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Artist or Maker: Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

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Provenance: Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Private collection, New York
David McKee Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Gerald and Paula Lennard, New York
Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 10 November 2004, lot 53
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

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Exhibited: New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture, December 1983-February 1984.
Ithaca, Cornell Univeristy, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery and San Diego, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-Six Years of Natural Expressionism, February 1988-April 1989, no. 48 (illustrated in color).

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Literature: J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 190 (illustrated in color).
K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 178, no. 77 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: Joan Mitchell's seductively beautiful La Grande Vallée of 1983 is an early work from a series of closely related paintings that hold a unique position within her extraordinary oeuvre$i. Created over a space of 13 months, the lush, complex cycle of 21 paintings that were brought into being during this period of frenzied activity combine her sensitivity toward landscape and memory with a desire for renewal after significant personal loss.

The emotionally charged La Grande Vallée series is among Mitchell's finest achievements. This deeply atmospheric and heroically scaled example celebrates life and the regenerative power of nature. The title La Grande Vallée comes from a story told by Mitchell's friend, musician and composer Giséle Barreau. Barreau met Mitchell in New York in 1979 and soon took up residence in the American painter's adopted home in Vétheuil, near Paris, to work and assist with the care of her home. During their time together, the composer would frequently recount her cherished memories of an idyllic valley where she used to play as a young girl in Brittany. Barreau spent her childhood whiling away entire days in this secluded, undisturbed landscape with a favorite younger cousin, surrounded by colorful wildflowers, insects and birdsong. Throughout her career, Mitchell was inspirated to paint a poetic response to her own memories of landscape, and she formed a personal vision of this place as a lost Arcadia, a sanctuary in which one could roam uninhibited and commune with nature. Although the location was unseen by the artist herself, it became one of the many landscapes of her imagination, inextricably bound with people, memories and emotions.

A year before La Grande Vallée was executed, Mitchell's sister, to whom she was very close, passed away, as did Barreau's young cousin, forever altering the painter's impressions of the enchanted refuge. "Her cousin died, my sister died. I didn't know what to paint' Mitchell later recalled of this time (J. Mitchell, quoted in Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p.37). Prompted by Barreau's account of her dying cousin's wish to return to the valley that they had only seen as children, Mitchell began to paint the abstracted paradisiacal landscapes of the Grande Vallée series as part of her process of mourning and an expression of hope.

Using her friend's remembrances as a springboard for a meditation on light, color, rhythm and space, Mitchell captures the emotions that this otherworldly sanctuary inspired in her. The compound layering of compact brushstrokes in rich, verdant colors creates an unusually dense, allover composition that contains little of the white breathing space Mitchell frequently allowed in her more calligraphic works. The predominating blue anchors the painting's tight structure, creating a perspectivally deep arena for the warmer hues to dance through, thereby evoking dappled sunlight or a shaded glen studded with flowers. With its harmonious and figuratively suggestive coloration, La Grande Vallée testifies to Barreau's poetic description of her beloved valley and Mitchell's painterly interpretation of it:

"Magical childhood land: harmony, refuge, shelter, tranquility.

"First concerts of insects, frogs, birds, zephyrs.

"A color-filled land: water green meadows, yellows, blues, cobalt violet, somber ditches, fritillaries by the thousands. Wind.

"A common land transformed, pure painting, its soul thus affirmed.

"The paintings, each and every one, sublime, ignited into luminous, resonant, radiating cathedrals."

(G. Barreau, La Grande Vallée, quoted in J. Livingston, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., New York, 2002, p.61).

The overwhelming sensation of an encounter with nature in this cycle of paintings has prompted many to draw comparisons between Mitchell's work and that of Claude Monet. Although she resolutely denied the influence of Monet, an artist who had once resided in a house at the bottom of her property in Vétheuil, the panoramic and abstractly narrative effect of the rippling shades of green and blue in La Grande Vallée make it difficult to disassociate this painting from the French master's later work. Mitchell seldom painted in the open air, however, preferring to execute her abstract landscapes in her studio from what she called "a mind's-eye view." By summoning the sensual effects of the natural world without resorting to illusory detail, La Grande Vallée also displays Mitchell's fundamental connection to the work of Willem de Kooning, who had been her early mentor and champion, and whose strident gestural paintings never abandoned figurative references. The responsive, high velocity brushwork in this work conveys a spontaneous spirit, yet Mitchell's paintings are in fact a product of serious deliberation. She was notoriously farsighted and always chose to back away from canvas to gain perspective on her emerging compositions. As a consequence, the intensely felt, inimitable form of lyrical abstraction found in La Grande Vallée does not share the urgency seen in the work of some of her peers. Instead, its volatile matrix of brushmarks invite slow reflection, urging the viewer to meander through its variegated surface with wonderment, just as the two small children explored the landscape that inspired it.

Much like de Kooning, Mitchell believed that painting was essentially an existential experience; a way of living that enabled her to explore the material reality of nature. The painting's monumental size conveys Mitchell's desire to be in her paintings, immersed in the sensual act of mark making. This submersion in the physicality of the medium signifies painting as a life affirming practice, which provided Mitchell with a means of transcending death and the dark thoughts that haunted her throughout her life. "Painting is the opposite of death," she asserted, "it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live" (J. Mitchell, quoted in J. Livingston, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., New York, 2002, p.63).