Review by New York Times Review
Two biographies examine the spiritedness and formidable success of Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. BIOGRAPHERS are forever readjusting our sense of the fantastically mutable relationship between an individual and a society. All men and women are shaped by the world in which they live, and it remains unclear to what extent even the figures who loom largest, a Churchill or a Proust, have precipitated or only crystallized the values or visions with which they are now inevitably associated. "Another time has other lives to live," W. H. Auden once observed. True enough. But to what extent can a person transform a particular time, even turn it into another time? The question is anything but academic. And when a biographer's subject is a 20th-century woman who wants to make her mark in a field hitherto mostly open to men, the question becomes almost alarmingly urgent. Is the story really about a society that has changed enough that a woman can take the next step? Are there cases where the personal triumph actually brings about a social transformation? Or do many of these stories end in a standoff, the woman simultaneously victor and victim, embodying within a society new possibilities that remain in many respects impossibilities? The lives of Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell - painters born nearly a generation apart, Krasner in 1908 and Mitchell in 1925 - cannot be understood without considering such questions. Reading "Lee Krasner" and "Joan Mitchell," the first full-scale biographies of these two immensely complicated women, I can see that the authors, Gail Levin and Patricia Albers, do not have the easiest time reconciling their subjects' energy, determination and formidable success with all the suspicion and skepticism they confronted. Krasner started out in the 1930s, when the Depression made careers in the arts confoundingly difficult for everybody, and after the war she and Mitchell both navigated an art world that had its own bohemian version of the Feminine Mystique, with women seen as helpmates and accessories, even if the setting was a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side rather than a Cape Cod in Levittown. "There were the artists and then there were the 'dames,' " Krasner said of New York in the 1940s. "I was considered a 'dame' even if I was a painter too." Albers observes of Mitchell's situation in the 1950s that "women artists were considered women first and artists second." And the attitude was internalized, or so some have maintained. A friend of Mitchell's, the artist Miriam Schapiro, recalled that "the women really didn't respect each other deeply." Few would dispute such assertions. And yet there they were, Krasner and Mitchell and some others, making their way when there was not supposed to be a way. We see Krasner, in 1942, exhibiting in a now legendary show organized by the brilliant and idiosyncratic painter John Graham, where her work hung along with that of Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, de Kooning and Pollock - whom she met after being told that this man she had never heard of and would eventually marry was going to be in the exhibition. Mitchell, not yet 30, had her first solo show in New York in 1952, and the poet John Ashbery, soon to be a friend, later remembered "a sensation of gyrating fanblade shapes, chilly colors and an energy that seemed to have other things in mind than the desire to please" - work, in short, of great seriousness. Whatever the skepticism with which men had sometimes greeted their ambitions, Krasner had had long, extraordinary conversations about art with Clement Greenberg, and among the writers who admired Mitchell were Frank O'Hara and Samuel Beckett, a sometime lover. Both women had enduring friendships with women. Although Krasner and Mitchell eventually came to be seen by some as sacred monsters, coldhearted warrior women in paint-spattered jeans, their imperiousness may have served to mask a deep ambiguity. Krasner's and Mitchell's greatest passion, the art of painting, is a profoundly traditional activity - and thus perhaps a complicated choice for any self-styled pioneer. But here, so I believe, lies one key to their success. Whatever spirit of defiance helped to shape them, they were also attentive to the value of the past, to the gold that can be extracted from even the seemingly inhospitable topography of family life. Krasner was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants living a hardscrabble existence in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and her mother, Levin tells us, "like many other Jewish mothers ... favored her only son over her daughters." Mitchell's parents were Chicago society, wealthy and cultivated. Mitchell remembered her father, a doctor, telling her, "You can't do anything as well as I because you are a woman" - a vote of no confidence that she may have found it difficult to reconcile with the fact that her mother, Marion Strobel, was ambitious, a poet and novelist who was involved with the avant-garde magazine Poetry. If the future could look dark for a girl with dreams, Krasner and Mitchell were unwilling to see it that way. Levin shows how the dislocations of immigrant life could in fact be freeing. "My parents," Krasner later recalled of their willingness to let her study art at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, "had their hands full acclimatizing themselves. ... They didn't encourage me, but as long as I didn't present them with any particular problems, neither did they interfere." As for Mitchell's finishing-school upbringing - the French lessons, the stint as a teenage figure-skating star with national recognition - what she took from all this was not only a lifelong disdain for anything like good manners but also the kind of wild aristocratic self-assurance that Katharine Hepburn personified for all time in "Bringing Up Baby," which came out when Mitchell was 13. LEE KRASNER, as she emerges in Gail Levin's pages, although born after her family arrived in the United States, is very much a product of the immigrant life, with her determination, resilience and hunger for new experiences. While her marriage to Jackson Pollock is no less the central fact of her life that one had imagined, the marriage did not define her. She once said of their time together: "Look, it was a mixed blessing - our relationship. It had many, many pluses and several minuses." She also said: "I respected and understood his painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry." Those remarks reflect a considerable equanimity about a stormy alliance with a man who spent much of his life drunk and depressed and died after driving his car into a tree. But then, by the time Krasner met Pollock she was already extraordinarily self-aware. She had a profound grasp of modern art, deeper though less instinctive than Pollock's, which she had absorbed through her studies in the 1930s with the great teacher Hans Hofmann. And she knew she enjoyed being with exciting, challenging men, having already lived with a fellow art student, Igor Pantuhoff, a White Russian with matinee-idol looks and the charm and deviousness to match. Krasner, so often represented as the woman with the graceless face who was somehow allowed to be Pollock's caretaker, turns out to have had her own sexual magnetism. Pollock was her choice - a daunting choice, true enough, but her choice, nonetheless. Levin, a respected art historian, is not the most graceful writer. Too much is presented almost as raw data, quotations from interviews of one sort or another, at moments closer to oral history than to biography. We see the explosive growth of the art world in the years after Pollock's death in 1956, Krasner's canniness about marketing his work, and the poor girl's pleasure in good fur coats and dinner at the "21" Club. Levin appreciates Krasner's complex responses late in life (she died in 1984) to feminists in the art world. Their work often left her cold, while their cause could not fail to touch something deep inside. "I'm glad I'm alive," she proclaimed in the 1970s, "now that women's lib has brought a new consciousness." So did the sacred monster give a nod to the young. Krasner struck up a friendship with Levin when the author was still a student, and one feels that Levin liked her and still likes her, which is not always true by the time somebody has finished writing a biography. But the book offers little in the way of judgments, and suggests, as Elizabeth Hardwick once noted, that when a biographer depends too much on taped interviews, "the drastic distance between gossip, the libertine loquacity of the dinner table, and print dissolves." Although we are given to understand that many people think Krasner's paintings are important, Levin does not make the case. Krasner's vast canvases of the 1960s, with roiling arcs and circles marshaled to create cascading arabesques, strike me as programmatic, an idea about joyful abandon rather than the thing itself. The images suggest cosmologies, geologies, glorious turmoil, but the handling, for all its lavish virtuosity, is weirdly perfunctory, almost corporate in its decorative impersonality. PATRICIA ALBERS has written a book about Mitchell that I cannot imagine will ever be improved upon, so graceful and incisive is her account of the artist's hellbent life and lyric art. Ashbery once wrote of Mitchell's work that "one's feelings about nature are at different removes from it," and Albers, the author of a biography of the photographer Tina Modotti, has found her key in this subtle observation. She uncovers the allusions to places, people and experiences woven deep into the warp and woof of Mitchell's canvases, and she skillfully evokes Mitchell's chromatic wonders, with "the flaring up of fluid, translucent strokes" and colors that include at one point "a celery ocher, an opulent burgundy and a gamut of light-rinsed and storm-tossed blues." Strange to say, there are times when I find Albers's prose almost too perfectly tuned. The appearance of Evans Herman, one of the many attractive men who crossed Mitchell's path and ended up in her bed, is announced with this image: "Joan's doorway framed a 23-year-old stripling, lean-faced and clean-shaven, with the kind of dark good looks and soft-spoken seriousness that can melt women instantly." Although Albers's ability to put us right there is impressive, I think I prefer a biographer who stands at a slightly more discreet distance from the subject. There is a virtue sometimes in admitting that we are not really there, in leaving the descriptive flourish aside and letting expository prose do the hard work. Mitchell was a wonderful letter writer, and Albers has the good fortune to be able to quote extensively from the artist's own prose. Mitchell's ecstatic rants can have some of the energy of Kerouac's sentences, especially when she is writing to Barney Rosset, scion of a wealthy Chicago family, Mitchell's first and only husband and lifelong friend, and known to many as the man behind Grove Press. "I did lots of good drawings today," she writes, "and read lots of Marx and wanted so to get in the Oldsmobile and pinch and bite and be generally irritating and go drink beer with potato chips" and have sex "and then drink six cups of coffee and talk about China." A reader cannot help rooting for this slim, good-lcoking young woman, so full of herself and her possibilities. The hedonism loses its shimmer only in the 1960s, when Mitchell is living mostly in Paris, involved with the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle in what amounts to a marriage without a license. Riopelle's suavely flamboyant abstract paintings were then selling like hotcakes, and he had the piles of money to satisfy an appetite for fast cars, big yachts and