Untitled, 1992

Oil on canvas
© Estate of Joan Mitchell. Photo by Joan Mitchell and Rudy Burckhardt; courtesy of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives.

In 1968 Joan Mitchell—one of the preeminent abstract painters of the postwar period—settled in Vétheuil, France, a village near Claude Monet’s former estate in Giverny, where she would remain until her death. Mitchell derived great joy from her gardens at Vétheuil, and her arrival there in the late 1960s coincided with the emergence of sunflowers in her work. She returned to the motif, in the form of explosions of yellow and orange paint, periodically throughout her life. Untitled—one of her final diptychs—contains pared-down versions of the sunflower form. In her later years, Mitchell painted with renewed intensity, continuing to work on a grandiose scale in spite of illness. Untitled is representative of the steely determination of her concluding efforts, combining two monumental, swirling balls of golden yellow with strokes of green, red, black, and blue that surge among them. The artist applied each mark with her signature confidence, while drips of excess paint stand as a testament to the unrelenting ambition and physicality of her painting process.