told art historian Judith Bernstock that the painting may have turned blue because George had died or because his hair had a bluish cast. See Bernstock, 45.

28 “I carry”: Mitchell, quoted in Sandler, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ArtNews 56:6 (October 1957), 45.

29 “There are”: Sandler, ibid. The photographs that accompany Sandler’s article are credited to Swiss-born photographer Rudolph Burckhardt. However, because the artist balked at the prospect of painting in Burckhardt’s presence, she was pressed into service. Burckhardt set up a view camera with timer and lights, and Joan took her own pictures. Painting was a private act. See William Corbett, “But Here’s a Funny Story …,” Modern Painters 12:4 (winter 1999): 48–51.

30 “the Impressionist manner”: Elaine de Kooning, quoted in Lawrence Alloway, “Some Notes on Abstract Impressionism,” catalog of Abstract Impressionism, 11–28 June 1958, unpaginated. In addition to this exhibition (curated by Alloway and Harold Cohen), which traveled throughout Britain, the 1957 show Abstract Impressionism at Mount Holyoke College included Joan’s work.

31 Art, O’Hara’s great poem suggests: My comments on “To the Harbormaster” are indebted to Jacqueline Gens, “Revisiting Frank O’Hara’s ‘To the Harbormaster,’ ” Poetrymind, 16 April 2005, http://www.tsetso.blogspot.com.

32 “I’m sure”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Joanne and Philip Von Blon, postmarked 26 January 1982. Collection of Joanne Von Blon.

33 “only a method”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d. [1957], Michael Goldberg Papers.

34 “One great big”: Caroline Lee, interview with author, 23 March 2003.

35 “You know”: Caroline Lee in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 23 August 1989. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

36 “like having”: June Wayne, telephone interview with author, 21 October 2001.

37 the occasion when: Lise Weil, telephone interview with author, 4 December 2005.

38 Buttercup’s Chicken Shack: A later letter from Buttercup Powell to Joan and Jean-Paul suggests that the two helped pay for Bud Powell’s 1966 funeral.

39 “shockingly the same”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

40 “I’m beginning”: Ibid.

41 “were finally”: Transcript of letter from Frank O’Hara to Michael Goldberg, 26 August 1957, Allen Collection of Frank O’Hara Letters, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

42 “Color, all they talked about”: Barney Rosset, quoted in Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (New York: Princeton Architectual Press, 2005), 139–40.

43 “large, sprawling canvases”: Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 488.

44 “oh God”: Joan Mitchell in a letter to Paul Jenkins, n.d. Collection of Suzanne and Paul Jenkins.

45 “Your descriptions”: Frank O’Hara in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 4 November 1957. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

46 One evening: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 24 July 2001; Evans Herman, interview with author, 27 March 2004.

47 “Make no mistake”: Catherine Jones, “The Native Genius We’ve Never Discovered,” Maclean’s, 3 August 1957, 32.

48 “Visibly … he was”: Mathews, quoted in Hélène de Billy, Riopelle (Montreal: Art Global, 1996), 133.

49 “I must be crazy”: Riopelle to Mitchell, n.d. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

50 “Don’t become”: Riopelle to Mitchell, 16 March 1958. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

51 “When I paint”: Riopelle, quoted by Jenkins, interview with author, 15 January 2003.

52 “There is nothing”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

53 Ginsberg’s cohort: When Corso’s “Marriage” was published in the summer 1959 issue of Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review, it was dedicated to “Mr. and Mrs. Mike Goldberg.” (Mike had married Patsy Southgate.) Regarding Ginsberg and Corso in Paris, see Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 (New York: Grove Press, 2000).

54 “be mad for”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers.

55 “little nice crazy”: Ibid.

56 “various constituents”: O’Hara to Mitchell, 30 July 1957. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

57 “[putting] on the table”: Paul Jenkins, interview with author, 11 January 2003.

58 “Now listen”: Mitchell to Jenkins, n.d. Collection of Suzanne and Paul Jenkins.

59 “felt like”: Elaine de Kooning, quoted in John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 220.

60 “a kind of suburban”: Friedel Dzubas, quoted in Max Kozloff, “An Interview with Friedel Dzubas,” Artforum 4:1 (September 1965): 51.

61 “You guys”; “The trouble”: Michael Goldberg and Sidney Gordin, quoted in Sandler, Sweeper-Up, 231.

62 “The Club rises”: John Canaday, “In the Gloaming: Twilight Seems to Be Settling Rapidly for Abstract Expressionism,” New York Times, 11 September 1960.

63 “But look”: Hamill, “Vital Gesture,” Art & Antiques (May 1990): 110.

64 “SHIT AND LOVE”: Riopelle to Mitchell, 20 June 1958.

