Joan MITCHELL

Joan Mitchell once stated that ‘Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint...And painting is what allows me to survive.’ The artist had a deep and abiding love of English and French literature and, in particular, poetry. She had grown up in a literary household in Chicago and was close friends with a number of writers and poets, including John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Dupin, Frank O’Hara, Nathan Kernan, Pierre Schneider and James Schuyler. Her work was often directly inspired by poetry, and indeed she once described her painting as ‘more like a poem’. As she added, in a 1957 interview, ‘My art embodies the qualities that differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.’ As has been noted by one scholar, ‘For Mitchell, poetry was a call across water, a model for hailing one another. It gave her a form in which to feel the world.’

Drawn in 1975, this is one of Joan Mitchell’s ‘poem pastels’; a series of unique abstract pastel compositions incorporating typewritten free-verse poems by five of the artist’s friends - James Schuyler, Jacques Dupin, J. J. Mitchell, Chris Larson and Pierre Schneider. The present sheet incorporates the poem Close by the poet J. J. Mitchell (1940-1986), a close friend of Frank O’Hara, who stayed with the artist at Vétheuil from the summer of 1974 to the end of 1975.

Another example of Joan Mitchell’s and J. J. Mitchell’s ‘poem pastels’ from this 1975 series, entitled Blue, is today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.




A poem by J. J. Mitchell typewritten along the left edge of the sheet: 
Close
To
fit
a
word
in
this
small
space
may
fill
a
void
I
need
to
trace
but
hat
to
say
when
I
embrace
a
longer
line
I
choke
on
space. 
Signed by the poet J. J. Mitchell at the lower left.
353 x 235 mm. (13 7/8 x 9 1/4 in.)