Joan Mitchell Quotes

Every so often a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism, then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. —Willem de Kooning

There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire.

When one is young and on the threshold of life’s long deception, rashness is all. —Françoise Sagan1

When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity,” said E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist behind The Wizard of Oz. “I felt I was being born for the first time.”11

Joan Mitchell—abstract painter

Said Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking book The Second Sex, "Just as in America there is no Negro problem but rather a white problem; just as 'anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem; it is our problem'; so the women problem has always been a man's problem. . . . Men have always held the lot of women in their hands; and they have determined what it should be, not according to her interest, but rather with regard to their own projects, their fears, and their needs.

Elaine (de Kooning) wrote, "For the bureaucrat, reality is found in . . .the radio with the advertisements that make claims that he accepts a s false. Reality is the baseball game, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. Reality is conspicuous consumption. All of this in short, is the reality that someone else has made for him. This to the artist is unreality . . .

In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.)

Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful! —Frank O’Hara1

John Myers wrote, "It is Imagination, man's power to imagine, that makes living in society, any society, possible. It think what Paul Goodman says about doing away with 'intolerable biological deprivation and spiritual impoverishment' through what he calls 'creative cooperative production' is the right and humane solution to our social woes.

An artist is a conduit for a vision that is as uniquely her own as a fingerprint, and unrecognizable until it appears.

the artist through his or her work revealed pure spirit so that men mired in the bitter reality of daily life might find the strength to continue.30

At one point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a Joan of Arc haircut, passed right in front of the glass. When Mitchell looked at her, the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank sexual meaning. Not that she "wanted" to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that. Deanie was right: Europe was a nice spot.

The talented woman… must have, besides their talent, an unusual energy which drives them… to exercise their own powers. Like talented men, they are single-minded creatures, and they cannot sink into idleness, nor fritter away life and time, nor endure discontent. They possess that rarest gift, integrity of purpose.… Such women sacrifice, without knowing they do, what many other women hold dear—amusement, society, play of one kind or another—to choose solitude and profound thinking and feeling, and at last final expression. “To what end?” another woman might ask. To the end, perhaps… of art—art which has lifted us out of mental and spiritual savagery.51

The abstract artist, he said, would be repeatedly challenged by such skeptics asking, “‘What does it mean?’… ‘Is it a sky, a house, a horse?’” To which they should respond with confidence and honesty, “‘No, it is a painting.’”29

After Kristallnacht, tight U.S. immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, allowing a trickle of people who wanted to leave Europe to enter the United States. Many of those given priority in a first wave of immigration were artists, writers, composers, and scientists, but even that very circumscribed immigration caused alarm. As late as 1939, 95 percent of Americans did not want any part of a European war.15 And, with the country’s economy still fragile, many people resented those fleeing it as needy hordes who would compete for scarce jobs and dwindling government support. Anti-immigration forces in Congress used fear as an excuse to deny foreigners entry. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938 to investigate newcomers suspected of being communists or spies.16 Alarm and insecurity in some soon hardened into paranoia and hatred. In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people marched through Manhattan, giving fascist salutes and carrying U.S. flags as well as banners with swastikas, toward a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

golden apple—Aphrodite, Athene and Hera,

We Will Never Die”—occurred at that same location. One hundred thousand people attended, among them Supreme Court judges, cabinet ministers, three hundred congressmen, senators, diplomats, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.55 The groundswell witnessed in New York had taken years to build: ten years since Hitler had come to power and begun persecuting his people, five years since the world had stood shocked at the sight and sound of Kristallnacht. The crowds in Manhattan vowed not to forget. But many, many others would continue to ignore what was too horrible to contemplate, at least until the killing had stopped. Then they would comfort themselves by repeating like a mantra, “We didn’t know.” The truth was, they did.

Feeling, existing, living, I think it's all the same, except for quality. Existing is survival; it does not mean necessarily feeling. You can say good morning, good evening. Feeling is something more: it's feeling your existence.

Elaine once replied, “I was going to quote from the Old Testament, and say that ‘a man sharpens his face on the face of his friends.’ This is why important movements in art have always taken place where groups of artists could get together. And then something happens. It’s some kind of electricity. A movement is never started by one; it’s always give and take.”27 Elaine’s and Bill’s relationship involved a continual exchange of ideas that wasn’t restricted to conversations with friends.

our own troubled world is sorely lacking in the nutrients that art provides.

If I can´t paint, I can´t breathe.

When you meet someone you think you can’t live without, then you get married.

Faith is a verb. An action, like love, that we do and live every day.

If anyone bothered to ask her, back then, what she did want, she would have said: to listen to music, Zeppelin and the Dead most importantly, but also Procol Harum, and Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell; to see George McGovern elected someday (now that Bobby Kennedy was dead and gone); to go into a line of work that would make a difference in the world; to meet a good man who took her seriously; to travel the country and the world. But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.