Joan Mitchell. Lady Painter

A reconstruction of the major Abstract Expressionist's life includes coverage of her debutante years in the Midwest, her marriage to Barney Rosset, Jr. and her pioneering achievements as a woman in male-dominated artistic circles. By the author of Shadows, Fire, Snow.A full-scale biography-the first-of the dazzling, outrageous, mythic Abstract Expressionist artist considered today one of the major American painters of the latter half of the twentieth century.Joan Mitchell-Midwestern steel heiress; ice-skating champion-came of age as an artist on New York's Tenth Street in the 1950s; knocking back beers at the Cedar Bar with de Kooning, Pollock, Kline, et al.; carousing in the Hamptons with Frank O'Hara, Saul Steinberg, Helen Frankenthaler; hanging out with hip cats at the Five Spot; and forging her own path in an art world convinced that women couldn't paint. In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs Mitchell's large and reckless life (her debutante years growing up in the Midwest; the evolution of her extraordinary work; her marriage to Barney Rosset Jr., owner and publisher of Grove Press; her affairs; her exhibitions) as seen through the times, the people, and the worlds of Chicago, Lake Forest, New York, Long Island's East End, and the expatriate circles of Paris-from the 1920s through the 1990s.