Sunflower III

A leading American painter and printmaker, Joan Mitchell was a contemporary of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell and was widely regarded as one of the supreme colorists of the abstract expressionist movement. Her lyrical abstractions are generally based on actual physcial entities, such as landscapes or studies of flowers. Commenting on Mitchell's art, E.C. Goossen wrote: The Abstract Expressionist generation out of which she came was forever searching for abstract subject matter with transcendent implications, even though it professed to believe that art was its own message... But unlike those contemporary painters who 'discover' their subject in the process of painting, Mitchell works from an idea and builds on it. Mitchell spent the last thirty years of her life in Paris, where she died in 1992.