About this item
“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950sShe was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago’s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution—Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian. She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn’t paint.Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America’s twentieth century.
About the Author
Patricia Albers is the author of Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti, selected as one of the Library Journal's Best Books of 1999, and Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life, one of Booklist's ten best biographies of 2011. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is currently working on a biography of Budapest-born photographer André Kertész.
