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JOAN MITCHELL’S “WHITE TERRITORY” (1970-1971): NATURE AND PAINTING IN

THE EMERGING DIGITAL AGE

Abigail Christine Swaringam

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Art History

Chair:

NikaNika Elder,Elder, Ph.DPh.D..

Jordan Amirkhani, Amirkhani Ph.D. Ph D

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

August 14, 2020 Date

2020

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

Abigail Christine Swaringam

2020

JOAN MITCHELL’S “WHITE TERRITORY” (1970-1971): NATURE AND PAINTING IN

THE EMERGING DIGITAL AGE

Abigail Christine Swaringam

ABSTRACT

In 1968, using an inheritance from her mother, painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) bought a property in Vétheuil, France, where she would live for the rest of her life. There, she created vibrant abstract paintings that combined dripping washes and globular brushwork on white backgrounds, but their titles often referenced foliage, land, and territories. One such work, White

Territory, painted from 1970 to 1971, layered these two types of brushwork through a time- consuming studio practice. Existing scholarship on Mitchell terms her a “Second Generation

Abstract Expressionist” and suggests her work pays homage to the formative movement. Rather than read Mitchell’s White Territory as belated Abstract Expressionism, my thesis examines the painting’s relationship to the historic home in which it was made. From 1878 to 1881, Monet had owned the Vétheuil property that Mitchell bought almost one hundred years later. There, he painted landscapes of Vétheuil’s cathedral, the river Seine, and his lush garden, capturing the appearance of the countryside and its changing weather patterns. Mitchell’s paintings at Vétheuil evacuated mimetic references to the home and the town and, instead, represented the dynamism of nature itself. Through her slow, calculated process of combining and layering different types of brushwork, in works like White Territory, Mitchell depicted nature as a force one encounters rather than a site to behold. Her paintings thus reimagined the idea of landscape and re-asserted the significance of nature and painting in the emerging digital age.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis could not have been possible without the commitment, support, and compassion of my adviser, the faculty of the art history department, my family, and my peers.

First, I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. Nika Elder, for her countless hours of support and constructive feedback. She possesses a vigorous, undying creativity when thinking about art and its history that has led me down unexpected, but always exciting paths of research. My thesis would not be possible without her thoughtfulness, dedication, and smart questions. I would also like to extend my thanks to the art history faculty at American University. Special appreciation and gratitude go to Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, Dr. Andrea Pearson, and Dr. Joanne Allen for their words of support, guidance, and feedback during this process.

I am grateful for the support and love that my family has shown me during the course of my degree. They have endured countless hours on the phone brainstorming endless possibilities, celebrating success, and consoling tears. Many thanks also go to my supportive and engaged peers. It has been a true pleasure finding a community of like-minded art historians to grow and share this experience with.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 MITCHELL AT VÉTHEUIL: PAINTING NATURE IN- PROGRESS ...... 7

CHAPTER 2 PAINTING NATURE AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE DIGITAL AGE ...... 22

CONCLUSION ...... 30

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 34

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Joan Mitchell, White Territory, 1970-1971, oil on canvas, 282.9 cm x 223.5 cm (111 3/8 in. x 88 in.), Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1974/2.21………...32

Figure 2: Joan Mitchell, Ladybug, 1957, oil on canvas, 6' 5 7/8" x 9' (197.9 x 274 cm), © Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, 385.1961…………………………32

Figure 3: Joan Mitchell, Student Gouache—Yellow Boats, c. 1942-43, gouache on paper, Estate of Joan Mitchell………………………………………………………………………………….32

Figure 4: Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955, oil on linen, 203.2 × 203.2 cm (80 × 80 in.), © The Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art, 1958.193………………………………………………………....32

Figure 5: Joan Mitchell, Vétheuil, 1967-1968, oil on canvas, 77” x 51”, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Greenberg, New York……………………………………………………………32

Figure 6: Claude Monet, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23 3/4 × 31 1/2 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1158...32

Figure 7: Claude Monet, Vétheuil, 1901, oil on canvas, 90.2 × 93.4 cm (35 1/2 × 36 3/4 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.447………………………………..32

Figure 8: Claude Monet, Vétheuil, 1901, oil on canvas, 90 × 93 cm (36 7/16 × 36 5/8 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1161……………………………………………..32

Figure 9: Claude Monet, La Débâcle (The Breakup of the Ice), 1880, 61 cm x 100 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Legat Eugen Loeb 1960………………………………………….....32

Figure 10: Detail of White Territory……………………………………………………………..32

Figure 11: Detail of White Territory……………………………………………………………..32

Figure 12: Detail of White Territory……………………………………………………………..32

Figure 13: Detail of White Territory……………………………………………………………..32

Figure 14: Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008, RSS newsfeed, paper, and printer, dimensions variable, Collection SFMOMA, Purchase through gifts of Helen Crocker Russell, the Crocker Family, and anonymous donors, by exchange, and the Accessions Committee Fund, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn………………………………………33

Figure 15: Sol Lewitt, Drawing Series 1968 (Fours), 1968……………………………………..33

INTRODUCTION

Although Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) has long been embraced as a post-war American artist, the defining moments in her career took place in France. Her artistic relationship with the country began in 1948. After graduating in 1947 with her B.F.A. from the Art Institute of

Chicago, Mitchell won the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship from the Art

Institute of Chicago, with which she traveled to France for the first time.1 First, she painted in

Paris and, later, in Le Lavandou.2 After traveling around France from 1948 to 1949, Mitchell returned to the United States and pursued a full-time painting career in New York. There, she met and became acquainted with artists and critics who would be canonized in the field: Grace

Hartigan, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Irving Sandler, Helen

Frankenthaler, and Clement Greenberg—to name just a few. Alongside many of them, she became one of the few women to be part of “The Club,” or the mainly homosocial group of artists in New York working under the Abstract Expressionist label.3 Throughout the 50’s and

60’s, she often travelled to back to France to paint and, in 1969, she ultimately moved there, producing much well-known work in her adopted country.

Nonetheless, as a woman who painted with visceral brushwork, Mitchell has often been categorized as a “Second Generation Abstract Expressionist.” Critics used the label to refer to younger artists, like Mitchell, who joined the Abstract Expressionists in New York in the later

1 On their website, The Joan Mitchell Foundation lists the scholarship as the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship from the Art Institute of Chicago. However, two key book sources on Mitchell list this scholarship as the Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship. See “Biography & CV,” Joan Mitchell Foundation, accessed June 4, 2020, https://joanmitchellfoundation.org/work/artist/bio; Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1988), 213; Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002), 17.

