"Music takes time to listen to and ends, writing takes time and ends, movies end, ideas and even sculpture take time. Painting does not. It never ends, it is the only thing that is both continuous and still.
—Joan Mitchell

Untitled (c. 1956) is exemplary of Joan Mitchell’s early work, comprising an underlying white space upon which a weave of darker brushstrokes is shot through with flashes of bright color. The rough borders of the painting demonstrate, as Jill Weinberg Adams, who worked closely with Joan Mitchell at Xavier Fourcade Gallery, New York, has explained, the artist’s practice of working on sections of canvas cut from larger surfaces in the process of being primed. Created in conjunction with larger works, it appears such sections were saved in her studio, perhaps for future reference or inspiration. After Mitchell’s passing in 1992, her Estate collaborated with conservators to have such paintings preserved. While similar works have been stretched in a traditional manner, in order to preserve the full composition of the present work it has been mounted on a canvas support.
Throughout the 1950s, Mitchell developed her signature style: rhythmic counterposed lines and layered fields of color that became a language through which she communicated emotion and life experiences. In a 1957 interview, she described her motivation for painting. “I want to make myself available to myself. The moment that I am self-conscious, I cease painting,” she explained. For Mitchell, painting was a means of both accessing her deepest self and losing it at the same time. While absent explicit imagery, her paintings are informed by experiences and places that she stored in her mind as in a photographic album. Each of her gestures embodies a feeling, which she conceived not as a simple emotion but as a state of being alive—of, in Mitchell’s own words, “feeling your existence.”
This rhythm and emotional tenor can be well observed in the present painting—corresponding to the particular development of fluidity and intuition Klaus Kertess noted of Mitchell’s work in the late ’50. In its careful evaluation of brushstrokes and hues vis-à-vis one another, it correlates with significant works such as Untitled (1956), in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The work’s close relationship to Mitchell’s studio practice gives it a unique position in her larger oeuvre, providing a close look at a compositional structure which the artist would keep close at hand for many years.
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