Un Verano Sin Ti Christmas Bad Bunny Ornament 2022

grew up comfortably and exposed to culture. Her mother, Marion Strobel, was a poet and the associate editor of Poetry magazine; her father, James Herbert Mitchell, was a dermatologist and amateur painter. They made the local social pages, and from outward appearance, Mitchell enjoyed a carefree childhood. But in the book Ninth Street Women, writer Mary Gabriel details the pressures and constant antagonism Mitchell felt from her father, who never fully accepted that Joan was not a boy. To compensate, she strove athletically, becoming a figure skater who competed successfully until an injury prompted her to shift focus. Immersing herself in art and poetry—from Cézanne and Matisse to Baudelaire and Rilke—she would have pursued both had her father not apparently forced her to choose, “so that she wouldn’t be mediocre.
Mitchell went on to spend her formative years studying art at Smith College, followed by the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually receiving a fellowship that allowed her to spend a year in Paris, from 1948-49. She returned to France in 1955, where she met Riopelle, and by 1968, she had acquired a property near the town of Vétheuil, where the gardener’s cottage had once belonged to Monet. “She became herself in Vétheuil,” says Pagé, noting that having a larger atelier led to Mitchell painting on a larger scale (although not quite as large as Monet’s Grande Décorations in the Musée de l’Orangerie). And then, of course, she lived and breathed the landscape around her. Curiously, Mitchell would paint at night to loud music (from Verdi to Billie Holiday) in the company of her dogs. The morning after, in daylight, she would review the colors. Pagé tells me to look closely at a photo of Mitchell surrounded by paint containers; turns out, these were emptied cans of dog food.
Indeed, while the exhibitions do not dwell on Mitchell’s biography, there are glimpses of her out in the world. Throughout the vast corridors of the Frank Gehry-designed FLV are portraits of both artists; their lives overlapping by less than two years. (She was born in February of 1925; he died in December of 1926.) Monet interacts with the canvas at very close range and fully frontal. Mitchell’s stance is even more active, leaning with an arm outstretched as through taking off towards the canvas. He wears a proper shirt and tie covered by an artist’s smock. She projects a unisex look that is inadvertently and self-effacingly cool. In one late image, she wears an overshirt with faded gray jeans, Le Coq Sportif tennis shoes, and dark sunglasses—a look we might call normcore today. “There was a modesty behind her glasses, a timidity, even if she could also be very direct,” says Pagé.
Although the shows will prove dazzling to anyone who visits, they’re best seen without large crowds. A calmer setting is most conducive to feeling in communion with the art, to observing how certain colors emerge and recede, to experiencing the emotional dimensions of abstraction. (Incidentally, Mitchell’s evocation of memory taps into the approach of French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last week.) In one of the galleries is Monet’s Water Lilies (Agapanthus), a formidable triptych spanning nearly 43 feet that was purchased by three different museums beginning in 1956. One year earlier, art critic Clement Greenberg had written a reassessment of Monet, advancing the idea that he had anticipated modern American painting. Here, the exceptional work—reassembled for the first time in France—speaks powerfully to the FLV’s influence.
Around this point, Pagé note