Recently, I went with my sister and my two sons to see the very beautiful “Monet-Mitchell” exhibition, which is being held at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris until February 27th. The idea behind this event is to create a dialogue between the works of Claude Monet (1840-1926) and those of the American painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), an atypical figure of abstract expressionism, inspired among others by Van Gogh and Cezanne. In 1959, Joan Mitchell settled in France, first in Paris, then on the banks of the Seine, in Vétheuil (Val-d’Oise), not far from where the author of the Water Lilies.
Independent spirit, who maintained a tumultuous relationship with the Quebec painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell painted huge canvases, made of fiery brushstrokes. Her favorite subject is not nature, from which she nevertheless draws inspiration (she considers it too beautiful to be represented, including in abstract form), but her feelings, emotions aroused by the vision of a landscape or by an event. Like Monet’s paintings where the top and the bottom seem to disappear, the vast cosmologies of spots and colored lines that Mitchell arranges on gigantic formats are a call to immersion. There is a sort of marvelously magnetic chaos, something of the order of the mystical in these canvases which, by their absence of conceptuality, by their pure energy, border on visual poetry.
But, after dragging their feet through the first rooms, my two sons are much less enthusiastic: “Joan Mitchell is all scribbling! », asserts the smallest, expressing there a common position. To tell the truth, I have already had the right to this type of reaction by bringing them to discover works that have nevertheless been praised by critics. The retrospective of Georg Baselitz, at the Center Pompidou, it was, there too, only “doodling”.
Contemporary art reaction
As he does not read Telerama, the child often holds (with an enviable freedom) the same discourse as a reactionary of contemporary art who would affirm, in a tone of bravado, that five pots of Ripolin paint are enough for him to equal the work of Jackson Pollock . My youngest son, once back home, takes a white sheet and says to me: “You’ll see, I’m going to make you one, me, a painting by Joan Mitchell!” » And, with a few furious wrist movements, he composes with four colors a sort of salad of intertwined lines, which he signs “Tablo by Jonne Michelle”.
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