Nature Calls (Mitchell-Monet)
Graffiti on Rue de Denoyez, Paris, October 10, 2022. Photograph by the author.
I had never been to the Bois de Boulogne and arrived early on the opening day of the “Monet Mitchell” exhibit to look around. “Are there restrooms here?” I asked the guard outside the Foundation Louis Vuitton in fumbling French. He shook his head. “But inside?” I gestured. “Interdit!” he barked. I slunk away to find the nearest concession stand. Following a gravel path along a pond filled with real, live swans, I asked the man at the food counter. “There are no toilets in the park!” he snapped. Of course, I realized, I’m in nature.
The Monet-Mitchell exhibit is premised on a connection between art and nature. It’s making an argument that Claude Monet’s impressions and Joan Mitchell’s abstractions have a common source in landscape. This unlikely pairing seems to imply that abstraction is really representation, disguised. It’s nature blurred by feeling (in Mitchell’s Abstract Expressionism) or sensation (in Monet’s impressionism).
It works, surprisingly. It’s impressive to see so many huge vivid explosions of shape and color together, in huge high-ceilinged rooms in a grand museum in Paris. The show begins with Monet’s water lilies, unrecognizable as “nympheas” in French, set against Mitchell’s rivers. Mitchell immediately seems fresh and energetic, Monet tired and clumsy. The years have not treated old Claude well: his palette seems muddied, his compositions mushy. Mitchell, in contrast, has been less seen, of course, and still surprises. Her decades of work continually shift the constraints of abstraction, playing with new emotional themes (like grief at her sister’s and friend’s deaths), new locations (her riverside home at Vétheuil, near Monet’s Giverny), and compositions (more and more diptychs and series like the stunning “La Grand Vallée” on the top floor of the show).
As you enter the main foyer of the Frank Gehry-designed building you can walk straight into the Monet-Mitchell or descend an escalator to the basement for a comprehensive retrospective of Mitchell’s work, organized in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. It’s stunning. In the big picture, one might say, their careers have come in waves, one after the other. Still, is the basement symbolic? Why does his name come before hers? We are in chronological or hierarchical order, not alphabetical.
Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925; Monet died in Giverny in 1926 so the two artists only overlapped on this earth for one year. This exhibit reveals that in his last years Monet had devolved almost entirely into abstraction. One of his Japanese Gardens on display here is a study in reds. Arguably, Monet’s reputation reached its high watermark just as Mitchell’s career was beginning: it was the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s who championed his work first. They admired how his breakdown of light moved painting away from figures and incorporated more movement. Elaine de Kooning coined the term “Abstract Impressionism” for the common ground they shared with Monet. Since then Monet has fueled a tsunami of tourism, from gift shop posters to pilgrimages to his home. (I keep mistyping his name as Money.) Mitchell’s work, in contrast, has not been nearly as well known, even as her peers rode new art market highs.
The artists’ relationship to nature (and Paris) seems central to the show, a common thread across styles, generations, and life stories. That theme works here, in this specific place. Hovering over it, you would see the Frank Gehry-designed museum like a silver bird in the green setting of the Bois de Boulogne, its tucked wings evoke the swans in the nearby pond, where old white men like Claude still fish for… what exactly? Flying higher you would see the forests of the park itself set in an urban grid, the iron Tour Eiffel visible from the museum’s parapets.
These are not the artists’ vistas though. There are no rooftop views or skyscapes on these canvases, and few trees. It’s water, water everywhere for these two: still ponds and rushing rivers. For Mitchell, these abstracted rivers seem to carry the current of her feelings in bold strokes. For Monet, the flat pond is a mirror for all that he perceived. But Mitchell’s landscapes are reflective too– the symmetry and asymmetry of her diptychs are unique to each one. It’s no wonder, then, that Mitchell’s collected works are so appealing now. Trends will change but Mitchell’s emotion seems personal in a way that Monet’s vision can’t now. My artist-father, who loved Monet, often quoted someone, I don’t remember who, saying “Monet was only an eye, but what an eye!” (I looked it up. It was Paul Cezanne). You can see the truth of this observation here and now, in this show: Monet’s new way of seeing now looks old, where Mitchell’s feelings are still raw. “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me,” she wrote. “And remembered feelings of them.” Her retrospective ends with an enlarged photo of the artist in her studio. She is more than life-sized, a titan of art, and meets our eyes almost defiantly as we exit into the foyer with escalators. There, at “pool-level,” water seeps in from a fountain outside, framed by glowing yellow rectangles, like sentries reflected back again in Mitchellian symmetry. It is an artfully crafted, and perfectly apt conclusion for that exhibit. And Mitchell deserves the last words, which were quoted in the wall text by Suzanne Pagé, curator of the retrospective. With the utter simplicity of improvisation’s “yes and,” Mitchell claimed: “My painting is abstract, but it is also a landscape.”