Joan Mitchell was a prominent American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. Working in an inventive gestural style, Mitchell’s works are characterized by their luminous layers of color and inspiration from nature, as seen in his signature work Sunflower (1972). “My paintings receive a title once they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me and remembered feelings from them, which of course are transformed,” he once reflected.

Born February 12, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, Mitchell earned her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moving to New York in the late 1940s, he became acquainted with the ideas espoused by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann.

In 1951, Mitchell was included in the groundbreaking “Ninth Street Show” curated by Leo Castelli at the Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village. Over the following decades, the artist divided her time between Paris and New York, developing the style of lyrical color block forms for which she is now known. Mitchell died on October 30, 1992 in Paris, France, at the age of 67.

In 2018, his painting Blueberry (1969) set an auction record for Mitchell when it sold at Christie’s for $16.6 million. Today, the artist’s legacy is remembered through the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which provides grants to sculptors and painters in the United States. His works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.