Joan Mitchell and Matta in New York

Some leave the best for last. The American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell— far and away the best female painter of the New York School—planted herself in later life in the south of France and, without forsaking abstraction, absorbed critical elements of the French tradition, particularly from Monet and Van Gogh, to produce a significant body of work that's still underappreciated.

Part of the reason for Mitchell's relative neglect was her isolation in France, and part of it has had to do with passing fashions in American art. Abstract Expressionism was overtaken in the early 1960s by Pop Art, and was suddenly relegated to the margins.

Jackson Pollock had already died; and two other important figures, Franz Kline and Bradley Walker Tomlin, died in 1962 and 1963 respectively, just as Pop was taking hold. Ad Reinhardt went prematurely in 1967, and Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko in 1970— the latter, like Pollock, a suicide. Philip Guston would live another decade, one-upping the Pop artists with his bobble-head figures and sinister landscapes.

But the younger Abstract Expressionists tended to get short shrift. Some of them turned toward figuration; others remained abstract. In either case, they tended to suffer the fate of epigones, fairly or not.

In Joan Mitchell's case, the judgment was decidedly unfair. She's a superb painter by any style or standard, and the 11 paintings in Cheim & Read's "Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings" should provide sufficient evidence for anyone.

Death as a minor nuisance

If any single word describes Mitchell's approach to painting, it's gestural. She works in strokes and loops, weaving dense tangles deposited on bare or lightly worked canvas— sometimes thrusting stray filaments into a void, sometimes using them as a bridge from one passage to another. The result is an amalgam of toughness and lyricism that everywhere bespeaks a fierce and exultant energy.

All but three paintings in the show date from 1990-92, when Mitchell was dying of cancer. There is little sign of her illness, except perhaps in the two large Sunflower paintings— whose subject matter connotes mortality (and, of course, Van Gogh)— and in one of her two 1991 Tondo paintings, where a dense black passage suggests a grim gravitational pull.

But in Mitchell's risky, ebullient art, life and death are inseparable, each the condition of the other. She kept her high-wire act up, and her delight in the pure sensuous pleasure of painting, right to the end.

These last canvases, moreover, are among Mitchell's most ambitious. Most of them are large diptychs in which the dividing line between the two halves is especially charged, sometimes bringing their respective forms close— a galactic collision?— and sometimes holding them apart.

In the gorgeous Beauvais (1986), the balanced clusters plunge toward the divided center as if to a waterfall. By contrast, in Merci (1992), they hang in suspension like cloud-fields drifting across a white sky.

Between the self and the world

If I describe Mitchell's work in terms of landscape, stellar or terrestrial, it's because the French countryside is clearly her point of departure. In the final reckoning, she may be seen as a crossover artist who married the conventions of Abstract Expressionism to the grand tradition of French landscape art that seemed to fade after Monet. Certainly a work such as River (1989), with its evocation of Monet's late studies of reflection, is meant as a direct homage to the master, as well as an extension of his vision.

We should not at this point worry over academic debates about abstract versus figurative art, since neither exists in a pure state any more than artists themselves can be separated from the forms they see or imagine. Let Plato argue the point if he will, but I find in Joan Mitchell's color fugues the happiest of conjunctures between self and world.

A New York sensation, once

Across the street from Cheim & Read in Chelsea, the Pace Gallery is celebrating the centennial of the Chilean painter Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren (1911-2002) with a show of 14 mostly large canvases, two of which— respectively 14 by 21 feet and 13 by 27— occupy entire walls by themselves. Matta—he has always been known by this single name alone— made a sensation when his Surrealist-influenced works were first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in the early 1940s.

Like De Chirico, Matta had a brief period when he produced paintings of unsettling, hypnotic power that have lost none of their magic (at least for me). Whereas De Chirico suggested inner states of mind by means of empty, arcaded cityscapes and juxtaposed objects wrenched out of their familiar contexts, Matta developed nonobjective biomorphic forms held in gravitational tension within luminously dark interiors, a space that suggested both mind and cosmos simultaneously, and a frame to accommodate both.

He called the resultant paintings "inscapes," but they seem to have ingested the void. There is nothing quite like them in 20th-Century art, and they exerted great influence on the emerging generation of Abstract Expressionists, especially Pollock, Gorky and Motherwell.

Gorky's suicide

I'm not sure that Gorky's masterpiece, Agony, could have been produced without Matta's example, but their relationship became a little too close: Matta ran off with Gorky's wife, and Gorky committed suicide a short while after. There were certainly other factors— Gorky was ill with cancer, and his studio burned in a fire— but the tight New York art world of the late 1940s held Matta responsible for Gorky's death, and ostracized him.

Matta returned to Europe, where he'd studied in the 1930s with Le Corbusier and Breton, and pursued his career there. His work turned political, and representational elements emerged in it.

These later canvases seem to me weaker and more diffuse, and his habitual monumental scale exposed their limitations. Matta nonetheless succeeded professionally, and although his American reputation went into eclipse, he was chosen as one of the world's ten most important artists in a 1972 international poll.

The Pace show of Matta is thus a good if limited opportunity to revisit him in the city of his first triumphs. The canvases on display are all late Matta, the earliest dating from 1975 and the last from 1999, when the artist was in his 88th year.

Inventive but uneven

The news, for me, is that Matta remained inventive and experimental to the end of his life, and that he was still capable of imposing work. The overtly political elements have disappeared (or been absorbed) in these later paintings, but there is no attempt to go back to the style that first won him favor, let alone (as with De Chirico) to fabricate backdated work now recognized as self-forgery.

At the same time, the work is uneven. Of the two largest canvases, L'homme descend du signe simply doesn't engage me, and its huge stretches seem forced and uncompelling. But Architecture du temps, almost as big and very nearly achromatic— except for bluish tints, it's entirely a study in white, black and gray— exerts much of the master's old spell.

It's interesting, too, that these are respectively the earliest and latest works in the show, so there is no question of cognitive or artistic decline. Matta swings like a slugger— when he connects, he can take the ball out of the park, and when he misses there's a lot of air.

Thinking big

But Matta didn't have to work large to work well; one of the most quietly impressive works in the show is the smallest, an untitled canvas from 1991. Nearby is another fine piece, Comment une conscience se fait univers (1992), which sets cube-like forms against a blue that, strategically "torn" in places, reveals a darker hue suggesting the depths of deep space.

I might also mention Deramen (1988), M'onde (1989), and The Fall (1991), the latter the only title in English. Each of these works is quite different, and it's this restless, protean energy that's perhaps most remarkable in Matta: He never stopped thinking big and taking risks.

With the art wars of the 1940s behind us, I'd say it's more than time for a decent retrospective here that would at least sample Matta's long career. Meanwhile, the Pace exhibit is a placeholder.