The Unfolding of Time in Paint

Rachel Cohen | The Yale Review | 11th December 2025

One for fans of Joan Mitchell. Mitchell liked to paint multi-panel works, especially after her mid-career move to live in France. The writer discusses four works from the perspective of how they reflected Mitchell’s life. Mitchell claimed that her work expressed her memories of landscapes and that she liked “the vertical”, the rhythmic breaks between the panels. That rhythm conveyed a sense of time. Painting, she said, never ends … “it is the only thing that is both continuous and still”