THE DEFIANT ONE

In a 1986 interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin, Joan Mitchell said, with characteristic don’t-give-a-damn humor, “I call myself a ‘lady painter’ and AEOH—Abstract Expressionist Old Hat.” Of course, with regard to both those monikers, she was anything but. For certain, Mitchell was a gestural abstractionist, and her highly emotional paintings are what the word “expressionist” was meant to describe, but she evolved somewhat independently of the Ab-Ex scene, choosing to leave New York for France and swim directly against the art-historical current that seemed to be flowing from the Old World to the New during the 1950s. While she is often called a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, her work is so strikingly individual that it is hard to justify lumping it with any cohort, and insofar as “second-generation” connotes an epigone or latter-day version, it sits ill with Mitchell’s vitality as an artist.

And as for “lady painter,” Mitchell had the distinction of being granted more credibility by the sexist, maledominated art establishment of the ’50s and ’60s than any of the other women abstract artists of her milieu—such as, for example, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, or Grace Hartigan. The reasons for that are