The Best Sale Ever
Lot 16:
Description
Keywords: No Reserve, Abstract Expressionist, Museum Worthy, 20th Century Master, Famous Artist, 20th Century Art, Oil Painting
Summary:
Joan Mitchell hand signed, large-format oil pastel on paper featuring a dense abstract field of layered vertical and diagonal strokes in green, turquoise, violet, and black over a light ground. The composition emphasizes rhythmic gesture and color interaction, characteristic of Mitchell’s mature abstract language. Signed and inscribed along the lower margin, and presented floated in a wide gilt frame with mat.
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was an American painter and printmaker associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Born in Chicago, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York, where she participated in the landmark “9th Street Show” in 1951 and quickly gained recognition for her gestural abstractions.
Working primarily in oil on canvas but also in pastel, drawing, and printmaking, Mitchell developed a highly individual language of energetic brushwork and intense color that often drew on “remembered landscapes” and her responses to poetry, music, and nature. From the late 1950s she increasingly divided her time between New York and France, eventually settling in Vétheuil, near Paris, where she created many of her major late works and continued to exhibit internationally.
(Work appears in very good overall condition with strong, unfaded color and no tears or significant losses visible. Minor handling marks, light smudging, and faint surface soiling to the sheet consistent with oil pastel and age; sheet lightly toned. Frame with scattered minor nicks, rubbing, and small abrasions, but presentable and ready to hang. Not examined out of frame.)
Measurement: Art: 31 x 23 in. (78.7 x 58.4 cm.), Frame: 42 x 33 3/4 in. (106.7 x 85.7 cm.) approx
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