Artist Joan Mitchell's Groundbreaking Work Is Coming To SFMOMA

Get ready for a vibrant ride: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcases the groundbreaking work on Joan Mitchell.

Joan Mitchell in her studio at 77 rue Daguerre, Paris, 1956.

Joan Mitchell, like many women who were midcentury cultural pioneers—musicians, singers, writers, even comedians—first had to dispatch with naysayers. And men. The artistic world in 1950s New York wasn’t exactly pining for a female abstract expressionist to come along and shake up the pecking order.

This fall, patrons at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will see how the artist upset the old order and blossomed into a world-renowned artist. The comprehensive exhibit, Joan Mitchell, features more than 80 works.

Mitchell’s talent was immense, and she soon became a distinguished and brazen creator in the New York School of painters and poets at the age of 26. After settling in the city, she exhibited at the historic 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, or 9th Street Show, in May and June 1951, alongside notables like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Elaine de Kooning. The exhibit marked the debut of abstract expressionism, the first American art movement that reverberated globally. In 1959, Mitchell moved to France and spent the next 30 years reflecting on the world’s countless changes to create work that drew on everything from memory to music to poetry. Her pieces, many of which were often mammoth in scale, reveal a collective mindset that no longer adhered to or cared about boundaries.

“Sunflowers” (1990-91)

In the late 1950s, the art world recognized Mitchell’s prowess, and major institutions—including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art—began collecting her paintings. In 1982, Mitchell broke through another barrier as the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She worked continuously until her death in 1992 in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris.

The SFMOMA show, co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art, also will hold the artist’s rarely seen early paintings and drawings that served as her career’s transformative foundation. Museum guests will see Mitchell’s large-scale, multipanel masterpieces that uniformly reveal her signature use of color. And for a better read on the woman who challenged tradition throughout her career, the exhibit offers a selection of Mitchell’s letters and photographs. Take note of those early images when Mitchell was in her mid-20s. In some of the pictures, she sits among her unfinished works, contemplative, with eyes staring boldly into the lens. This is a manifestation of power, shrinking violets be damned. It’s this level of internal passion that would help define modern art and the contours of beauty for years to come. Through Jan. 17, 151 Third St., 450.357.4000