描述
开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780375414374
“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New
York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s
She was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest
(her grandfather built Chicago’s bridges and worked for Andrew
Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American
Revolution—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 couldn’t
paint.
Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract
expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s;
a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world,
painters making their way in the second part of America’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, “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 ‘lover’ I’ve ever had—every friend—nothing closed
out. It’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with
it—the dreams—and paint it.”
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 “sexy as hell.”
Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet
Rosset, Jr.—scion of a financier who was head of Chicago’s
Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on
to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell’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.
Mitchell’s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East
Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler,
Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others;
going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games—and living an
entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil.
Mitchell’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
painter’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
”Electrifying. . .Patricia Albers emulates Mitchell’s
painterly mission to conjoin “accuracy and intensity” in this
transfixing and justly revealing portrait.”
—Booklist (starred)
”Patricia Albers vividly chronicles the artist’s 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. .
. Vibrantly written and carefully researched. . . Albers constructs
a fluid, energetic narrative of Mitchell’s complicated life and
work.”
—Publishers Weekly
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