In art, abstraction has always made sense to me. You take a thing and deconstruct it. What makes less sense, is how I am to write about it.
The Joan Mitchell retrospective at SFMOMA is organized thematically by what the curators say were the obsessions of her life: cities, water, poetry. Those are also the obsessions of my life, so maybe I am tuned for this.
The most establishing point of chronological narrative in the show is at the very beginning in a painting called Figure and the City from 1949. In it, a woman in industrial blues and greens stands at the forefront of a cubist city that also is blue and green. Of the painting, Mitchell wrote, I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint. I just knew. And it was. In the painting, the woman’s body still holds sculpture, but in her bent head you see the action of her personhood dissolve into the abstractness of the city.
Art historians place Mitchell squarely with the abstract expressionists, a style and period in which a handful of men in New York City sucked up all the air in the room. Those names are hardly mentioned in this show, and so too they will be absent here. A good retrospective is one that decontextualizes, and this is that, the canvases themselves doing the narration, thick in paint and texture, unexhaustive in color.
I walk through the rooms of the show slowly, first cities, then water, and last of all poetry. I keep track of all the blues I see: dark dreaming blues, cold morning ones, deep oceans. If there is red it is disruptive but meaningfully so. If I am to be here, I will be here, and it will be fine. In some places her paint is built up in a kind of topography, in others it is wispy and taciturn.
Everywhere I look there is motion. Everywhere I look I am made agreeable to a discordance that is first welcomed and then resolved.
Shapes, forms, colors, movements, textures —brushstrokes on canvases eight feet high. I understand these things, when combined together, to be the experience of one woman one time somewhere, maybe in Paris, maybe on a sailboat, maybe reading John Ashbery. Beyond that, objectivity falters. What I can tell you is that the show makes me calm, better aware to the proportions of space in the gallery, to the sound of footsteps, to the quietness of my own contemplation. This is one way I felt, one time, in San Francisco at the beginning of fall in my thirty-second year on a day I’ve dedicated to walking around the city without a specific direction in mind.
When it’s time to go, I go, back into the city, where life awaits. My legs steer while my eyes wander, noticing the red in a storefront awning and the way the sun makes a cream-colored building appear golden. Eventually, I arrive at the ocean, where the waves undulate and the Golden Gate Bridge stands guard. Joan Mitchell wrote that she carries her landscapes with her wherever she goes, and for today anyway, I carry them too.