2 Bernstock, 213.

3 Bernstock, 18. 1

half of the 1940’s. While it is true that Mitchell moved to New York after Abstract

Expressionism had already began to unfold, using generational terms frames her as derivative of the elder artists and the formative movement. While this is an unfair label for her complex and individualized career, it remains a common art historical term for her and many other painters in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

In his 1997 monograph on Mitchell, which commemorates the artist on the occasion of her death, Klaus Kertess states that Mitchell was “one of the few of her generation who would remain committed to Abstract Expressionism for the duration of her life.”4 In the Whitney

Museum of American Art’s 2002 retrospective catalog on Mitchell, museum Director Maxwell

L. Anderson laments the lack of critical recognition during her lifetime for Mitchell’s contributions to Abstract Expressionism.5 He writes, “…her true contribution was never fully appreciated during her lifetime. Although she is a mythic character among artists and insiders, the public reputation she deserves has perhaps never been fully developed.”6 Jane Livingston, the curator of the 2002 Joan Mitchell retrospective, explains Mitchell’s career through the lens of other Abstract Expressionist painters. As Livingston pinpoints shifts in the artist’s style over time, she asserts that Mitchell “adopted” vocabulary from Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.7

Despite contemporary efforts to reassess and reframe how art history discusses artists who self-identified as female and worked alongside prominent male Abstract Expressionist artists, most recent scholars continue to term Mitchell a “Second Generation Abstract

4 Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, Inc., 1997), 16.

5 Livingston, 7.

6 Ibid

7 Livingston, 19-20. 2

Expressionist” and read her paintings through this lens.8 But the introduction to Mitchell’s 1972 exhibition catalog at the Everson Museum of Art offers a rare example of the field’s early frustration with this label. In the introduction, James Harithas, the director of the museum writes,

“…classifying Joan Mitchell’s paintings as simply second generation abstract-expressionism, and then going on to find in them redeeming personal qualities or distinguishing them from earlier artists (as many critics have done) is not really meaningful.”9 As Harithas also argues, the term “Second Generation” implies that Mitchell’s practice is derivative of the former movement, which both degrades her creative integrity, and places the male-dominated art movement at the pinnacle of art historical taste. My thesis argues against the continued classification of Mitchell as a “Second Generation Abstract Expressionist” and seeks to redefine her work on its own terms.

In 1968, Joan Mitchell purchased an old, countryside property in Vétheuil, France. The artist, born and raised in the United States, first moved to Frémicourt, France in 1959 with her partner and fellow painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle. In 1968, Mitchell’s mother passed away, and she received an impressive inheritance. That same year, she decided to purchase her own property— one that she hoped would give her a larger and more private studio.10 On the Vétheuil property

8 For recent literature focusing on her New York career, see Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018).

9 James Harithas, My Five Years in the Country (New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1972), unpaginated.

10 Up until this point, Mitchell painted in apartments that she normally shared with her partners. She frequently complained of not having privacy when painting and notes that she purchased this property to build her first private studio. Mitchell claims other practical reasons for moving there—one being that she did not have to walk her dogs, and second that she could then paint on stretched canvases. Her prior apartments had stairs which were too narrow to bring a stretched canvas down. This limitation forced Mitchell to paint on sheets of canvas tacked to walls, rather than stretched canvases. This practice risked cracking and distortion of her paintings as they were moved and stretched post-painting. While Mitchell claims the move to Vétheuil was for purely practical reasons, my thesis examines the turn in her work at Vétheuil as directly related to the site’s historical significance. See Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell Lady Painter: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 312. 3

stood a stone house referred to as La Tour, a fourteenth-century portico, an orchard, a garden, a clear view of the Seine river, and a stucco cottage. But perhaps its greatest selling point was the property’s former owner: Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) lived and painted in the stucco cottage at Vétheuil from 1878 to 1881.11

As Livingston asserts, “France changed Mitchell’s work perceptibly.”12 There, she started to employ a wider range of painterly techniques, broader chromatic varieties, and incorporated new thin, airy layers into her work.13 These techniques were paired with her already established dense, impasto mark-making. White Territory (fig. 1), painted between 1970 and 1971, was one of the first paintings Mitchell made after her permanent move to Vétheuil in 1969 and exhibits these visual changes. The canvas was one of several in a loose series titled after territories and fields.14 Alongside White Territory, Mitchell produced several paintings with titles like Vétheuil,

My Landscape, My Landscape II, and Blue Territory.

While one might expect these paintings to depict the lush lands they are titled after,

Mitchell’s Vétheuil paintings lack the characteristic traits of traditional landscape paintings—like one-point perspective. Instead, her paintings are of patches of translucent color, impasto swaths, and twisting marks. The brushwork in White Territory twists around the central area of the canvas, scattering into the less populated edges of the white canvas. Indeed, one could say the

11 Ibid

12 Livingston, 24.

13 Livingston, 25.

14 Mitchell’s early paintings at Vétheuil were first categorized into “fields” and “territory” groups in the 1972 exhibition, “My Five Years in the Country,” at the Everson Museum of Art. They have continuously been referred to as series in scholarship on her. Marcia Tucker, the curator of the Whitney’s 1974 exhibition of Mitchell, drew from the Everson Museum of Art’s organization. She cites this in her 10th footnote. Tucker states that Mitchell has claims she does not paint in “series” but paints in terms of subject. While these may not be an explicit series to Mitchell, they clearly draw from one another. See Marcia Tucker, Joan Mitchell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974), 17; Harithas, My Five Years in the Country (New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1972), unpaginated. 4

painting appears to be still “in-progress,” as if its marks could still be taking form and shape. By implicating her work in the lineage of landscape painting through her titles, yet using abstract, active brushwork, Mitchell produces paintings that show nature as a constantly evolving force.

Mitchell’s painterly engagement with nature as her subject ran counter to the most visible avant-garde practices of the day. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s witnessed a wave of cultural and technological developments that permeated the works of American artists and spurred an interest in numbers, systems, and digital processes. Because none of these developments appear in Mitchell’s work, scholars have not read the paintings in relation to them. But that is precisely the point. Mitchell’s oil paintings of the early 1970’s mark a return to nature. While Conceptual artists embraced and incorporated technology into their artistic practices, many cultural thinkers feared the impacts of technology on humanity.

In chapter one, I explore the impact of the Vétheuil property and its storied lineage on

Mitchell’s work. Rather than the sites and sounds of the region, Mitchell drew inspiration from the property’s former owner, Monet, and his investment in nature. But while Monet wanted to make paintings that captured its changing appearance, Mitchell used a rigorous process of abstract mark-making to represent nature as an evolving, active force through brushwork that appears “in-progress.” While traditionally nature was viewed as an inherently visible resource, her work framed nature as an invisible force that we encounter.

