• Director(s):

    GUEZ (Stéphane)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTLINE FILMS, ARTE FRANCE

  • Territories:

    Worldwide (except France).

  • Production year:

    2023

  • Language(s):

    German, English, French

  • Rights:

    TV, NON-THEATRICAL, INTERNET, VOD

Joan Mitchell was one of the greatest painters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. Acclaimed by critics and the public, her stance allowed her to be among one of the only women to make her mark in the then male-dominated world of abstract art. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1982.

In 1940s New York, alongside Pollock, De Kooning and Franz Kline, and then in France where she lived from 1959, Joan Mitchell developed a unique body of work at the crossroads between abstraction and impressionism, between France and the United States. The writer Paul Auster, the composer Gisèle Barreau and personalities from the art world talk of the Joan they knew personally, and of her outstanding work drawn from her deep-seated emotions and sensations.
Using archives seen for the first time, this documentary explores the artist’s vibrant work, full of bursts of color, as well as the darker, more vulnerable side of her character hidden behind a mask of toughness. The writer Paul Auster and the composer Gisèle Barreau talk of the Joan they knew personally, and guide us in the discovery of her work. Katy Siegel and Sarah Roberts, the curators of the largest-ever exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States and in France, give us the keys to her painting filled with emotions and memories, her love for poetry, music and nature.