65 “ghastly dreams”: Mitchell to Jenkins, n.d.

66 “And the days”: Ibid.

67 “Heard all”: Mitchell to Jenkins, n.d.

68 When the newlyweds: Robert Harms, interview with author, 18 July 2002. Harms heard the story from his close friend Patsy Southgate.

69 “To ***”: Poems of René Char, trans. and ann. Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 283.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: SEEING SOMETHING THROUGH

  1 “Ah Joan!”: Frank O’Hara, “Far From the Porte des Lilas and the Rue Pergolèse: To Joan Mitchell,” in Donald Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1971), 311.

  2 “Beckett followed”: Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 488.

  3 “promiscuous drunks”: Frank O’Hara, quoted by Bill Berkson, interview with author, 10 July 2006.

  4 “a rather handsomely”: Eleanor C. Munro, “The Found Generation,” ArtNews 60:7 (November 1961): 39.

  5 “Miss Munro seems”: Jane Freilicher, in “Editor’s Letters,” ArtNews 60:8 (December 1961): 6.

  6 “Why are you”: Yvonne Hagen, interview with author, 19 June 2005.

  7 “La vie en rose”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d., Michael Goldberg Papers, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

  8 “I thought”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Marion Strobel Mitchell, n.d. [stamped “June 1959”]. Collection of Sally Perry.

  9 “prods of giggles”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Marion Strobel Mitchell and James Herbert Mitchell, 17 June 1959. Collection of Sally Perry.

10 “I think”: Sarah Mitchell Perry to Marion Strobel Mitchell, n.d. [labeled “September 2nd”]. Collection of Sally Perry.

11 “At a boozy”: Peter Schjeldahl, “Tough Love,” New Yorker, 15 July 2002, 88.

12 “work out”; “give me money”: Joan Mitchell in letters to Eleanor Ward, n.d. Stable Gallery Records, Joan Mitchell, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution. When Joan found Kowalski’s bill too high, she retaliated by pulling strings through a friend who knew people in the French police and fixing it so that Kowalski’s work permit was not renewed. See Yvonne Hagen, From Art to Life and Back: N.Y.-Berlin-Paris 1925–1962 (Sagaponack, NY: Xlibris, 2006), 209.

13 “It makes me”: Ibid.

14 “I am always”: Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster.” in Donald Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Knopf, 1971), 95.

15 “Joan, Chérie”: Jean-Paul Riopelle in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 10 April 1959. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

16 “Your last letter”: Jean-Paul Riopelle in a letter to Joan Mitchell, May 1959. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

17 Before leaving: Hélène de Billy, Riopelle (Montreal: Art Global, 1996), 145–49.

18 “two sailors”: Riopelle to Mitchell, n.d. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

19 “lovely with snow”: Mitchell to Rosset, n.d. Collection of Barney Rosset.

20 “Eh, Coco”: Mitchell, quoted by Schneider, telephone interview with author, 24 September 2006.

21 “So how’s your”: Mitchell, quoted by Zuka Mitelberg, interview with author, 24 March 2003.

22 “You know”: Mitchell, quoted by John Bennett, interview with author, 28 June 2002.

23 “Did you get”: Marc Berlet, telephone interview with author, 5 August 2006.

24 “Riopelle was”: Ibid.

25 Once Joan silenced: de Billy, 158–59.

26 “[Joan] was”: Suzanne Viau, quoted in de Billy, 161.

27 “Riopelle had”: Marc Berlet, telephone interview with author, 5 August 2006.

28 Not until: Among those Joan told were artists John Bennett and Elisabeth Kley.

29 “extremely taken”: Pierre Schneider, telephone interview with author, 24 September 2006.

30 “Rip would get”: Mitchell, quoted by John Bennett, interview with author, 28 June 2002.

31 One night: Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 433.

32 Once the same trio: John Ashbery, interview with author, 16 May 2006.

33 At least once: Roseline Granet, interview with author, 28 March 2003.

34 One late night: Barney Rosset, interview with author, 10 January 2003.

35 Scholar Marjorie Perloff: Marjorie Perloff, “The Silence That Is Not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Embers,” in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 247.

36 “not a sound”: Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Embers (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 35.

37 “If something”: Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1988), 106.

38 One night: So Joan told Beckett biographer Deirdre Bair. Author’s telephone conversation with Deirdre Bair, 7 June 2006.

39 “Stick to Riopelle”: Cronin, 433.

40 Her title: In his essay for Joan Mitchell: Trees and Other Paintings, 1960 to 1990, a 1992 exhibition at Laura Carpenter Fine Art, critic and poet John Yau links the title County Clare to both Ireland and the poet John Clare.