In chapter two, I explore how Mitchell’s decision to paint the forces of nature through her

“in-progress” brushwork directly relates to a tension between the digital and the handmade in her contemporary artistic moment. Mitchell slowly and methodically unfolds abstraction in her studio, working on paintings like White Territory for up to one year. Her slow, hand-driven process evoked the dynamism of nature, in an abstract way, and was directly opposed to the

digital processes and technologies permeating the Western world in the mid-twentieth century.

Thus, as she asserted the power of nature, Mitchell also reasserted the primacy of painting and the handmade in the digital age.

CHAPTER 1

MITCHELL AT VÉTHEUIL: PAINTING NATURE IN-PROGRESS

White Territory is a vertically-oriented, non-representational oil painting measuring over

9 feet tall by 7 feet wide. Although its title proclaims the painting is white, ironically, the painting is full of vibrant and active color. Nimble strokes, watery swaths, and impasto chunks of white, yellow ochre, viridian, light blue, and black activate the painting’s surface through a combination of opaque and translucent layers. It is clear from looking closely at the painting’s layers that White Territory was not a spontaneous attempt to document an actual place, but a long and arduous process of revision in the studio. The work marks a change in Mitchell’s approach for, up until this point in her career, she was known for thick, dense canvases that utilized impasto brushwork and the “all-over” technique made popular in the 1940s.15 For example, Ladybug (fig. 2), painted in 1957, comprises thick, horizontal lines of color that span the surface of the painting. The painting is built up through dense, bold strokes that draw attention to the variety of brush sizes and colors used.

But, while at Vétheuil, Mitchell added a new technique to her painterly arsenal. She began to use translucent washes of color that normally appeared in semi-rectangular shapes.

White Territory adopts these new, thin patches of light blue, yellow, and seafoam green, whose loose pigments drip down the canvas, indicating the painting’s vertical gravity. Using a rather lengthy and arduous process, Mitchell combined the thick, opaque swaths that were already

15 The “all-over” technique was coined at the height of Abstract Expressionism. It refers to paintings that lack traditional compositional structure (foreground, middle ground, and background) and focal points. Critics, like Clement Greenberg, claimed that paintings using the “all over” technique often emphasized the painting’s flat surface. See Annie Dell’Aria. "All-over painting." Grove Art Online. 2003; Accessed 1 May. 2020. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e- 7000001940. 7

typical of her style with her newly developed, thin layers of dripping paint. The addition of the translucent washes provided visual contrast, but also gave the paintings an unfinished look.

Although the work does not picture Vétheuil, Mitchell’s immediate environment was indeed important. Vétheuil is a small, rural village along the Seine river, about an hour’s drive from Argenteuil and Paris. On one side of the village is the floodplain of Presqu’ile de Moisson, and on the other stands the town of Lavacourt. One of Vétheuil’s notable landmarks is the church of Notre-Dame, which was begun in the twelfth century and was refurbished to have a

Renaissance façade.16 When Mitchell’s mother, Marion Strobel, passed away in 1967, the artist inherited a large sum from her maternal grandfather, Charles Strobel.17 With her newly gained funds, Mitchell decided to move to France, where she had often lived, for good.

According to her biographer, Patricia Albers, in 1966 Mitchell was investigating and compiling renovation estimates for island properties that would be shared between her, her then- partner, and two friends.18 Before she could make a decision, one of the friends, an American composer named Betsy Jolas, showed Mitchell an ad for the Vétheuil property in Le Monde, and

Mitchell was immediately taken with it.19 The ad listed a number of luxurious rural features: an orchard, a garden, a vast lawn, an impeccable view of the Seine river, several small, old buildings, including a stone house referred to as La Tour, a fourteenth-century portico, and a stucco cottage that once belonged to the painter Claude Monet.20

16 Richard Thomson, “Vétheuil 1878-1881,” in Claude Monet 1840-1926 (Paris: Galeries Nationales, 2011), 157.

17 Livingston, 32.

18 Albers, 312.

19 Ibid

20 Ibid 8

While Albers contends that the painter’s interest was practically motivated, Mitchell— already a practicing artist in her own right—surely would have been interested in its artistic pedigree, too. Monet resided and painted in the stucco cottage between 1878 and 1881. The property’s address, 12, avenue Claude Monet, reflected its artistic and historic status to the public, including Mitchell.21 Her move to the famous painter’s property drew attention in the

American press, and many scholars pinpoint it as a turning point in her career. It might seem that

Mitchell acquired the property with the intention of finding inspiration both from it and the work that Monet had produced during his residence. Yet verbal interviews suggest that she was dismissive of him and his work.22 For example, in 1991, on a four-day trip to interview Mitchell for the New York Times, when Deborah Solomon asked Mitchell about the paintings Monet made at Vétheuil, the artist switched the subject away from Monet to his doting wife Camille, who had supported her husband’s career and who had died on the property: “You know, she’s my neighbor,” Mitchell stated in reference to Camille’s burial at a nearby graveyard.23 Mitchell also infantilized and feminized Monet by purposefully mispronouncing his name as “Monnet,” like

“bonnet” in English, rather than correctly, in French, with a silent “t.”24 She also grumbled whenever his name was mentioned and exclaimed, “I bought this house because I liked the view, not out of any love for Monet.”25

21 Albers, 375.

22 Deborah Solomon, “In Monet’s Light,” New York Times, November 24, 1991, ProQuest.

23 Solomon, 6. For more information on Camille’s passing at Vétheuil see Ruth Butler, “Death in a Village by the River,” in Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 194-202.

24 Solomon, 1.

25 This act suggests that Mitchell was both attuned to and affronted by the gendered dynamic of the couple, whose relationship was defined in large part by the advancement of the professional success of a husband by a wife, behind the scenes, and without credit. It also suggests by extension her acute awareness of her own position as a female artist and of the gendered challenges she and other women of the period faced in establishing and promoting their 9

While Mitchell publicly dismissed Monet in the interview with Solomon, other evidence suggests that he mattered for the work she created at Vétheuil. For example, on the afternoon of their interview, Solomon pressed the painter to discuss the paintings Monet made at Vétheuil.

Mitchell agreed to bring his catalogue raisonné to the balcony where the two looked at images of

Vétheuil during winter, frozen in snow.26 If Mitchell was so adamant about her disinterest in

Monet, why did she have his catalogue raisonné?27 Mitchell’s distaste for Monet was notable, but his paintings from Vétheuil were clearly a point of departure for the work that she made there

(perhaps even a foil for it)—one that has yet to be fully contended with by scholars.

