As the opening credits for Marion Cajori’s 1993 documentary Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter roll, we hear the groundbreaking abstract expressionist painter being asked a series of questions.
“Do you ever think about the role that you’ve played historically?”
“No,” she replies matter-of-factly.
“…and its significance?”
“No.”
There’s something thrilling and refreshing about an artist not being remotely concerned with conversation about their meaning, impact, or historical importance. Many artists who are far less accomplished, talented, or historically significant than Mitchell drone on, and on, about the importance of their work, their place in art history. It’s a seamy but mandatory component of branding. That’s not to say that artists of the past weren’t shrewd about constructing personas and hyping themselves. Countless of them have been, since forever, of course. But Mitchell is an artist in (for lack of a better term) the purest sense. There’s something gloriously self-contained (unbothered by marketplace dictates, art world trends, or theory du jour) about how and why she creates, and the documentary works hard, but elegantly, to get at that.
Filmed wearing glasses, straight, shoulder-length hair, and a dark turtleneck, Mitchell, who died the year before the documentary was released, is the very picture of the effortlessly cool, throwback, old-school artist. Both her early days in the art world of mid-twentieth century New York, and her productive creative years living in Paris waft off of her. Born to a deaf poet mom (“My mother had a split life; she was a poet, and then she had children”) and a self-made father whose competitive nature extended to his relationships with his children, Mitchell grew up in a wealthy home in Chicago. Visits to Lake Michigan as a child helped shape her aesthetic and the content to which she was drawn.
In the film, she says that she took to painting – and specifically abstract painting – because it was beyond her father’s scope of interest or knowledge, so it became a safe haven from his competitiveness. Throughout the film, she interestingly vacillates between insightful psychoanalysis of herself and her work, and shrugging dismissal of outside efforts to provide the same. While smilingly describing how nice the prominent male painters of the day were to her when she was just starting out – even as many of them didn’t seem to take her work very seriously – she is also bitingly honest about the gendered power imbalances of the art world, and how xenophobia as well as sexism often factored in when her work was being assessed. “They call me sauvage in Europe,” she says. “I’m direct. I say what I think, and you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to be diplomatic – which I call hypocrisy, lying really.”
As the film cuts back and forth between Mitchell touring a sprawling exhibit of her work, chatting at cocktail parties, and speaking directly to the camera as she alternately entertains and swats down questions, jazz playing on the soundtrack and generous examples of her work shown, what emerges is a woman of staggering talent and vision who is both incredibly strong and forthright, but also unabashedly fragile. She has strong opinions about art and politics and where the two should or should not meet (“I think love has to do with painting. I don’t paint well out of violence of anger. I don’t like that at all. I don’t want to look at descriptions of horror. I mean, the world is horrible [but] do I want to hang that on the wall?”) but is often visibly unsettled (or drily cantankerous) when conversation turns to choices made in her private life.
The talking heads in the film range from gallery owners to other painters, and they’ve been smartly chosen. None are superfluous, and between their assessments of Mitchell’s work and career, and sometimes their personal relationships with her, Mitchell takes form as a layered, intriguing painter and human being. And painter Elizabeth Murray’s observation that, “Painting really is not about reality. It’s about life,” is the perfect encapsulation of why Mitchell’s work retains the power it does.
Watch the film here.
