A Conversation About Joan Mitchell

Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel | SFMOMA | 15th February 2021

The abstract expressionism style clearly rubbed off on Mitchell. However, those artists didn’t believe in paintings having a subject. Mitchell did. Her enduring loves were poetry and nature and a big retrospective shows just how much they figure in her work. Not literal still lifes or landscapes, but the moods they convey. “There is no word for the territory she created … she straddles and defies both abstraction and landscape … a beautiful/ugly duet”.