Joan Mitchell Retrospective at SFMOMA

A huge retrospective of the American painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) has opened at SFMOMA before traveling to Baltimore and Paris early next year. The entrance is adorned with an enlarged photo of Ms. Mitchell puffing away on a cigarette, rather like one of Joan Didion's author photos, which seems in poor taste since Ms. Mitchell's last decade was plagued with ill health while recovering from oral cancer surgery and she eventually died at age 67 from lung cancer.

In every other respect, her life seemed enviable. Born to an affluent family in Chicago, she moved to New York after World War Two and became one of the few successful women in the Boys Club of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, holding her own at the Cedar Tavern, an infamous artists' dive, and the studios of fellow artists such as Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.

At the end of the 1950s, she moved to Paris, where she had begun a decades-long, tumultuous affair with the French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle.

In 1967, she received an inheritance from her mother, and bought a house in Giverny, near Monet's final home, where she lived with 13 dogs and played hostess to a coterie of friends and young artists from all disciplines for the next three decades.

Just when you think the exhibit is over, yet another expansive room appears and the colorful squiggles on the large canvases become richer and somehow more delightful.

Of course, some people's mobile device addictions get in the way...

...but for those willing to surrender to the monumental paintings...

...it is easy to become a Joan Mitchell fan.

The exhibit will be at SFMOMA through the middle of January, and is very much worth checking out.