Joan Mitchell

“I am not a member of the make-it-ugly school,” Joan Mitchell told Irving Sandler for an ARTnews article in 1957. No argument there. As the major retrospective of more than eighty significant paintings by the second-generation Abstract Expressionist (1925-92), now on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reminds us, Mitchell’s artistic life was an unabashed pursuit of the beautiful. Her paintings, derived from nature but fired in the kiln of memory and intuition, are testaments to that pursuit, showing us at once just how devilishly out-of-reach true beauty can be, and just how important it is to stretch one’s arms and go for it.