On Wingspan: Joan Mitchell’s Reach
John Vincler’s new column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.
Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-1991 ©Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner
Standing before a Joan Mitchell painting, as I tried to bring language to her colors and gestures, the first word that came to me was As I walked past the nine paintings spread across two rooms at her recent exhibition, “I carry my landscapes around with me” at David Zwirner, I looked for the grand, arching strokes that regularly mark the oversize scale of her work. The term suggests a great bird or angel, but it occurs to me simply as shorthand for , like that of a star athlete: a tennis player’s serve, a baseball player’s windup, a basketball center’s blocking ability. (Almost every consideration of her work mentions the seemingly requisite detail that she was an accomplished figure skater in her youth.) Joan Mitchell was not unusually proportioned or exceptionally tall (a patient archivist from the foundation points me to a mid-60’s driver’s license that places her at 5’6”), but she brought in his East Hampton studio, with Pollock like a dancer leaning forward, brush in one hand, paint can in the other, arcing drips across his unstretched canvas on the floor; Cecil Beaton’s photograph for from the following year titled blankly , showing a model in a strapless couture dress holding a pair of black gloves standing stiffly with a Pollock painting serving as the backdrop; and finally Rudy Burckhardt’s 1957 photograph of Joan Mitchell, feet planted firmly, facing her canvas , back to the viewer, her right arm stretched to its limit as she slashes horizontally at a height almost certainly exceeding six feet tall. This photograph of Mitchell documents a body’s limit from rootedness to extension. Standing there in a room surrounded by her work, I see clearly that through her painting, Mitchell made herself a giant.
