ldquo;Gee; Joan; if only you were French and male and dead.rdquo; mdash;New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell; the 1950sShe was a steel heiress from the Midwestmdash;Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicagorsquo;s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolutionmdash;Anglo-Saxon; Republican; Episcopalian. She was tough; disciplined; courageous; dazzling; and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched; made her way in it; and disproved their notion that women couldnrsquo;t paint.Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s; rsquo;60s; and rsquo;70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world; painters making their way in the second part of Americarsquo;s twentieth century. As a young girl she was a champion figure skater; and though she lacked balance and coordination; accomplished one athletic triumph after another; until giving up competitive skating to become a painter. Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said; ldquo;I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every lsquo;loverrsquo; Irsquo;ve ever hadmdash;every friendmdash;nothing closed out. Itrsquo;s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with itmdash;the dreamsmdash;and paint it.rdquo;Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude; daring; and discipline; as well as delicacy; grace; and awkwardness.Mitchell exuded a young; smoky; tough glamour and was thought of as ldquo;sexy as hell.rdquo;Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal; Barnet Rosset; Jr.mdash;scion of a financier who was head of Chicagorsquo;s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951; at Mitchellrsquo;s urging; and to publish Henry Miller; Samuel Beckett; Jean Genet; Jack Kerouac; Allen Ginsberg; et al.; making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time. Mitchellrsquo;s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning; Frank Orsquo;Hara; James Schuyler; Jane Freilicher; Franz Kline; Helen Frankenthaler; and others; going to clambakes; cocktail parties; softball gamesmdash;and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Veacute;theuil.Mitchellrsquo;s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft; especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places. In Joan Mitchell; Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painterrsquo;s large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work. Joan Mitchell re-creates the times; the people; and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.From the Hardcover edition.
#1654833 in eBooks 2006-04-07 2006-04-07File Name: B004BLIL3CPDF # 1
Review
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Received it in virtuallly new condition. as advertised.By rwwhiteThis is a thoughtful set of essays by one of Americas leading historians. It is eloquentlywritten and tells interesting things about the lives and times of those she discusses as well as their intellectual development and outlook.16 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Links intellectual lives to the moral imaginationBy D. Donovan. Editor/Sr. ReviewerGertrude Himmelfarbs THE MORAL IMAGINATION is a recommended pick. here linking the intellectual lives of modern thinker and literary giants with what she identifies as the moral imagination. How these thinkers evolved their ideas. wrote in different traditions at different times. and shared a common moral passion which reflected in their literature makes for truly involving reading.11 of 15 people found the following review helpful. New SlantsBy F. WatkinsG. Himmelfarb has some very different insights into the authors she discusses and puts some of the characters in the novels in new lights. I have enjoyed reading this book and she has prodded me into reading further in the authors discussed. I would recommend this book to any persons interested in changing the moral tone of American today.
