Grandes Carrières

Joan Mitchell, 1961-62

All right, it’s nine in the morning in New York, and Joan Mitchell’s out walking her dog. She runs into Hans Hofmann, one of the big painters in town. He goes, “Mitchell, you should be painting.” She remembered him as very supportive. “Very nice,” she said. Then she goes on: “I don’t think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the ‘lady painter.’” At this point she’s already showing alongside Pollock and de Kooning. But the history books have a little name for her, too. Second-generation Abstract Expressionist. Basically, the younger crowd making those big, splashy paintings. She had a word for that, too. Boring. “We were painting at the same time as they were,” she said. So at this point, New York is the center of this whole thing. Her friends are there. Her career’s there. She’s in the room. And she just gets up and leaves. For Paris. She doesn’t know anybody. She doesn’t even speak French. Anyways, a couple of years later, she makes this. It’s nearly ten feet across. Look at that dark thing in the middle. Brown and blue, all jammed together. Then the pinks, and splatters of green and teal breaking off around it. Even that pale stuff around the edges is full of little lines and smears of color. Kinda feels like you’ve just missed the whole thing happening. But she could spend weeks on a painting. Sometimes months. She’s working from memory. Somewhere she’s been, the feeling it left behind. And she’s looking for the point where the paint starts giving her that feeling back. “The freedom in my work is quite controlled,” she said. “I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best.” So, eventually, she’s got the painting. Then it gets a name. This is Grandes Carrières. Big quarries. A neighborhood in Paris.

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