From the Field: Marie Dupas on the works of Joan Mitchell at Musée d'Arts de Nantes

The works of Joan Mitchell occupy an essential place in the collection of the Musée d'Arts de Nantes because they bear witness to a strong moment in its history: in 1994, the museum presented, alongside the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the first major Joan Mitchell retrospective in France. Curated by Daniel Abadie and Henri-Claude Cousseau, then director of the museum, the exhibition in Nantes proposed an expansive journey through the first thirty years of the artist's work, from 1951 to 1980, while the Jeu de Paume focused on the second part of the artist’s career.

It was on this occasion that the museum requested a set of paintings deposited on long-term loan from the Centre Pompidou and the Fonds national d’art contemporain. Today, six works by Joan Mitchell—including Méphisto (1958), Les Bleuets (1973), No Daisies (1980) and Tilleul (1992)—are preserved in our collections, five of which come from the Musée national d'art moderne. Their arrival marked an important step, by bringing into the collection a significant body of work by an important American abstract expressionist who is in harmony with the European tradition of landscape painting.

These works are regularly presented in the permanent collection galleries, notably in thematic sections such as Territories and Time and Memory in the Cube, a space dedicated to contemporary art collections. The museum also offers interventions of contemporary works in the permanent exhibition. Joan Mitchell's No Daisies, for example, is exhibited between two 19th century paintings, Le Déluge by Léon-François Comerre and Le Naufrage du trois-mâts by Eugène Isabey. This intentional juxtaposition creates a dialogue across centuries about the power of the elements, emotional intensity, and the pictorial gesture.

Though her paintings are not narrative, Joan Mitchell manages, through material and color, to express a raw energy and a sensation of space, movement, and emotion—all of which connects her to the expressive ambition of her predecessors.

The works presented at the Musée d'Arts de Nantes during Joan Mitchell's Centennial span a significant period of the artist’s career and reflect the complexity of her approach, which combines a deep connection with nature, a style that is both gestural and structured, and a constant search for interaction between color, space, and emotion. The paintings convey what the artist herself described as “the feeling of a space” — whether that space be closed, infinite, intimate or terrestrial.

This celebration of Mitchell’s centenary is an opportunity to take a new look at this work, to explore its modernity, its sensory power, and to remind ourselves how much Joan Mitchell, as she herself said, painted "what one color does to another," rather than ideas. In this way, Mitchell remains a key figure to understand the intersection of abstraction, emotion and landscape in contemporary art.

Marie Dupas is curator of contemporary art at Musée d’Arts de Nantes in Nantes, France. Learn more about the museum at https://museedartsdenantes.nantesmetropole.fr.

Note: The Joan Mitchell Foundation currently catalogs the painting featured above as "Les Bluets," as this was inscribed by Mitchell on the painting. However, Musée d'Arts de Nantes and Centre Pompidou catalog the work with the traditional French spelling: "Les Bleuets."