WOMEN IN THE ARTS ...JOAN MITCHELL, ONE OF THE GIANTS!

Mitchell

Mitchell

Mitchell

This is the first posting on the subject of WOMEN IN THE ARTS.  I will be blogging intermittently about this subject which is, of course, dear to my heart! 
I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM MY READERS, (2,000 in less than two months! yay!) FROM ABOUT TWENTY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ON THIS SUBJECT. PLEASE COMMENT!

In 1989, a group of women plastered posters across New York. "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?", the slogan asked. The Guerrilla Girls, as the activists were known, were outraged that while only 5% of the artists in the Museum of Modern Art were women, 85% of the nudes were female. Twenty years later, these posters are not just being exhibited inside a national museum - they are part of the largest all-female showcase in contemporary art to date, one that might finally show the art world what it has been missing.It is the first time the Pompidou Centre in Paris has displayed its new permanent collection of female painters, photographers, designers, architects, sculptors, performance artists and film-makers. After decades of excluding women from its major shows, elles@pompidou was an enormous visual manifesto for the institution, proving its commitment to putting female artists at the core of modern and contemporary art. (I hope more galleries & museums follow suite)!


I am focusing on JOAN MITCHELL, AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST, one of the most powerful painters I can think of...of any gender!  Joan Mitchell (1925‐1992) is one of the main female American painters of the 20th century. She was born in Chicago and spent most of her career at Vetheuil, a few miles only from Giverny, two key villages in Claude Monet's art. She passed on way too young at age 67!

The abstract painting she perfected as early as the fifties, oversized, luminous, dynamic, deeply refers to nature (Great Valley, Sunflowers, Linden, Fields). Actually, nature surrounded her studio at Vetheuil with its large views on the Seine river.