Joan Mitchell, La Fureur De Peindre

It is said of the painter Joan Mitchell that she entered a room like Katharine Hepburn entered a saloon! A look, a presence and a sound. And it was with a bang that “Big Joan”, as she called herself, came into my life, through a painting.
I first experienced this impression of being immersed without oxygen in the depth of a Joan Mitchell diptych at the MoMA in New York about ten years ago. I was struck by the energy of the brushstroke, dazzled by the power of the colours, without understanding what was happening to me. And since the violence of this sensory shock, I have never left the painter or the woman. What was the life of this unpredictable American woman, this heroine, alcoholic and angry, fascinating and frightening, powerful and so fragile, who chose to live in France? Born in 1925 in Chicago into a high-society family, Mitchell died in Paris in 1992. She established herself as a major figure of abstraction in a world that was then almost exclusively male. This account is an investigation of a free woman, free to love like a man, to drink like a man and to paint like a man.