Home Journal Joan Mitchell Featured in “Americans in Paris” at NYU’s Grey Art Museum

Joan Mitchell Featured in “Americans in Paris” at NYU’s Grey Art Museum

Joan Mitchell smiles, sitting at a wooden table in a white walled room, with a partially obscured abstract painting behind her. She is a white woman with dark hair cut into a bob, and wears a black blouse.
Joan Mitchell in her 10 rue Frémicourt apartment, Paris, circa 1960. Photographer unknown, Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives.

On March 2, NYU’s new Grey Art Museum opens its inaugural exhibition, Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962. This show includes two paintings by Joan Mitchell, loaned from the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s collection, as well as work by Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and many of Mitchell's other contemporaries who lived and worked in Paris during this period.

One of the Mitchell paintings in this exhibition, an untitled oil-on-canvas from circa 1960, will be on public view for the first time.

Untitled, circa 1960, abstract painting by artist Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1960. Oil on canvas, 66 x 78 5/8 inches (167.64 x 199.708 cm). © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Following the opening on March 2, Americans in Paris continues at the Grey Art Museum through July 20, and then travels to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA (September 3, 2024 – January 5, 2025) and the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, United Arab Emirates (February 11, 2025 – June 1, 2025).

Americans in Paris is accompanied by a catalogue that includes a timeline, contextual essays, reproductions of artworks in the exhibition, and portraits of Mitchell and her contemporaries in post-war France.

An open spread of the title page of a catalogue - the left page has an abstract painting by Joan Mitchell, and the right page reads “Americans in Paris Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962” followed by author and publication details.
Page spread from Grey Art Museum's Americans in Paris catalogue, featuring Joan Mitchell's Untitled, 1960 opposite the title page.
Page spread from Grey Art Museum's Americans in Paris catalogue, featuring a portrait of Joan Mitchell in her 73 rue Galande apartment in Paris, 1948. Photograph by Barney Rosset, Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives.

Over the course of February, to celebrate Joan Mitchell’s birthday (February 12) and lead up to the opening of the Americans in Paris exhibition, the Foundation shared a series of posts on Instagram that illuminate Mitchell’s time in Paris from 1948 to the early 1960s. The series includes archival photos, biographical details, and paintings from this time period. Click through to read more in the posts featured below.

See all the posts on Instagram.

The Grey Art Museum is located at 18 Cooper Square, New York, NY. For more details on the Americans in Paris exhibition and catalogue, visit Grey Art Museum.