In the light of Joan Mitchell

About the double exhibition devoted to Joan Mitchell by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 27 February 2022: "Joan Mitchell Retrospective" and "Monet-Mitchell".

At a time when the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris is devoting a major exhibition to Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), the Fondation Louis Vuitton is paying tribute to the brilliant art of Joan Mitchell (1926-1992), one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, who was very impressed by the work of the Austrian artist, who was discovered thanks to her art teacher at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. Two good reasons, then, to visit the capital! And even three, because two complementary exhibitions are presented under the name "Joan Mitchell Retrospective" and "Monet-Mitchell" in the 16th arrondissement, one tracing her career and the other focusing on her relationship with the art of Claude Monet (1840-1926).

Because obviously, the influence of the Water Lilies and the famous "all-over" on Joan Mitchell's immense abstract canvases is obvious, as it is obvious that she is inspired by the landscape. Or rather her feeling of the landscape. It is no coincidence that the term "abstract impressionism" has stuck to her, ever since it was coined by art critics to designate those whose abstract painting remains inhabited by the sensations of landscape space. But labels and "schools" are not Joan Mitchell's thing. Even though the American necessarily sealed her kinship with Impressionism and the French tradition by choosing in 1968 to buy a house in Vétheuil, in the Val d'Oise, to make it her haven of peace and creation overlooking a loop of the Seine, a stone's throw from Giverny. This means a stone's throw from the house, pond and gardens where Claude Monet lived from 1883 until his death, and where he created the famous Water Lilies series.

"The two artists share a commonality of subjects, namely nature and landscape, water and its reflections, the pond for one, the Seine for the other. But also, a common use of large formats requiring a real gesturality", explains Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and general curator of the "Monet-Mitchell" exhibition, answering Manuel Jovert who interviewed her for the magazine Connaissance des arts. "In both of their works, the play of colour with light prevails through a great freedom of touch, technique and style, alternating thickness and fluidity in a similar range of colours where blues, yellows, greens, pinks and reds dominate. The fact remains, however, that the motif is always present in Monet's work, whereas Joan is frankly abstract... although. If she says "My painting is abstract", she adds "but it is also a landscape".

However, it was not because she was based in France that Joan Mitchell was quickly recognised there. Not at all. "Her painting did not find any more resonance there than contemporary French painting did in France," notes Suzanne Pagé. "From then on, she forged her own path and imposed a unique voice on the 20th century. The painter would lock herself up in her studio at night with her dogs, play music, and set about translating into her paintings what she called the "feeling", i.e. what she had felt in front of a subject seen during the day. Or even what the subject itself had felt. For example, Joan Mitchell liked to say about Two Sunflowers, the famous diptych that has been added to the permanent collection of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, that her paintings should "convey the feeling of a wilting sunflower". One can only think of Monet, who composed his great Water Lilies in his studio, according to the sensations that nature had aroused in him.

"His ardour, his very personal ardour, the violence of his gestures in increasingly monumental formats, the intensity of his palette with a preference for complementary colours were foreign to the lyrical Abstraction of the time", Suzanne Pagé points out about Joan Mitchell. No matter. "Stranger to any aesthetic doctrine, Joan Mitchell has reopened painting to the lyrical irrigation that matters most to us," writes Manuel Jover in Connaissance des arts.

The woman who was also tried to be categorised as part of the "second generation" of the New York School or Action Painting, even though she abhorred any form of categorisation in art, was 25 when Willem De Kooning was 46, Franz Kline 40 and Jackson Pollock 38. It is easy to imagine that, faced with "the true heroes of this great virile gesture that is the emergence and triumph of modern American painting, destined to conquer the world", as the journalist from Connaissance des arts so aptly wrote, the young woman had a little difficulty in getting her work recognised at its true value.

It is not surprising that she finally turned to Europe in 1955. She was familiar with Paris, having spent a year there on a scholarship after graduating from the Art Institute School, and after a year in New York in the studio of Hans Hofmann, a master of abstract art. If in New York the young Chicago artist had discovered the avant-garde, from Arshile Gorky to Jackson Pollock, in Paris she had found all the masters who had marked the child visiting the famous Art Institute of Chicago in the wake of her enlightened and wealthy parents: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse... The daughter of a poet and an amateur artist doctor, Joan Mitchell hesitated for a while between poetry and the plastic arts.

But with her considerable artistic background, her original production and her cutting-edge formal research, Joan Mitchell has no doubt that she has a place in the world of painting. Her meeting in Paris in 1955 with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), who was to become her partner until 1977, sealed a rich artistic collaboration. The two would influence each other constantly. One of Riopelle's most ambitious works was a suite of thirty paintings entitled Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, which he created as a tribute to Joan Mitchell when he learned of her death in 1992. Mitchell's 1979 painting La Vie en rose is often described as a representation of their abrupt break-up.

The Jean Fournier art gallery in Paris, a conduit for American painting from the 1950s to the 1980s in France, had long been responsible for Joan Mitchell's works of art for sale, and the leading art critics always spotted her exhibitions, whether in the United States or in France. The Frenchman Pierre Schneider left in his wake the enigmatic phrase that sums up the unspeakable sensation of a luminous combination of interior and exterior when one sees a Joan Mitchell painting: "It feels like a light bulb shining in broad daylight".