ARTICLES
Madison Fred Mitchell
Daniel Putnam Brinley
Louis H. Porter |
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Madison Fred Mitchell
Born 1923
April 2004 excerpt from Art in America magazine review of Fred Mitchell solo exhibition at David Findlay Jr. Gallery, New York City by critic Jonathan Goodman.
Fred Mitchell at David Findlay Jr.:
The art of Fred Mitchell is very much a part of the New York School; however, as this show of his work from the 1940’s to the 1960’s made clear Mitchell has always developed a feeling for his surroundings wherever he has lived. In one of the stronger works in the show On Barren Ground (1941) he portrays the weathered buildings surrounding his neighbors in the town of his birth, Meridian, Miss. While the realism and gothic tone of the painting do not prefigure the joyously open abstractions Mitchell went on to paint in later life, the wish to capture the spirit of a particular place is a constant for the artist, linking early work to late. In Parade (1947), he depicts dour-faced musicians playing instruments raised up toward the light. At once sad and exuberant, this painting shows how effectively Mitchell conveys ambience.
Shortly after finishing Parade, Mitchell moved to Rome where he lived and worked for three years. Two paintings from the period Untitled, (1950) and Cielo-Montana, Rome (1950), vividly demonstrate his command of the Ab-Ex idiom. Untitled 1950 consists of yellow lines and red blotches against a black background. Crisscrossing each other across the vertical field, the lines generate a lively sense of movement that brings to mind equations scrawled cross a chalkboard. Cielo-Montana, Rome, also vertical, includes many kinds of forms-thick and thin stripes, rectangular spots of color, larger areas of lighter hues-that bump up against each other and create contrapuntal energies whose effects are jazzy and syncopated.
But Mitchell really opened up when he arrived in New York in 1951. Long a downtown resident, Mitchell treats, within the confines of his abstract idiom, such natural phenomena as clouds and trees, as well as the urban language of streets and buildings. In Walking in Battery Park (1955), for example, organic shapes in blazing reds, subtle blues and grassy greens contrast with more rectangular building like forms that weight the painting. Ithacan Stream from the late 1960’s, is simpler, with its red patches and pastel cloud shapes painted over four background areas, mostly yellow in color. Mitchell’s pleasure in the painting process is palpable here, and the results exceptionally graceful.
November 1983, excepted from Art in America magazine review by Lawrence Campbell: “Homage to the Tanager” at Buecker & Harpsichords (Gallery).
Campbell: “…Before such urban phenomena as the East Village, SoHo, NoHo, Tribeca and the South Bronx became art world landmarks, back in the faraway 1950’s there was a small group of young artists who met regularly. The members were Charles Cajori, Lois Dodd, Angelo Ippolito, William King and Fred Mitchell. It was an extordinary period. The enemies of modernism were everywhere. Abstract art was widely thought to be un-American. Even well known artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock could barely make a living…One day in early 1952 Angelo Ippolito and Fred Mitchell were walking along East Fourth Street near Cooper Union, and noticed that the tenant at No.53, a barber, had moved out. They put it to the other members of the group: why not split the monthly rent of $59 among themselves and open a gallery, not only to show their work but other’s work too. Thus was born The Tanager Gallery. A small pane of glass orange-red reminded Mitchell of a scarlet Tanager-hence the gallery’s name…
This show last spring at Buecker & Harpsichords was a deliberate attempt to recreate a typical Tanager mid-season “salon” exhibition. It included paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture made in the ‘50’s by members of the group: Cajori, Dodd, Mitchell, Ippolito, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Perle Fine, William King, George Ortman, Philip Perlstein, Sal Sirugo, Raymond Rocklin & Tom Wesselman.
…Stanton Krieder, who reviewed Fred Mitchell’s paintings in Pictures on Exhibit in June 1953, said that his work ranged from the “compactly far-abstracted to the airily nonfigurative”; it was “broadly conceived and resourcefully executed”, and was “lucid, incisive and bright with verve”. I find it impossible to improve on the aptness of these comments, which today I would echo without reservation…
-Lawrence Campbell, 1983 Art in America |
