Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter
Marion Cajori
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Plot Summary
A powerful and intimate portrait, JOAN MITCHELL: PORTRAIT OF AN ABSTRACT PAINTER captures Mitchell's independent spirit and testifies eloquently to Mitchell's art. One of the great abstract painters of the 20th century, Mitchell was an active participant of New York's dynamic Abstract Expressionist scene and hung out with fellow painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, as well as poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and John Ashbery. In the mid-fifties, she moved to Paris, where she was part of a circle of friends that included Pierre Matisse, Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti. This elegantly edited documentary weaves together interviews with the acerbic Mitchell and other leading painters and critics, while letting her stunning pictures dominate the film. Stephen Holden of the New York Times says, "The canvases have grand chaotic romanticism. While celebrating the physical universe with an ecstatic love of color, they don't shy away from expressing a harsh, feral apprehension of nature and its violence."
Customer Reviews
Organic and Fierce
Joan Mitchell's work is explicitly astonishing. This film, which was shot in 1992, is as current as today. It is elegant, imaginative, graceful. She is a hard person to pin down and I think it is because, like her paintings, she just is. What she feels is released from her conscious manipulation, emerging, uncensored. I like the idea that her paintings are like poetry, in the way a poem is not a statement, but, rather, a summary of feelings that somehow cohere into a meaning that is best felt, rather than spoken. There's just the moving feeling. Her work is organic and fierce and much to be admired. This film did such a good job of introducing me to Mitchell, even though Mitchell resisted the filmmakers. I don't think her resistance is intentional. i think that Mitchell is just a rare, visual creature for whom words are wholly inadequate. I watched it twice in a row.
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