Joan Mitchell: Drawing into Painting

Drawing into Painting is a survey of works by Joan Mitchell (1925–92) on canvas and paper from 1958 through 1992, the year of her death. For Mitchell, drawing and painting were related but autonomous activities. Her pastels can be as dense as oil paintings, and her oil paintings can be as light and airy as watercolors. The book includes art from each decade of her career, with a formal range spanning flurried strokes and gestural lines of rhapsodic color, to darkly massed forms and complex, multi-panel formats. Mitchell’s move to France in 1959, as Mark Rosenthal writes in his essay, “suggests an aesthetic choice whereby she submerged American artistic developments within a profound embrace of French Impressionism.” This decision represented a departure from the influences and goals of her colleagues in the New York School, and harked back to her student days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.