“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s She 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. As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter. Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said, “I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every ‘lover’ I’ve ever had—every friend—nothing closed out. It’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it—the dreams—and paint it.” Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness. Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as “sexy as hell.” Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.—scion of a financier who was head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell’s urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time. Mitchell’s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games—and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil. Mitchell’s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places. In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painter’s large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work. Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

Arts & Photography

Albers, Patricia

History & Criticism

KNOPF

Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti

Ten years of research and the discovery of long-forgotten letters and photos enabled Patricia Albers to bring new recognition to this talented, intelligent, and independent photographer whose life embodied the cultural and political values of many artists of the post-World War I generation.

Photography & Video

University of California Press

Born in 1896, Tina Modotti lived one of the most brilliant lives of her era. A first-generation modernist photographer, she created internationally renowned images of extra-ordinary formal clarity and profound soulfulness. But Modotti's artistic achievement is only one facet of her astonishing story. A legendary beauty, spirited and sensuous, she scripted for herself a series of remarkable roles--glamorous actress; jazz age bohemian; Communist agent; and lover, colleague, and muse to photographer Edward Weston and painter Diego Rivera. Her friends included the illustrious--Frida Kahlo, Pablo Neruda, John Dos Passos, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Dorothea Lange, Sergei Eisenstein, and La Pasionaria--as well as workers, peasants, and humble people everywhere. Filled with the rich details of Modotti's turbulent interior life and of her journey through the cultural and political upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti is a provocative adventure. We follow the impoverished Italian immigrant to the San Francisco stage and to the glitter of early Hollywood, then on to the artistic circles of post-revolutionary Mexico. Dramatically expelled from her adopted country, Modotti made her way to Stalin's Moscow and to the Spanish Civil War, from which she emerged tormented by tragic memories. Returning to Mexico City, she died alone in a taxicab, probably of heart disease, though rumors persist that she was liquidated by her comrades. Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti is the first fully realized biography of this luminous figure. Drawing upon ten years of research and some 300 letters and photographs discovered in long-forgotten trunks in a family attic, author Patricia Albers brings new recognition to a talented, intelligent, and independent woman, whose bold quest is a prototype for contemporary seekers. Ever a flamboyant personality, she was nonetheless pursued, even after death, by a glaring spotlight of publicity and controversy. Her burial, in a fifth-class tomb, drew many of the grand old warriors of international communism. Meanwhile, Mexico City's modern art gallery readied a retrospective of her photographs, and journalists dredged up yellowing scandal sheets shrieking of romance, violence, deceit, and Tina Modotti. . . . "The dramatic circumstances surrounding [her death] measured up to those of her agitated, subterranean, and adventurous life," typed one eager reporter. "Bees, shadows, fire, snow," intoned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his elegy, "silence and foam combining with steel and wire and pollen . . ."

Clarkson/Potter

A Cultural Geography Of North American Indians

History

Ross, Thomas E.

Manzo, Joseph

Moore, Tyrel G

Rhodes, Terrell

Americas

Westview Press

This volume is a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book of 1983.

The Hidden Half

Politics & Social Sciences

Medicine, Beatrice

Social Sciences

University Press of America

This volume is a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1983.

The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women

Eaton/Shoen Gallery, 1980-1981

The Gallery

Tina Modotti the Mexican Renaissance

Cordero Reiman, Karen

Individual Artists

Editions Jean-Michel Place

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