endless rounds of drinks. Rip, as Joan called him, was dark, compact and pugilistic, and their relationship was along the lines of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," only more so. He divorced his wife but went back on a promise to marry Mitchell, and although she made close connections with his children, sometimes touchingly worrying about their education in the midst of alcohol-soaked days, she had wanted to have her own and had the abortions to forever remind her of what might have been. During her later years, living outside Paris, Mitchell attended to her gardens and her dogs and reached out to younger artists and writers, mixing tenderness and even passion with tough love and outright cruelty. For her troubles, she found Rip taking up with one of her young female enthusiasms, although Mitchell was hardly an innocent bystander. She died of lung cancer in 1992 at the age of 67, and only days before was seen in the hospital "seated in a chair in the hall amid a coterie of young French painters, sipping Chablis and looking 'like a queen holding court.' " Albers relates all this with remarkable dignity and poise. There is only one completely false move in the book, and that is its subtitle: "Lady Painter." It is a phrase that Mitchell used with honeyed irony about herself and her situation, and I do not think it unlikely that on seeing a book about herself with those words on the cover, she would have tossed it across the room. Mitchell probably would have been in a drunken state. But then, she apparently painted some of her best canvases while high on booze. I do have one gnawing doubt about Albers's approach to the paintings. She writes of Mitchell's ability to relive "emotional states, sounds, even bodily movements" as "eidetic" and reports on recent studies of synesthesia, a "sensory cross-wiring in the brain." While Albers's observations are interesting, I am troubled by her insistence on establishing some physiological explanation for the brilliance of Mitchell's abstract evocations of sights and emotions. What I see here is a dangerous objectification - and maybe even medicalization - of the imagination. I do not think that Albers gives enough weight to the aestheticization of memory and sensation as self-conscious, even willful acts, rooted in the Symbolists and Post-Impressionists of the late 19th century, whose work in both poetry and paint Mitchell admired. When Mitchell's friend Irving Sandler wrote about her work in 1959, he commented that she "considers herself a 'conservative' in that her pictures are in the tradition of de Kooning, Kline, etc.," and I think Mitchell's originality rests in the intrepid spirit with which she steps into and embraces the history of painting going back to the Venetians, not in something unique or even unusual about the hard-wiring of her brain. Mitchell's and Krasner's lives overlapped at various times. Early on, they knew many of the same people, exhibited at some of the same galleries, and suffered similar indignities when they found themselves known mostly for their relationships with hard-drinking, immensely famous male painters. Both had retrospectives at the Whitney Museum in the 1970s, and both ended up exhibiting in the beautiful, high, light-filled rooms of the Robert Miller Gallery. Krasner, late in life, mentioning Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan, said that they "had an easier time of it" than her cohort a generation earlier. "We had to create all this," she said. "The next generation had an open door. ... That's a little bit of progress." But Mitchell, when first offered a retrospective at the Whitney, did not want it at the same time as Krasner's. "Not only did Joan feel that her work clashed with Krasner's," Albers writes, "but she also held her nose at the idea of ghettoization as a woman artist." Krasner had of course always worried about the same thing. What Krasner and Mitchell were after was not gender equality but membership in a community they believed transcended gender: the community of artists. The free-flowing nature of the art world in mid-20th-century New York emboldened them, for there was no guild or academy or salon or presiding figure to declare who could and could not be a member. For Krasner and Mitchell the question was not feminism but freedom - the freedom to accept the discipline of art. If by the 1950s the New York artists, as many were arguing, understood Matisse better than the Parisians, who was to say that a woman might not understand de Kooning better than a man? Nearly 20 years after her death, Joan Mitchell looks to be the only artist of her generation, man or woman, who produced a big, abstract, painterly painting that can stand up to the best of de Kooning and Pollock. The legions of arrogant young men who swaggered into the Cedar Tavern have been eclipsed by this woman who probably had more self-confidence and certainly had a more abundant gift than any guy her age in the room. Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and was a 2010-11 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is writing a life of Alexander Calder.