Joan Mitchell

Although the abstract expressionist crowd of 1950s New York was infamously macho, the formidable Joan Mitchell always held her own, inside and outside the studio. Today, with a record of €5.2 million ($7 million)—the second-highest price achieved by a female artist at auction—set last year at Christie’s Paris for an untitled 1971 canvas, Mitchell is beginning to catch up to some of her male peers in market performance.

Born in 1925 to a wealthy Chicago family—her maternal grandfather, Charles Stroebel, was the structural engineer for many of Chicago’s bridges—and classically trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mitchell moved to New York in 1947. Her painting predilections quickly shifted toward abstraction after she saw Arshile Gorky’s calligraphic Surrealism and Jackson Pollock’s heroically scaled arabesques. Determined to be part of this heady new art scene, Mitchell established her studio at its epicenter, on West Ninth Street, and soon befriended Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and Franz Kline, among other members of the hard-living New York School. She increased the size of her paintings and experimented with muscular, gestural brushwork.

Mitchell exhibited alongside her contemporaries in the seminal Ninth Street Show, curated by the dealer Leo Castelli in 1951, and was given solo shows at New York’s highly regarded New and Stable galleries throughout the 1950s. Although always maintaining a Manhattan studio, she lived primarily in France starting in 1959, eventually settling in rural Vétheuil, north of Paris, on an expansive property she bought with the share of the Stroebel trust she inherited from her mother in 1967. Residing in the countryside inspired a more lyrical approach to abstraction, filled with evocations of sunlight and shimmering water in a palette rich in yellows, blues, greens and violets. She vacillated between dense, thickly painted compositions covering the entire surface—characteristic of her work from the 1950s and her ’80s “Grande Vallée” series—and more centripetal compositions suspended on open canvases, exemplified by her somber-hued pieces from the early 1960s and brilliantly colored paintings of the late ’60s and ’70s.

Perhaps because she’d moved away from the hub of the art world or because she was a woman, or perhaps for both reasons, Mitchell, who died in 1992, didn’t make it into the pantheon inhabited by de Kooning, Gorky, Kline, Pollock and Rothko, whose prices regularly reach into the tens of millions. She emerged from the margins, however, with the 2002 traveling retrospective of her work mounted by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “Historically, there was always some reluctance to put her in the first rank of Abstract Expressionists,” says Robert Manley, the head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department in New York, “but the Whitney retrospective started to change everyone’s perception about Joan Mitchell. Increasingly people are recognizing that she is as great an American artist as the 1950s produced.”

John Cheim, the director of New York’s Cheim & Read gallery, the exclusive agent for the sale and promotion of work in the Joan Mitchell Foundation Collection, agrees. “Joan is no more a second-generation Abstract Expressionist,” he says, referring to the term often applied to Mitchell and such colleagues as Sam Francis, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Jack Tworkov, “than Kline or Guston, both of whom were making figurative paintings until the late 1940s. She was just younger and a woman. She is the definition of the Abstract Expressionist and one of the great colorists, along with de Kooning and Rothko.”

The reassessment of Mitchell’s work prompted by the 2002 show has boosted her prices. As an illustration, Manley points to a 1969 canvas from her “Sunflowers” series, whose radiant bursts of yellow were influenced by her proximity to nature in Vétheuil. The picture sold at Sotheby’s in 2000 for $280,000. When it came up again, at Christie’s in 2006, it brought just over $2 million. “Her market has improved since then,” says Manley. “I think now it’s more of a $3 million–to–$4 million painting.” From October 23 through December 20, the canvas will be on loan at Cheim & Read for an exhibition devoted to Mitchell’s paintings, pastels and etchings inspired by sunflowers and executed from the 1960s until her death. The paintings range in price from $2 million to $6 million, the works on paper from $100,000 to $300,000.