Joan Mitchell by Judith E. Bernstock - 1988

New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988. CT1 - A first edition (stated) hardcover book in very good condition that has some bumped corners, lightly bowed, some scuffing on the right side page edges, light tanning and shelf wear with no dust jacket. All four (4) folded pages (pages 47, 91, 115 and 177) are present. In association with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. 10.25"x10.25", 226 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Joan Mitchell was an American painter and printmaker who also worked in pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the 1950s in the New York School of artists. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career. Mitchell was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings, drawings, and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections around the world. Although her painting style evolved over the years, Mitchell remained committed to abstraction from the early 1950s until her final works in 1992. Grounded in years of visiting the Art Institute of Chicago as a child to look at nineteenth-century painting, Mitchell cited Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh as influences on her work. Her paintings are expansive, often covering multiple panels. Memories and the feelings she associated with remembered landscapes provided the primary source material for her work. Mitchell told critic Irving Sandler, "I carry my landscapes around with me." Mitchell painted primarily with oil paints on primed canvas or white ground, using gestural, sometimes violent brushwork. She has described a painting as "an organism that turns in space." According to art historian Linda Nochlin, the "meaning and emotional intensity [of Mitchell's pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue - all are potent signs of meaning and feeling." Mitchell said that she wanted her paintings "to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower" and "some of them come out like young girls, very coy ... they're very human." Mitchell was very influenced by her feelings and incorporated them into her artwork. She even compared these feelings that influenced her paintings to poetry. . First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.