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 10, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Painter Mitchell is no mer. second-generation abstract expressionist. Albers avers in the first comprehensive biography of this ruthlessly independent, flagrantly blunt, highly educated artist. Mitchell's ravishingly chromatic, organically structured, endlessly evocative paintings are unique, and Albers learned why. Mitchell had synesthesia. For her, music, the letters of the alphabet, people, and emotions all emitted pulsing colors. Possessed, too, of eidetic memory, her visual recall was acute. Thi. perceptual otherness. along with her technical mastery, underlies the push-pull vitality and ecstatic beauty of her paintings. But what a contentious, abrading life she lived. Born to wealth but scant affection in Chicago, Mitchell wa. fiercely competitive. excelling at art and as a champion ice skater and becoming a debutante who joined the Communist Party. Hard-drinking Mitchell's moxie, recklessness, an. smoky, tough-cookie glamou. enabled her to hold her own with de Kooning, Pollock, and the boys in New York's macho art world. Albers, also the biographer of photographer Tina Modotti, is electrifying in her metaphor-rich descriptions and forthright analysis, tracking Mitchell's volcanic artistic fecundity in sync with her psychological struggles an. sexual adventurin. that included tempestuous relationships with legendary publisher Barney Rosset, Samuel Beckett, and French artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. Albers emulates Mitchell's painterly mission to conjoi. accuracy and intensit. in this transfixing and justly revealing portrait.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this first biography of renowned abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti) vividly chronicles the artist's tortuous journey from her wealthy upbringing in Chicago to her defiant student days at Smith College, and as a young painter at the Art Institute of Chicago when "the wisdom of the day held that women couldn't really paint." Albers focuses on Mitchell's artistic life as a rising and respected New York School painter and her years in France from the late 1950s until her death. Albers deftly balances Mitchell's often difficult temperament (some found her "cranky and contentious"; she was an insomniac and alcoholic) with her artistic vision. Mitchell described her mind as a mental "suitcase filled with pictures," and Albers centers her narrative on the "blessing and curse" of Mitchell's vivid visual memory and synesthesia. Albers astutely analyzes Mitchell's paintings, and one wishes she had done so more often throughout a generally comprehensive study. Vibrantly written and carefully researched, including numerous interviews with Mitchell's former husband, Barney Rosset (former owner of Grove Press), friends, lovers, and colleagues, Albers constructs a fluid, energetic narrative of Mitchell's complicated life and work. 8 pages of color photos, 62 photos in text. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With this generously illustrated work (eight pages of full-color photographs; 62 in-text reproductions), art historian, author, and curator Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti) presents the first full-scale biography of Joan Mitchell (1925-92), a major 20th-century American artist. Often described as a second-generation abstract expressionist painter, Mitchell, who came from a wealthy Chicago family and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Columbia University, moved to New York during the late 1940s, where she attracted the attention of critics, collectors, curators, and gallery owners. In 1955, she moved to France, where she practiced a painting style described as abstract impressionism. This significant biography covers all aspects of Mitchell's life, including her synesthesia, eidetic memory, alcoholism, troubled relationships, and art. Filled with intimate details of her complex personality and unconventional lifestyle, this is a conscientiously objective yet sympathetic portrait of the "lady painter" and the social and cultural contexts in which she became a successful artist in the male-dominated Parisian and New York art worlds. VERDICT Reasonably well documented, this scholarly yet compelling book will interest general readers as well as students, scholars, and museum professionals. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]-Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Independent curator Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti, 2002) presents a sizable biography of Joan Mitchell (19251992), a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters who changed the face of the art world in the 1950s.Raised in luxury as an heiress to the fortune of famed Chicago engineer Charles Louis Strobel, Mitchell competed for the national figure-skating title as a teen in the early 1940s. She would follow her own path to success, dropping out of Smith College (where, she noted, "I got a B+ in art") to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. She took up residence in New York's Greenwich Village in late 1949, becoming part of a vibrant art scene along with soon-to-be famous names like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The book begins a bit slow, but as Mitchell, armed with talent and a stormy personality, begins to establish herself as an important painter, Albers begins to find her footing as a biographer. The author is at her best when writing about the art, managing the difficult trick of bringing visual work alive on the written page. Eventually dividing her time between New York and France, Mitchell inhabited an alcohol-fueled world of artists, poets and musicians, including her longtime companion, French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, poet Frank O'Hara and playwright Samuel Beckett. Discussion of Mitchell's turbulent personal relationships, her lifelong pursuit of psychoanalytic treatment and her synesthesia and eidetic memory all inform what the author calls her "glorious, all-consuming involvement with memory, landscape, and paint." "Lady Painter" is how Mitchell often referred to herself, and though her experience as one of few women in a male-dominated milieu is present throughout the narrative, it is not the focus. As Albers writes, Mitchell "refused to differentiate herself from male artists," and "did not want to be considered among the forgotten or neglected."A revealing portrait of a complex personality, this biography provides insight into the work of a master artist, but is perhaps too detailed to appeal to casual readers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