Throughout the scholarship on Mitchell, many recognize her move to Vétheuil as a turning point in her career and style. In her discussion of the Vétheuil paintings for a 2002 catalogue essay on Mitchell, Jane Livingston writes, “France changed Mitchell’s work perceptibly,” but attributes the shift to Mitchell’s romantic relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle, who she characterizes as a French exponent of Abstract Expressionism.28 In a 2002 ArtNews article reviewing the Whitney’s exhibition, Cynthia Nadelman states that in Mitchell’s Vétheuil paintings “a sense of place began to appear,” likening them to works by French painter Pierre

Bonnard.29 In the introduction to the 1972 exhibition catalog for the Everson Museum of Art, where White Territory was shown for the first time, James Harithas notes a newfound sense of

careers. In the same interview with Solomon, Mitchell speaks to her own unequal experience in an artistic partnership with Jean-Paul Riopelle. She says, “During the years we were together, there wasn’t a single painting of mine in the house. I don’t recommend living with another artist. Someone gets squished.” Thus, her characterization of Monet may have been a response not only to the sexism of his historical moment but hers as well. For quotation see Solomon, 5.

26 Solomon, 6.

27 Solomon, 1.

28 Livingston, 24.

29 Cynthia Nadelman, “Joan Mitchell,” ArtNews, October 2002, 153. 10

light and focus on sunflowers, but primarily characterizes Mitchell’s new paintings and her process as a “painful day by day reassessment of her life.”30

Like many accounts of Mitchell’s career, these three examples display the urge to read

Mitchell’s new work in Vétheuil as beholden to elder male artists or as illustrative of her biography and identity. While scholars, like Nadelman and Harithas, note the landscape’s features, such as the light shining on her garden or the Seine, as reasons for perceptible changes in Mitchell’s work, Mitchell’s paintings from Vétheuil do not directly depict the landscape’s most attractive landmarks, nor does her process engage with her surroundings.

White Territory was not an homage to Monet or any other male artist, but, rather, a revision of Monet’s ideas about nature. Whereas Monet was interested in the appearance of nature, Mitchell was interested in nature as a force. Through the artist’s slow, methodical process and seemingly “unfinished” brushwork, White Territory manifests the continuous changes of nature over time. By evacuating natural referents and focusing on the labored process of painting, Mitchell reimagined landscape from an empirical subject that could be framed and presented through the human eye to a dynamic, anti-retinal force that exists beyond human time and conception. Through its process and visual qualities, Mitchell’s artistic practice participates in a broader reconceptualization of nature that was occurring in the 1970’s.

Mitchell’s Early Landscapes

Mitchell was well versed in landscape painting and produced more traditional, legible iterations of the genre earlier in her life and career. In 1942, she graduated from Francis W.

Parker School in Chicago and enrolled as an English major at Smith College in Northampton,

30 Harithas is referring to the recent passing of Mitchell’s mother when he makes this claim; James Harithas, My Five Years in the Country (New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1972), unpaginated.

Massachusetts.31 That summer, before starting at Smith, Mitchell visited the Oxbow art colony in

Saugatuck, Michigan, which was operated by The Art Institute of Chicago.32 There, she learned lithography, drew from life for many hours daily, and painted the landscape en plein air.33 Her

Student Gouache—Yellow Boats (fig. 3) c.1942-1943 is one of the few surviving examples of the work she produced at Oxbow, and it hews to the conventions of landscape painting. The gouache depicts a public landscape setting, either a lakeside or a park, and people interacting with the landscape.

In this work, Mitchell uses receding forms to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space. For example, the tall, undrawn sails of the center boat overlap the edge of the lake, which creates a legible foreground, middle ground, and background. The gouache utilizes a repoussoir, a French term literally meaning “to push back,” which is a traditional pictorial device used by

European artists—typically an object, usually leaning towards one side of the foreground—to lead the viewer’s eye into the depths of a picture.34 In the case of Student Gouache—Yellow

Boats, the repoussoir is the large sailboat to the left of center. Surrounding the boat are lines representing the water’s rippling surface, which curve backwards and lead the viewer’s eye to the horizon. These early works thus draw upon the long precedent of representing three- dimensional space upon a two-dimensional surface.

Mitchell moved to New York in December of 1947, and some of her earliest mature works retained a connection to landscape painting but embraced looser marks and began to

31 Livingston, 12. 32 Livingston, 16.

33 Ibid

34 "Repoussoir." Grove Art Online. 2003; Accessed 28 April. 2020. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e- 7000071531. 12

explore increasingly illegible forms.35 While her works became more abstract, her titles still referenced specific locations, and the paintings visibly evoked those sites. For example,

Mitchell’s City Landscape (fig. 4) from 1955 offers an overarching view of the dense, colorful, and dynamic urban environment of New York City from a distant vantage point. The viewer looks out over the top of the city, whose architectural elements melt into a blob of activity and endless color. Although City Landscape is abstracted and does not legibly depict the rooftops of

New York City in the 1950’s, it reflects the city’s active growth and bustling activity through the cluster of shapes rising out from the center of the canvas.

As Mitchell’s career progressed, her landscapes became more illegible. And, once she permanently moved to France in 1959, her work’s connection to landscape becomes harder to pinpoint visually. For example, Vétheuil (fig. 5), painted from 1967 to 1968, lacks any identifiable features of the landscape itself. Unlike City Landscape, which evoked the clusters of buildings and the bustling character of New York, Vétheuil comprises multiple registers; unrecognizable clusters float on the upper third of the painting, accompanied by some smaller sections of color in the lower register. Vétheuil’s lack of identifiable characteristics, despite being titled after her new home, mirrors the non-representational quality of White Territory.

In the 1988 catalog for Mitchell’s retrospective at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Judith Bernstock observes that by the mid-1960s, Mitchell’s work had turned away from urban references and towards suggestions of nature.36 She reads the artist’s shift in subject matter as an expression of Mitchell’s feelings about her Paris studio being

35 Mitchell moved to a flat beneath the Brooklyn Bridge where she lived with her then-partner, and fellow artist, Barney Rossett; Livingston, 18.

36 Bernstock, 66. 13

demolished as well as recent deaths in the artist’s family.37 In regards to her “territory” paintings of the early 1970’s, Bernstock claims that the term territory “[implies] possession, property, and privacy, associated with closed, fixed entities, and thus are marked by more distinct, self- enclosed, compact shapes.”38 Bernstock thus reads the titles and forms of Mitchell’s paintings as a reflection of her feeling of being fenced in.39 Rather than an index of the artist’s emotional or psychic space, however, we can understand “territory” as an alternate way to refer to, and define,

“landscape.” Understanding the word in this way helps explain how and why Mitchell responded to the property’s previous and illustrious owner.

