Joan Mitchell valuation
Painted remembered landscape in violent colour, from a house above the Seine at Vetheuil.
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, was a competitive figure skater, and became one of the very few women taken seriously within the second generation of Abstract Expressionism in New York.
What a work by Joan Mitchell is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, was a competitive figure skater, and became one of the very few women taken seriously within the second generation of Abstract Expressionism in New York. She moved to France in 1959, lived for years with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and in 1968 bought a property at Vetheuil overlooking the Seine, next to the house Monet had rented. The paintings are abstract but explicitly about place and memory — sunflowers, trees, water, weather — worked in slabs and skeins of high-keyed colour, frequently across two, three or four panels. She died in 1992.
The multi-panel works from Vetheuil lead this market and must remain complete and correctly ordered; a separated diptych or triptych is worth substantially less than the whole. Mitchell frequently left large areas of raw or thinly primed canvas exposed, and staining, discolouration and old restoration in those passages are conspicuous and difficult to remedy. The Joan Mitchell Foundation holds the archive and the catalogue raisonne project. Pastels and works on paper are a significant and more accessible body of work, and are light-sensitive.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 February 1925, Chicago
- Died
- 30 October 1992, 5th arrondissement of Paris
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
The retrospectives, and the Foundation
The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris showed her paintings beside Monet's late work from October 2022 to February 2023, after a retrospective organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021.
Under her will the Joan Mitchell Foundation was set up in New York in 1993. It gives grants to artists, keeps her archive and papers, and since 2015 has been researching a catalogue raisonné of the paintings. Until that is published, the Foundation's archive is the reference for a painting's history.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
