Joan Mitchell’s Resplendent Paintings: How the Abstract Expressionist Resolved the Unresolvable

There was no turning back when, in 1950, Joan Mitchell completed Figure and City, a painting in which an abstracted figure emerges from the canvas amid a crush of cuboidal forms. Prior to this breakthrough, Mitchell had been working in a semi-figurative mode, producing still lifes and urban landscapes in which anything and everything could be reduced to geometric shapes. Then, after Figure and City, she leapt into the void and began working in abstraction. “I knew it was the last figure I