Monet at Vétheuil

Monet lived at Vétheuil from 1878-1881. He moved there on account of his depreciating income, declining response to his paintings from Argenteuil (the town he lived in prior to this move), and the complicated birth of his second son.40 Carole McNamara notes that living in

Vétheuil was less expensive, yet it lacked the hustle and bustle of Monet’s previous places of residence.41 Like many other Impressionists in Europe, Monet had built his early reputation by painting modern Paris and its inhabitants. For example, Monet’s Arrival of the Normandy Train,

Gare Saint-Lazare (fig. 6) from 1877 depicts a train station where a large throng of bourgeois residents gathers to board the locomotive. In the painting, Monet focuses on recent industrial developments in France, depicting new modes of transportation that affected the speed and

37 Bernstock, 70.

38 Bernstock, 126.

39 Ibid

40 Thomson, 156.

41 Carole McNamara, “Monet’s Vétheuil Paintings: Site, Subject, and Débâcles,” in Monet at Vétheuil: The Turning Point (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1998), 67. 14

efficiency of life in urban France. As scholars on Mitchell have noted a significant shift in her paintings produced at Vétheuil, the same goes for Monet. In his catalog essay, “Rural Idylls:

Vétheuil,” Daniel Zamani writes that Monet’s time at Vétheuil “marked a decisive turning point in his artistic interests.”42 In contrast to his earlier depictions of industrialization and speed,

Monet’s paintings at Vétheuil lacked people, urban markers, and the speed of city life. For example, on a trip back to the site in 1901, Monet painted two versions of the landscape, both titled Vétheuil (figs. 7 and 8). Unlike Monet’s earlier work, these two paintings lack any reference to urbanity.

Monet clearly turned away from depicting culture, but he substituted an interest in nature and, specifically, weather. In these two paintings, Monet painted the exact same view of the village, but with different palettes and temperatures. Both distance the viewer from the city by placing the Seine in the foreground, and no humans are present within the image. By painting the same view, but with different colors, the pair reads as two images where time has passed. It appears that Monet is interested in visible changes to the landscape, often showing how colors represent a change in time of day, a change in weather, or a change in season. His interest is the visual and temporal experience of nature.

With this shift in subject matter came a shift in technique, too. Monet started to do more work in the studio. However, he retained—to varying degrees—the sur le motif technique that he had gained fame for. The tradition of en plein air painting, beginning in Rome in the 1780’s and surviving until Parisian Cubism in the 1910’s, is based on direct observation.43 Popularized by

42 Daniel Zamani, “Rural Idylls: Vétheuil,” in Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2019), 158.

43 Anthea Callen, The Work of Art: Plein-Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reakiton Books, 2015), 7. 15

the Impressionists, the technique entailed working directly from the subject rather than from a preconceived idea of it. This meant painting out in the landscape itself, looking directly at a still life, or from a sitter for a portrait. Although Impressionists are often described as painters of fleeting moments, or “impressions,” Monet’s later paintings combined observation with imagination to achieve his desired pictures of nature.

In “Monet and the Challenges of Impressionism in the 1880s,” art historian Paul Tucker characterizes Monet’s interest in painting the rural and the temporal as a desire to reassert his dominance in the Impressionist oeuvre, to display his nationalism and love of the French countryside, and to assert nature as “magisterial, a source of wonder and fulfillment, a power that is at once elusive and omnipresent, chilling and restorative.”44 Tucker’s analysis reveals Monet’s choice to depict the appearance of the French landscape, rather than its social, cultural, or historic aspects. In his catalog essay for an exhibition on Monet in 2011, John House states that

Monet “adapted his paint-handling for the specific scene and weather conditions.”45 House emphasizes Monet’s dedication to choosing thick and thin paint depending on the condition of the weather, which reveals his attention to the appearance of the landscape and its condition over anything else.

Monet’s paintings from Vétheuil turn away from his previous depictions of the “modern” and culture. Instead, he adapts his technique to his new subject matter: nature. His paintings characterize nature as observable moments in time, most commonly showing varying weather conditions of the Seine. For example, his painting La Débâcle (fig. 9) depicts the ice breaking up

44 Paul Tucker, “Monet and the Challenges of Impressionism in the 1880s,” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007), 242.

45 John House, “Monet’s Subject,” in Monet 1840-1926 (Paris: Galeries Nationales, 2011), 23. 16

on the Seine river using dense, thick strokes and limited color palettes.46 By choosing to paint varying states of weather, it becomes clear that Monet was most interested in the appearance of nature over its cultural significance.

Mitchell At Vétheuil: Anti-Landscape

Mitchell’s canvases from Vétheuil are extremely different than the ones produced by

Monet at the same site. Indeed, Mitchell’s paintings of the early 1970’s, like White Territory, do not depict the landscape of Vétheuil at all. Rather than paint the scenic countryside as Monet had, White Territory comprises textures, opacities, and colors of paint. The painting contains watery patches and impasto chunks of white, yellow ochre, viridian, light blue, and black that lack any identifiable connection to Vétheuil or even landscape painting. Read in relation to emerging understandings of nature, however, it becomes clear Mitchell’s work engages with the genre. But, rather than the appearance of nature, she depicts it as a dynamic, evolving force.

Mitchell’s understanding of nature as a constantly changing force is emblematic of emerging ideas of nature in the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s. This era, for example, gave rise to

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Ronald Hepburn’s notion of “Environmental Aesthetics,” and

Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle. Each of these authors sought to understand and define

46 Monet moved to Vétheuil on the backs of creditors after not being able to sell many pictures through his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in Paris. See McNamara, 66. Although his wife Camille was gravely ill, often requesting money to help his pay for his wife’s beside care, Daniel Zamani contends that Monet’s time spent at Vétheuil was one of the most productive periods of his entire career. See Zamani, 158. For information on Monet’s letters during his wife’s dying years, see Ruth Butler, “Death in a Village by the River,” in Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 194-202. While at Vétheuil, Monet produced over 300 paintings, which surpassed the number he produced at Argenteuil. See Zamani, 158. Charles Stuckey notes the lack of market interest in Monet’s rural landscape paintings, as still life was the genre that was catching the buyers. See Charles Stuckey, “Love, Money, and Monet’s Débâcle Paintings of 1880,” in Monet at Vetheuil: The Turning Point (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1998), 42. In order to gain more market attention, Monet began experimenting with new working methods and subject matter. His serial depictions of weather marked a conscious shift to try to access a new market and claim the artistic authority in Impressionism that he once held. His attempts were not successful until he received a solo exhibition at La Vie Moderne where he exhibited his Débâcle paintings. See Stuckey, 59. After this exhibition, fifteen of his twenty Débâcle paintings were bought, relieving his financial shortcomings of years prior. See Stuckey, 60. 17

nature on its own terms and rather than as an exhaustible resource for humanity. Carson, a marine biologist and author, was the first to publish on, and warn the public of, the human and environmental dangers of using pesticides.47 Her seminal book, Silent Spring from 1962, led others to question and explore ethical approaches to nature. In 1971, Barry Commoner, a cellular biologist, professor, and politician, wrote The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, where he presented nature as the idea that “everything is connected to everything else.”48 Ronald

Hepburn, a philosopher, responded to other contemporary philosophers who did not view nature as an aspect of aesthetics in his seminal article from 1966, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the

Neglect of Natural Beauty.” As scholar Allen Carlson has noted, Hepburn’s important text formed the foundation for a new academic field entitled Environmental Aesthetics, which addresses the relationship between nature and art.49 His text voices his frustration that aesthetics

(as a field of scholarship and inquiry) has ignored the beauty and appreciation of the natural world, often turning its attention to fine art and artistic theory. He writes, “In our day, however, writing on aesthetics attend almost exclusively to the arts and very rarely attend to natural beauty, or only in the most perfunctory manner.”50 Hepburn makes the case that art cannot provide the same experience for viewers as nature would, as art inherently frames one’s own experience in relation to their chosen subject.51 According to him, “we are in nature and a part of

47 See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962).

48 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 33.

