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Untitled
Artist
Joan Mitchell
(Born 1925, United States; died 1992, France)
Date1961
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 118 1/2 × 78 3/4 × 1 1/4 in. (300.99 × 200.03 × 3.18 cm)
Framed: 119 3/8 × 79 7/8 × 1 3/4 in. (303.21 × 202.88 × 4.45 cm)
Framed: 119 3/8 × 79 7/8 × 1 3/4 in. (303.21 × 202.88 × 4.45 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Anne and John Marion
Object number2012.5
Status
On viewSignedsigned recto - lower right
Copyright© Joan Mitchell Foundation
Category
Label TextFrom the 1950s to the 1980s, as the prevailing tastes of the New York art world shifted from abstraction to Pop and Minimalism, Joan Mitchell never wavered in her commitment to making paintings abounding with exuberant color, form, and brushwork. The nonrepresentational forms and gestural energy of her work tie her to the New York School painters of the 1950s, with whom she socialized and exhibited. Her mature images, however, move away from the allover compositions of artists such as Jackson Pollock, instead preserving a distinct figure-ground relationship more akin to the work of her colleagues and mentors Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning.
Mitchell painted Untitled, a monumental work nearly ten feet tall, in 1961. The surface is built up in many successive layers, visibly recording her intensely physical process. In Untitled, the artist unleashed the full range of her medium’s capacity, applying paint in thick spreads, splatters, blunt stabs, and globs or diluting it with turpentine and allowing it to trickle across the canvas at gravity’s will. Although vertical in orientation, the painting loosely resembles a landscape: brown passages as thick as mud in the canvas’s lower portion suggest a passage of ground, giving way to a “sky” of looser, atmospheric brushwork above. The artist’s aim, however, was never to represent a particular place or natural environment. With Untitled, Mitchell produced an image that teeters on the brink of wild spontaneity and orchestrated control—not so unlike nature itself.
Mitchell painted Untitled, a monumental work nearly ten feet tall, in 1961. The surface is built up in many successive layers, visibly recording her intensely physical process. In Untitled, the artist unleashed the full range of her medium’s capacity, applying paint in thick spreads, splatters, blunt stabs, and globs or diluting it with turpentine and allowing it to trickle across the canvas at gravity’s will. Although vertical in orientation, the painting loosely resembles a landscape: brown passages as thick as mud in the canvas’s lower portion suggest a passage of ground, giving way to a “sky” of looser, atmospheric brushwork above. The artist’s aim, however, was never to represent a particular place or natural environment. With Untitled, Mitchell produced an image that teeters on the brink of wild spontaneity and orchestrated control—not so unlike nature itself.