The greatest proponents of abstract
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 4:04 am
There was no going back when, in 1950, Joan Mitchell completed Figure and city, a painting in which an abstract figure emerges from the canvas in the midst of a crushing of cubic forms. Prior to this breakthrough, Mitchell worked in a semi-figurative fashion, producing still lifes and cityscapes in which anything and everything could be reduced to geometric shapes. Then after Figure and city, she jumped into the void and began to work in abstraction. “I knew this was the last figure I would paint,” Mitchell said of the woman shown in Figure and city. “I just knew. And it was.”
Over the next decade, she is now known. Most of the canvases she produced in the 1950s feature dazzling paintings of brushstrokes assembled against pristine white backgrounds. Mitchell always made sure to leave his thick paintwork and pure, bright colors. The hues she used would become warmer as her career progressed, and her gestural features sometimes merged to form masses that seem to cluster in the center of her canvases. Impressionism and poetry, along with the nature and star cast of the art world surrounding him, haunt his works, though their subject matter is often only revealed through their titles.
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Mitchell was considered one of the most important members of the job function email database post-war abstract expressionism movement. This was the case even in her day, when female artists rarely achieved widespread fame. In 1972, critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, called Mitchell “a master of many oil painting techniques who always seems to push his mastery to the limit, willingly throwing it against ‘impossible’ problems.”
Mitchell’s ability to solve the insoluble with his innovative pictorial techniques will be on display in a long-awaited retrospective this week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Curated by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel, the exhibition will also travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art, which co-curated it, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.) Below is a look at why the Mitchell’s piquant abstractions continue to intrigue.
Over the next decade, she is now known. Most of the canvases she produced in the 1950s feature dazzling paintings of brushstrokes assembled against pristine white backgrounds. Mitchell always made sure to leave his thick paintwork and pure, bright colors. The hues she used would become warmer as her career progressed, and her gestural features sometimes merged to form masses that seem to cluster in the center of her canvases. Impressionism and poetry, along with the nature and star cast of the art world surrounding him, haunt his works, though their subject matter is often only revealed through their titles.
Related Articles
Mitchell was considered one of the most important members of the job function email database post-war abstract expressionism movement. This was the case even in her day, when female artists rarely achieved widespread fame. In 1972, critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, called Mitchell “a master of many oil painting techniques who always seems to push his mastery to the limit, willingly throwing it against ‘impossible’ problems.”
Mitchell’s ability to solve the insoluble with his innovative pictorial techniques will be on display in a long-awaited retrospective this week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Curated by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel, the exhibition will also travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art, which co-curated it, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.) Below is a look at why the Mitchell’s piquant abstractions continue to intrigue.