49 See Allen Carlson, “Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics,” in Environmental Aesthetics Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground, edited by Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 13.

50 Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy (London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285. 51 Hepburn, 287.

nature; we do not stand over against it as over a painting on a wall.”52 Rather than denounce art as a lost cause, however, Hepburn calls for new theoretical approaches to aesthetics that accommodate nature’s constantly changing constitution and humanity’s varied understanding of it.53 Hepburn does not articulate or illustrate what this new conception of nature would look like in art, but Mitchell’s work from Vétheuil gives us a good idea of it. It does not prioritize human vision, but nature itself.

While there is no concrete evidence that suggests Mitchell read Hepburn’s call to action, her paintings exhibit this new understanding of nature. Mitchell’s dynamic, vigorous brushwork represents an anti-retinal understanding of nature. In an interview with Yves Michaud on her paintings in 1986, Mitchell says, “Painting is the only art form except still photography that is without time…it never ends, it is both continuous and still.”54 Mitchell explains that to her, paintings exist through time, rather than in time. Her paintings arrived at this “through time” look rather than an “in time” look through her brushwork. Indeed, one might say White Territory looks “unfinished,” as though the painting—like nature—is in a state of becoming.

For example, the dark viridian square in the upper left corner (fig. 10) is not a uniform, evenly shaped patch of color. Mitchell left the edges rough, allowing the shape and edge of her paintbrush to be visible. Not only are the edges uneven, but the color is not uniformly applied either. Mitchell appears to have painted the viridian square, then to have gone back in with a brush covered in turpentine to manipulate and thin out the previously applied paint. Using turpentine to revisit oil paint on the canvas leaves a visible record of the act, which both signals

52 Hepburn, 290.

53 Carlson, 14.

54 Yilmaz Dziewior, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings (Köln: Museum Ludwig, 2015), 55. 19

Mitchell’s active work layering and editing in the studio, but also causes the painting to visually appear to be in progress.

Another example of motion in Mitchell’s work is in the thick yellow ochre and white brushwork hovering around and to the right of the seafoam green circle (fig. 11). These dense, quick strokes do not appear anchored in their place, but appear to be moving and twisting into a broader area of paint. While the active, dripping visual effects of White Territory suggest that

Mitchell painted relatively quickly, using a wet-on-wet approach to apply the paint, she engaged in a deeply intentional working process that unfolded over an extended period and further abetted her vision and understanding of nature. This approach is evident in areas of the canvas in which the paint colors remain distinct from one another rather than blend together. For example, in one part of the canvas (fig. 12), the yellow and green might have blended to form yellow-green had

Mitchell applied them coevally. Even in the haziest areas of Mitchell’s painting, such as the light gray-green area on the left side of the canvas (fig. 13), an emphasis on individual areas of color suggest that she created these passages through layering. Thick applications, such as the use of white and yellow ochre in the center of the painting, can take several months to thoroughly dry.

While Mitchell’s slow process is materially evidenced in her paintings, she has also openly spoke about the time she spent on individual works. In an interview on her work at

Vétheuil she explains why it takes her several months to complete a painting, “I paint a little.

Then I sit and I look at the painting. Sometimes for hours.”55 Notably, this process took place in the studio rather than in nature itself. Although Mitchell’s paintings proclaim to be landscapes, territories, or fields, she did not work en plein air. And, although she is quoted saying she adored

55 Solomon, 5.

the light of the day, she never worked during it.56 Mitchell covered the windows of her studio with burlap, only working under different types of artificial light.57 Her work’s only exposure to the daylight would be when she took her canvases outdoors to assess the color she had applied in her studio the night prior.58 Her refusal to paint sur le motif during daylight or even just to have the landscape in her periphery through the window demonstrates that Mitchell did not view nature as something to be captured, framed, and displayed by the artist, but as a force to be evoked and eluded to through her slow process of layering and material choices.

While scholars like Livingston have noted that France changed Mitchell’s work, they have not pinpointed the reason for these changes. Mitchell bought the property in Vétheuil to have a space to herself, but its previous occupant left his mark. This is not to say that Mitchell paid homage to Monet—on the contrary, she worked against him and his vision of nature.

Mitchell’s canvases, which used dynamic brushwork on a white background, still appear “in- progress.” By lacking a legible, complete depiction of the landscape, Mitchell recharacterizes the idea of nature. Rather than a force to be visually understood by the human eye, Mitchell paints nature as continuous change.

56 Livingston, 32.

57 Solomon, 5.

58 Livingston, 33. 21

CHAPTER 2

PAINTING NATURE AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE DIGITAL AGE

In chapter one, I argued that Mitchell was deeply invested in the idea of nature. Despite its lack of legible references to an actual landscape, White Territory is a process-driven, slow, and calculated painting that visualizes the dynamism of nature over its appearance, which had concerned Mitchell’s predecessor at Vétheuil, Claude Monet. By using brushwork that appears unfinished and is suspended on a white background, Mitchell depicts nature as a dynamic, ever- present force. Mitchell’s deep commitment to evoke nature, rather than legibly picture it or illustrate it, hewed to emerging ideas of nature as a force rather than a resource. At a time when writers like Ronald Hepburn criticized art for reducing nature to visual illustrations, Mitchell’s work provided a new approach to natural subjects. Rather than capture nature in its perfection,

Mitchell conjured nature as infinite, abstract, and in motion.

