ART REVIEW : Mitchell’s Responses to Beauty

“I am not a member of the make ugly school,” Joan Mitchell told an interviewer way back in 1956, when she began to win notice in New York as an Abstract Expressionist painter.

Not then. Not now. Probably not ever, as we see in a 37-year retrospective of her paintings at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (to Jan. 29). Even when she sounds a death warning in recent “Chord” paintings that gather force in dark blue clusters or alludes to suicide in a lyrical diptych called “Ready for the River,” Mitchell seems to be motivated by the sheer beauty of paint as well as the seductive landscapes that have always been her inspiration.

You have to walk through the large exhibition to a back gallery to find relatively neutral canvases (from the early ‘50s), and even here Mitchell pulls a restrained richness from a beige palette that might have gone muddy. All the other paintings in this show, organized by Judith E. Bernstock for Cornell University, are unabashedly beautiful and colorful. Whether they stretch out across multiple panels, strike rhythmic cadences or pull up into snarled balls of color, whether they suggest gardens, trees or rivers, these abstract landscapes are first of all paintings by an artist who responds to beauty.

Mitchell says in the catalogue that she begins each painting with the feeling of a memory, but once she gets going she simply paints. Unlike realists who search for telling details or Impressionists who paint changing effects of light on landscape, Mitchell presents a distilled experience.

An Abstract Expressionist who emerged with the “second generation” of action painters, Mitchell shares the pioneers’ gestural approach but not their concept of being inside the canvas. Removed by youth from painters who reacted to World War II and by temperament from those who spill their guts on canvas, Mitchell is a poetically inclined observer who exercises a high degree of control and filters sensations without losing their essence.

This approach doesn’t make her seem distant, however. She is an athletic participant who twirls and twists her strokes or unfurls them into great looping paths across the canvas. Over the years, you can see her go from intensely worked masses to fluid expanses, from rather frenetic urban jumbles to vast rural gardens, but there is always a high-strung sense of engagement in Mitchell’s work. She pays attention to her work and treats each color as if she is responsible for playing it to the hilt.

Mitchell revels in sunflower yellow, spinning out whole fields of it across a diptych underpainted with gestural foliage and glints of pink. She bathes in blue, painting ribbon-like rivers, limpid pools and frightening currents that serve as metaphors for natural forces and emotional turmoil.

And though she claims to hate white, Mitchell admits she can’t live without it--as a body of light and a ground for color. “They Never Appeared With the White,” an unusually pale diptych, recalls a traumatic moment one August when Mitchell’s Parisian paint supplier was on vacation and she ran out of white pigment. Like a modest nymph caught with only a handkerchief to cover her body, she desperately stretched her last bit of white into a veil across a 7-foot expanse of canvas.

This may suggest that Mitchell’s paintings are autobiographical. They are, but only insofar as they correspond or react to events through the process of abstraction. The catalogue tracks her work through moves from Chicago to New York to Paris to Vetheuil (where she has lived for the last 20 years) and relates her paintings to personal relationships and losses. All this is relevant, but there’s a toughness to the 62-year-old artist that also makes her work seem impervious to physical upheavals or even heartbreak.

Working through the Cubist influence of Cezanne and a period of paying homage to Arshile Gorky (in paintings like the 1951 canvas, “Cross Section of a Bridge”), she assimilated the Abstract Expressionist work of Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock while creating her own gestural style.

Seen in retrospect, Mitchell now appears to be one of a handful of American artists who have had the good sense to fall from fashion while becoming better and better painters. In the face of such superior work, it seems absurd to protest that this isn’t what the smart set is doing.