41 “working like”: Mitchell to Ward, n.d. Stable Gallery Records, Joan Mitchell, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution

42 Joan rejected: Mitchell, quoted in Stephan Westfall, “Then and Now: Six of the New York School Look Back,” Art in America 73:6 (June 1985): 114.

43 Besides, the art world: Sometimes artists are classified by age. Yet Milton Resnick, born in 1917, is usually considered second generation while Philip Guston, born in 1913, achieves first-generation status. Other times the classification is by the period when the artist embraced an avant-garde outlook. However, Grace Hartigan (second generation) did so around the same time as Franz Kline (first generation). Among women, only Lee Krasner, who painted progressively beginning in the 1930s, is categorized as first generation.

44 Rather than: Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 280.

45 at Bill Berkson’s: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 4 June 1962, Michael Goldberg Papers.

46 “pop art, op art”: Douglas Davis, “The Painters’ Painters,” Newsweek, 13 May 1974, 108.

47 “There’ll always be”: Joan Mitchell in John Ashbery, “An Expressionist in Paris,” ArtNews 64:2 (April 1965): 64.

48 Using crayon: David Acton, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Worcester Art Museum, 2001), 168.

49 Meanwhile her oils: Many of Joan’s paintings from this period are untitled, which was fine with her, but collectors complain about untitled work, and dealers go crazy. Normally she titled her work after it was finished, often during laughter-filled “naming evenings” with friends. At other times (as she told art historian Judith Bernstock) her titles were deeply felt and inextricable from the work. Many refer to music, poetry, places, people, plants, and landscape elements. Quite a few are double entendres. She always knew exactly what had inspired each painting but didn’t necessarily reveal it in the title.

50 “To paint”: Catherine Flohic, “Joan Mitchell,” Ninety (1993): 3.

51 “Everything is closed”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in Marion Strobel Mitchell to Sarah Mitchell Perry, n.d. Collection of Sally Perry.

52 Between July 1: Stable Gallery Records, Joan Mitchell File, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

53 “The gay gigglers”: Sarah Mitchell Perry, quoted in a letter from Marion Strobel Mitchell to Joan Mitchell, 16 May 1962. Collection of Sally Perry.

54 “kicked me”; “Get rid of”: Mitchell, interviewed by Linda Nochlin, 16 April 1986. Transcript, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

55 Indebted to Bach: Marc Berlet, telephone interview with author, 5 August 2006.

56 “to transform”: Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Bowl of Roses,” in William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 8.

57 “vistas of billowing”: Holland Cotter, “Joan Mitchell,” New York Times, 17 June 2005.

58 “Titian in the way”: Pierre Schneider, telephone interview with author, 24 September 2006.

59 “the story”: Pierre Schneider, essay for Joan Mitchell exhibition at Jacques Dubourg and Galerie Lawrence, 8–26 May 1962.

60 “Well, there’s Kline”: Joan Mitchell, quoted in a transcript sent by Betsy Zogbaum to Joan Mitchell, 5 July 1972. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

61 “little monster”: Marc Berlet, telephone interview with author, 5 August 2006.

62 “a special relationship”: Hal Fondren in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 28 February 1987. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

63 “terrible things”: Marc Berlet, telephone interview with author, 5 August 2006.

64 less than twenty: Fabienne Dumont, “Femmes, art et féminisme en France dans les années 1970,” Sisyphe, 11 April 2005, http://sisyphe.org.

65 “dear old Gimpel”: Mitchell to Goldberg, postmarked 5 September 1965, Michael Goldberg Papers.

66 “just us”; “the big rooster”: Mitchell, quoted by John Bennett, interview with author, 28 June 2002.

67 “J.P. is sweetie pie”: Mitchell to Ward, n.d., Stable Gallery Records, Joan Mitchell File, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

68 “I think”: Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 381.

69 “gay, amusing”: James Herbert Mitchell in a letter to Joan Mitchell, 18 November 1960. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

70 “sort of shoveled”; “took [Adrian] out”: Ellen Lanyon, interview with author, 27 July 2001.

71 “(supposedly … made”: Mitchell to Goldberg, n.d. [Christmas 64]: Michael Goldberg Papers. Mitchell mistakenly refers to Newman as “Mortimer Newman.”

72 “shooting the shit”: Sally Perry, interview with author, 14 April 2001.

73 “very violent”: Mitchell, quoted in Bernstock, 60.

74 Rufus found Joan: Rufus Zogbaum also cites as an example of Joan’s kindness her 1970 purchase of a tombstone for his father, Wilfred Zogbaum (who had died in 1965), replacing one she felt unworthy of Zog.

75 “so nice”: Olga Hirshhorn in a letter to Joan Mitchell, n.d. Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

76 “one of the great”: Interview with Joseph H. Hirshhorn, conducted by Paul Cummings, New York, 16 December 1976. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.