In this chapter, I explore why Mitchell was interested in returning to the subject of nature in the early 1970’s. While many critics, scholars, and Mitchell herself posit biographical events and her interactions with other artists as driving forces behind her work, this chapter will read

Mitchell’s painting practice in relation to developments in Western culture in the early 1970’s. In her moment, Conceptual artists Hans Haacke, Sol Lewitt, and others became interested in numbers, signs, and systems. Rather than traditional hand-produced methods, such as painting, these artists used machines and sets of instructions to produce artwork. These same phenomena—namely, developments in technology—allowed everyday life to become increasingly efficient.59 While Conceptual artists saw the potential that technology brought to

59 The twentieth century witnessed numerous inventions, as well as various aspects of nature that were developed into specific fields for scientific study. For a broad introduction to these various inventions and discoveries see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2005). 22

artmaking, others feared the direction that society—and art—was heading in. Authors and artists responded to this fear, publishing their worries about an increasingly automated and distant world. In this context, Mitchell’s paintings encourage a return to nature and humility before it, but also to painting. While other American artists of her time created works that utilized newly developed digital processes and prioritized ideas over objects, Mitchell’s practice at Vétheuil looked back to a long history of landscape painting and updated it for the digital era.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, scientists in the United States developed several important technologies. One of the most notable inventions, the computer, revolutionized the role of human labor in a number of fields. The evolution of the computer opened the door for new, digital ways of interpreting phenomenological data and changes in the physical world. With the invention of the computer that we know today, the world became bound up in a discrete language of symbolic numbers. Although their use was relegated to large academic institutions, by the early 1960’s, computers could be programed to perform specific tasks. While the versions in 1960’s were bulky and do not resemble the sleek, lightweight personal devices that we presently utilize, they nonetheless ran on similar systems of coding. In 1968, the first 256-bit

RAM, or random-access memory, chip was introduced to computer technology, allowing for the storage of memory in computers.60 1970 saw the invention of the microprocessor, opening up the door to the development of the personal computer in the next decades.61

While the invention of these efficient, yet expensive, systems was funneled into institutions and the hands of the wealthy and the elite, their effects on society could be felt

60 For a history of the computer see Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: The History of the Information Machine (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996).

61 Ibid 23

through everyday citizens.62 Two books, The Analytical Machine: Computers—Past, Present and Future and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects, represent the alternative attitudes that people held towards technology at the time. Respectively, their authors embrace or fear its cultural impact.

In his 1963 book, The Analytical Machine: Computers—Past, Present and Future,

Jeremy Bernstein, a theoretical physicist, explored the history, capabilities, and impact of computers on industry and humans. Bernstein begins with the computer’s history, detailing the development of programming and describing some of the advanced mathematics that computers would enable. After his historic and scientific analysis, Bernstein addresses the expanded reach of computers in contemporary society and what continued adoption of these devices would mean for it. According to Bernstein, the word “proliferation” characterizes the history of computers, due to the skyrocketing number of machines and rapid increase in people utilizing them.63 As evidenced by Bernstein, by September of 1962, there were 16,187 computers installed in the

United States.64 Computers and Automation produced a survey that detailed over six hundred applications for computers by 1962. Notable practical applications included medical diagnosis, analyzing literary style, detecting word frequency, and language translation.65 Computers made tasks faster, but also automated. As Bernstein writes, “Frequently, I have run into numerical problems that would have taken weeks of dreary ‘hand’ computation…electronic computers do

62 Ibid

63 Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine: Computers—Past, Present and Future (New York: Random House, 1963), 81.

64 Ibid

65 Bernstein, 82.

such jobs in a matter of minutes.”66 After explaining the rapid development of computers in the

1960’s, Bernstein concludes his book by exploring the potential fusion of computers and the human brain. He takes an optimistic approach, encouraging further experimentation between human brains and machines, implying that there were many similarities between the two.67

While Bernstein encouraged exploration of human automation, other contemporary literature suggested that many feared technology’s potential deterioration or distortion of the human brain and the computer’s social impact.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher and media theorist, collaborated with Quentin

Fiore, a visual artist, to publish The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. The book was filled with photographs, cartoons, and quotes that expressed the unease and suspicion of

1960’s developing technology on social and daily life. The graphic book presented how technology could affect various aspects of individuals’ lives. The authors acutely targeted the reader as the one who should be concerned about “progress” in technology. The situation was made personal and individual through headers like: “Your job,” “Your government,” “Your education,” “Your family,” “Your neighborhood,” etc. Each section presented technology and media as a threat to the respective sphere, defining how human authority and agency were being, or could, be replaced by machines. For example, in “Your family,” McLuhan fears the influence of television on children, stating, “The family circle has widened. The whirlpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telestar, flight—far surpasses any influence mom and dad can now bear.68 According to McLuhan, technology threatened the integrity of parenting, and

66 Bernstein, 5.

67 Bernstein, 83.

68 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 14. 25

thus the composition and wellbeing of society itself. In “Your neighborhood,” McLuhan claims technology has destroyed normal distinctions between public and private. He writes, “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men…Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.”69 McLuhan warns of a world lacking in privacy and human agency. When speaking of jobs, he writes, “When the circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?”70

McLuhan and Fiore created the book to showcase all the new technology that needed to be analyzed, but it also exhibits the fear and suspicion that technology aroused, specifically how it might alter the way humans perceived the world and each other. He writes:

The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life…Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.”71

McLuhan warns the public that their lives are going to be altered and dominated by these new technological processes. He says, the “nature of the media by which men communicate” is more important than the “content of the communication.”72 While technology, in its various forms, had been perceived as progress, McLuhan warns of its dangerous, possibly catastrophic, effects.

Unlike Mitchell, many of her contemporary fellow artists were interested in technology and the world of numbers and ideas. They did not share McLuhan’s fear of automation, but leaned into the mechanized and systematic. In the 1960’s, many American artists began

69 McLuhan, 16.

70 McLuhan, 20.

71 McLuhan, 8.

72 Ibid 26

introducing technology as art material and/or adopted processes that mimicked manufacturing, replication, and automation. This imperative is particularly evident among the Conceptual artists.

Rather than proffer a material object, their work often executed a set of instructions and, in some cases, was automated. For example, Hans Haacke produced an installation that acted in real- time, printing out news reports in the gallery. In his 1969 installation titled News (fig. 14),

Haacke used five teletype machines that “were hooked up to five commercial wire services, and reams of paper printouts accumulated in the gallery space as the exhibition went on, gradually building up a sea of discarded data.”73 The news reports—on topics such as the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—would unravel from the teletype machine, spilling onto the floor of the gallery. The pile was left untouched, signifying the speed and capabilities of recent technology, but also the impossibility of keeping up with every new public, cultural, and political development. His work thus embraced technology, but also exhibited its strained relationship to human civilization.

While Haacke used new computer technology that visualized the speed and amount of information available, Sol Lewitt focused on systems, numbers, and ideas. In 1967, Sol Lewitt wrote “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” which became a seminal text for Conceptual artists. In this think-piece, Lewitt writes, “In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work…What the work looks like isn’t too important.”74 Lewitt’s work during the later

1960’s focuses on creating sets of instructions that could be followed by assistants or other individuals. For example, Drawing Series 1968 (Fours) (fig. 15) is a set of instructions on how

73 Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Co: Recovering Hans Haacke's Systems Art,” in Hans Haacke, Rachel Churner ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 195.

