Joan Mitchell was born and received her art education in Chicago. In 1948 she visited France for a year before moving to New York, where Mitchell became a young leader in the Abstract Expressionist scene. Mitchell was well connected with New York School artists and poets.

Klaus Kertess admiringly writes of Mitchell, “She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled.”

The artist's legacy is preserved by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

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