Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was an American painter and printmaker who also worked in pastel and other works on paper. Though she spent most of her career in France, she is tied to the American abstract expressionist movement and was an active member of the New York School during the 1950s. Born in Chicago, she became one of the few female artists of her time to earn both critical and public recognition.

Her emotionally charged style and gestural brushwork were shaped by post-impressionists like Henri Matisse. Mitchell often drew inspiration from remembered landscapes, once telling critic Irving Sandler, “I carry my landscapes around with me.” Later in life, her declining health influenced and limited her work.

Mitchell’s paintings, drawings, and prints appear in major museums and collections worldwide and have fetched record-breaking auction prices. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art jointly organized a major retrospective of her work. From October 2022 to February 2023, the Fondation Louis Vuitton hosted an exhibition pairing Mitchell with Claude Monet.

Her will established the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a nonprofit that gives grants and fellowships to working artists and maintains her archives.

Mitchell’s family history reaches back to the Revolutionary War. She was described as an heiress; her mother, Marion Strobel, was also called an heiress, while her father, Dr. James Herbert Mitchell, was the “unpedigreed son of a downstate farmer.” They married in Chicago in 1922. Her maternal grandparents, Sarah Moore and Daniel Baxter, moved from Massachusetts to Chicago in 1857. By 1871, Daniel Baxter had made $100,000 in the grain business. Their eldest child, Henrietta Baxter, married Charles Louis Strobel in 1890. Strobel, a trained civil engineer, worked for 27 years at Andrew Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company. His father was a pocketbook factory owner and immigrant from Bavaria.

On her father’s side, the Mitchells came from Havana, Illinois. His maternal grandparents, George and Waity Vaughan, moved from Vermont in 1839 with a 177-acre land grant signed by President James Polk, where they farmed corn, wheat, horses, sheep, and dairy cows. Their ancestors were British colonists and tannery operators. Joan claimed her paternal great-grandfather fought in the American Revolution, but this was unconfirmed. Her father’s family included early settlers who moved from Virginia to Kentucky and then to the Illinois River. One half great-uncle was the first casualty of his county in the Civil War.

Mitchell was born in Chicago to dermatologist James Herbert Mitchell and poet Marion Strobel Mitchell. Her father led the American Dermatological Association; her mother co-edited *Poetry* magazine. As a child, she loved diving and skating, and her art later reflected that athleticism—one gallery owner said she “approached painting almost like a competitive sport.” She took Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and spent later summers at its Ox-Bow art colony. She grew up on Chestnut Street in Streeterville and attended Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park, where she became close friends with Edward Gorey, though neither admired the other’s work. When her maternal grandfather died in 1936, she inherited two-thirds of his $500,000 estate, and later received trusts from both parents.

Mitchell studied at Smith College for two years before deciding to become a full-time painter. She then earned a BFA in 1947 and an MFA in 1950 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she won a scholarship in 1944. She painted in Mexico during summers. After moving to Manhattan in 1947, she tried to study under Hans Hofmann but attended only one class, later saying, “I couldn’t understand a word he said so I left, terrified.” A $2,000 travel fellowship let her study in Paris and Provence in 1948–49, and she also traveled in Spain and Italy. Her work grew increasingly abstract during this time. In September 1949, she married publisher Barney Rosset in Le Lavandou, France; they returned to New York later that year. Rosset founded Grove Press. They divorced in 1952.

In 1950, Mitchell saw her first Willem de Kooning painting at the Whitney Annual. That same year, she painted *Figure and the City*, her last work to include a human figure. She later said, “I knew that it would be my last figure.” Throughout the 1950s, she was an active member of the New York School of artists and poets and remained associated with the American abstract expressionist movement.