74 Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist’s Writings, Kristine Stiles, ed., (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 987-88. 27

to produce a book of drawings. Lewitt describes the design and measurements of each drawing, the type of material that should be used, the location, and the process that should be used. While these instructions could be executed, Lewitt characterizes the instructions, or the unrealized idea, as the art itself. Rather than having to create an object to illustrate that idea, Conceptual artists viewed the idea as art.

As Conceptual art rose to prominence through the contemporary art exhibitions and criticism, Mitchell’s subject matter and technique—her dedication to nature and to slow painting—proffered an alternative to the automated world of “progress.” Mitchell’s White

Territory embraces nature as a continuous force rather than a teleological progression to perfection and represents it through a layered approach to painting. While there is little evidence to suggest that Mitchell was interested in specific technological and cultural developments of her time, there is evidence that she did not support the art movements that explicitly used them. For example, when asked about Pop art, a movement that used replication technologies and mass- produced items as subjects or materials, she teased, “Pop art, op art, flop art, or slop art.”75

Although Mitchell’s comment is lighthearted in spirit, her real sentiment shows through her undying commitment to works produced by the hand. By using the term “slop,” Mitchell speaks to the speed and carelessness she saw in contemporary art movements. By contrast, Mitchell exploited brush-drawn marks and would execute her paintings over the course of a year.

White Territory posits nature and painting as an alternative to technology’s inundation of public life. While Conceptual art and the “dematerialized” field dominated discourse in the late

1960’s and early 1970’s, Mitchell chose to create works of art that returned to the historically

75 Bernstock, 57.

heralded subject and technique but in her own way.76 Rather than visualize the progress of the technological world, Mitchell’s practice in the 1970’s exhibited nature as a force of perpetual change. White Territory exhibits this through its active, lively brushwork and elongated process.

Unlike many of her contemporaries who were interested in technology and the world of numbers and ideas, Mitchell was interested in the organic and the handmade.

By examining Mitchell’s process in relation to her cultural moment, I am recharacterizing her work. Scholars have read it as emblematic of her own life and experiences or as symbolic of her memories. Reading it in relation to ideas about nature and technology at the time, I assert that her process-based work posed as an alternative to the emerging digital age. Using painting as an alternative to industrialization is not new. Monet had also turned away from “modernity” towards the countryside. Mitchell did the same thing, but her turn away from “modernity” was also a turn away from Monet. As I argued in chapter one, in White Territory, Mitchell replaced the eye with the hand, and the look of nature with its substance. By revisiting nature during a time of technology, she also reasserted the primacy of painting in the digital age.

76 Art historic discourse of the American post-war era has long been characterized as an urge towards dematerialization. See Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin, ed., Materializing “Six Years” Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012); Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 29

CONCLUSION

Made in Mitchell’s first year at her new studio in the small town of Vétheuil, White

Territory reveals the artist’s interest in an anti-retinal and methodical process. Both Monet and

Mitchell returned to nature during a time of intense cultural and technological change. While

Monet’s paintings reveal his desire to capture the weather and conditions of specific landscapes at specific times, Mitchell refused to picture nature in a single moment in time or even from a single perspective. Instead, her paintings visualized nature as always “in-progress,” which is evidenced through the vitality of her marks, her process of editing on the surface of the canvas, and her slow, calculated process. As opposed to her contemporaries, who were engaged with technology and its increasing ability to create order and systems, Mitchell’s work resonates with newfound understandings of nature and its philosophical and environmental versus instrumental significance.

By understanding Mitchell’s engagement with the nature and turn away from technology, we can understand her relationship to her own contemporary moment. While a large exhibition history and body of scholarship locates Mitchell within the context of Abstract Expressionism and gender politics, my thesis has positioned her as an artist engaged with her time and the world around her. Mitchell did associate with the Abstract Expressionists, through whom she gained some of her first large exhibitions, but, as I have demonstrated, Mitchell’s engagement with landscape painting existed long before she moved to New York and continued well after she left.

Her investigation of nature and how it is depicted or not depicted remained a primary concern to her death. In her early career, she worked within the conventions of landscape painting. At

Oxbow, she painted from observation, creating gouaches of lakes and parks. When she moved to

New York City, Mitchell evoked the urban environment by using semi-legible horizon lines, condensed compositions, and flashy colors. When she moved to Vétheuil, the artist’s relationship 30

to landscape became less tied to the physical appearance of her surroundings and engaged a new understanding of nature. Nature was not to be captured and framed, but to be evoked and eluded to through time and process.

While canonical accounts of Mitchell’s work characterize her work as compilations of her memories and feelings regarding her physical presence in the landscape, my thesis has explored the specifics of the site and way in which she worked and, from there, made claims about her interest in nature and disinterest in technology. Mitchell’s self-imposed “exile” from the United States’ art scene has discouraged scholars from interpreting her work in relation to her cultural moment. Through an examination of her slow, methodical layers of paint on canvas and her dynamic brushwork, it becomes apparent that Mitchell created paintings that asked, “What is nature?” Freeing Mitchell from the title of belated Abstract Expressionist enables us to see why she asked that question and, also, how she answered it.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources

Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Joan Mitchell, White Territory, 1970-1971, oil on canvas, 282.9 cm x 223.5 cm (111 3/8 in. x 88 in.), Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1974/2.21.

Figure 2: Joan Mitchell, Ladybug, 1957, oil on canvas, 6' 5 7/8" x 9' (197.9 x 274 cm), © Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, 385.1961.

Figure 3: Joan Mitchell, Student Gouache—Yellow Boats, c. 1942-43, gouache on paper, Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Figure 5: Joan Mitchell, Vétheuil, 1967-1968, oil on canvas, 77” x 51”, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Greenberg, New York.

Figure 6: Claude Monet, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23 3/4 × 31 1/2 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1158.

Figure 7: Claude Monet, Vétheuil, 1901, oil on canvas, 90.2 × 93.4 cm (35 1/2 × 36 3/4 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.447.

Figure 8: Claude Monet, Vétheuil, 1901, oil on canvas, 90 × 93 cm (36 7/16 × 36 5/8 in.), Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1161.

Figure 9: Claude Monet, La Débâcle (The Breakup of the Ice), 1880, 61 cm x 100 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Legat Eugen Loeb 1960.

Figure 10: Detail of White Territory.

Figure 11: Detail of White Territory.

Figure 12: Detail of White Territory.

Figure 13: Detail of White Territory.

Figure 15: Sol Lewitt, Drawing Series 1968 (Fours), 1968.

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