"Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter" does little more than showing us the (beautiful) paintings of Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell and film her, shortly before her death, making obscure pronouncements about her work that don't hide the fact that she doesn't want to talk about her art.
She is the first one to say she doesn't think when she paints - she feels instead. We are told almost nothing about her life, except for the fact that her father seems to have been a difficult man. She mentions depression five or six times throughout the hour-long documentary, but the issue of why she is depressed is only broached once, at the very beginning, when she relates that once, she stopped painting for about two weeks, after Big Joan told Little Joan that if painting gave her so much pain, then she should stop. I wondered what that comment suggested about her mental health, since she was clear the two were parts of herself. She doesn't say if painting was the reason she was depressed the many other times.
Of her private life we only learned that she moved to Paris out of love for a French-Canadian artist, and she laughs that it's what women are supposed to do: follow the man (I paraphrase), and given the stature of Mitchell in the art world I had a hard time believing that. She wanted to move to Paris. That was her choice. She doesn't have to put herself down. At first she didn't want to give the interviewer his name, because the man had been married. Apparently the man left her for the dog-sitter (that's what she said). Why he made that choice would have been an interesting issue to explore: how was Mitchell in her everyday life?
And we are told nothing about any friendships she had. Did she have none? A French art connoisseur talks about her vulnerability and hypersensitivity and Brice Marden talks about the light in her paintings, but we never know whether to believe them. The one real piece of information we get about Mitchell is that she had, apparently, this condition that makes one see letters as colors. I did find the comment about the connection of her work to van Gogh, Cezanne and particularly Claude Monet valuable. To give an idea of the scope of the movie's indifference to Mitchell's life, it doesn't even say she was born in Chicago. When it briefly touches upon her early years, we do see a picture of the river and hear a mention of the Art Institute, so people who have traveled there will recognize it.
Mitchell had been a heavy drinker and smoker and died in 1992 when she was 67. She did seem to have her own set of demons to struggle with, but they're never explored. The movie does have good shots of Mitchell's paintings, but again, it offers little insight into her work - it sounds more speculation by other people. There is also no discussion of how her style evolved over the years.
Contrast this sedate documentary with this 2002 New Yorker article by Peter Schjeldahl, full of life, describing an argument between Mitchell and her long-time partner (that French-Canadian artist) and published at the occasion of Mitchell's retrospective at the Whitney. There, Mitchell really comes to life. We learn a lot more about Mitchell in a few paragraphs than in this movie. As for her paintings, you can learn a lot more about them by consulting the catalogue of that 2002 Whitney exhibition, available here.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.
