For women in the arts it’s been a long, uphill road to gain respect and acknowledgement of being equals in what, like in every other field, has been a (white) man’s world. Last year Phaidon Press published two fine books, “Great Women Painters” and “Great Women Artists”. The implication of the strikethrough is that we’re past due in recognizing great work for what it is regardless of gender (or any other classification). The other thing that’s really good about these books is that the authors show a lot of work from 2015 to the present, contemporary work that can be hard to access if you don’t live in a major city. This struggle to overcome obstacles far beyond what the average man has to deal with has produced some great creations and some tough women along the way. Two such artists are Joan Mitchell and Joni Mitchell. Each has been both helped and hindered by male colleagues and critics and other arbiters.
Joni Mitchell has had a long and impressive career as a musician. In the early days she was part of the folk/rock scene and had many friendships/relationships with the likes of David Crosby, Graham Nash, and James Taylor. She was more than their equal as a musician and songwriter, and to this day they speak of her with a kind of awe. Last year the New York Times did a piece called “50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’”, her groundbreaking 4th album, on the 50th anniversary of it’s recording. They work through every song, with comments from musicians of all ages and backgrounds, and the common threads are the depth of feeling in the songwriting and the complexity and difficulty of the music itself. The opera singer Renee Fleming talks about developing her voice in part by singing along to these songs as a teenager. David Crosby says that the first time he heard “River” he considered quitting and becoming a gardener.
Joni went on to make one great album after another. Her music was always growing and changing, and she constantly experimented with different sounds and forms of music, all of which can only be defined as completely original. She brought in the best musicians, including jazz greats Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. Her collaborations with them were brilliant not only because of their playing but because the sounds that she drew out of them were unique, unlike anything they had done previously. Her voice changed over the years, becoming deeper and richer as she got older and couldn’t reach those impossible high notes from her early albums.
I saw her in 1998 when she was the opening act while touring with Bob Dylan. She was miserable and disgusted with the crowd, most of whom were there for Dylan and were heckling her with no appreciation for what she was doing. Here lies a great irony. For years she had been making consistently high-quality ground breaking records while Dylan (who, by many accounts, is a renowned misogynist, and who never came to her defense at the concert) had been mostly producing crap. For a male “Legend” like Dylan, it didn’t matter if your voice was so bad that no one could understand the lyrics, or that your playing was mediocre at best. Women like Joni were held at a different standard.
Joni is also an accomplished painter, and her approach to music reflects this. In a line from the title song from her album “Turbulent Indigo”, she sings “He’ll piss in your fireplace, he’ll drag you through turbulent indigo”. The second part is an obvious reference to Van Gogh paintings, specifically “Starry Nights”, while the first is based on a legendary act by Jackson Pollock at a rich patron's house. In 2015 Joni suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, which impaired her ability to walk and speak. After a difficult rehabilitation period she is starting to perform again with the encouragement of a lot of younger musicians, notably Brandi Carlile. She has been doing jam sessions at her home in Laurel Canyon with the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bonnie Raitt, Harry Styles, Chaka Khan, Marcus Mumford and Herbie Hancock.(Thanks, wikipedia for that line of information). Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that.
Elaine DeKooning was known as the wife of her more famous husband. Lee Krasnor was the wife of Jackson Pollock. They are only two of a long line of women painters whose work was largely overlooked for much of their lives. If you go into any major museum these days it’s kind of shocking to see major works by Krasner, DeKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and other mid-century female artists. It’s not that they didn’t have these paintings 15 or 20 years ago, it’s just that they’re so much more prominent now. It feels like these institutions always had large works by these artists, but that they didn’t want to take up a whole wall with one of Lee Krasner’s monumental paintings. To our loss, because they measure up to anything else done at that time.
Joan Mitchell was a successful artist for most of her life. She was a part of the Abstract Expressionist group in New York in the 1950’s (these box-like categories are more the creation of critics, historians and curators than of the artists themselves). Born in 1925, she split time in her early career between the US and France before moving there permanently in 1959. In what could be a complete coincidence, many black jazz musicians moved to Paris at the same time because they were judged by their artistic ability rather than by the color of their skin. Some of her inspirations- water, trees, dogs, poetry, music- were probably seen as soft or overly feminine by some at the time, in keeping with the feeling that women could not be “serious” artists, but those same inspirations are what such give her paintings such a refreshing contrast to much of the dark, heavy and frankly depressing work of some of her male peers. She was admired and encouraged by many of those peers, especially her friends Franz Kline and Willem DeKooning, if not by some of the critics of the day. It’s fascinating to look at totally abstract work which still evokes the natural world and the landscape that inspired it. Another thing she shared with her “New York School” compatriots was a lifestyle that included heavy drinking and smoking. This had a predictable effect on her later life, and she had many serious health issues leading up to her death from lung cancer in 1992. She was very supportive of younger artists and established a foundation to continue with that support through grants and other forms of much needed assistance.
And now for a short rant. The image at the beginning of this piece was compiled from her high school yearbook picture (from wikipedia). That is literally the only image of her or her work available in the public domain, apparently in part due to the overzealous control wielded by her foundation. I would have liked to show you an example of her work in the normal low-res, web-based, useless for anything else format, but I don’t really want to go through an exhaustive permission process for one newsletter post. Releasing a few images into the public domain is not going to destroy anyone’s reputation or impact the lives of some control freak, not for profit employees! Being able to show artists' work to people easily might inspire them to search for more, maybe even lead them to a gallery show for the first time in ten years. End of rant.