The Grand Valley

Morgan Meis

• Publisher: Slant Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781639821990
• eBook ISBN: 9781639822010
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human connection. The Grand Valley paintings, born from a memory not her own, become a focal point for understanding Mitchell's approach to abstraction and landscape. Meis examines the pain and, at times, even violence within Mitchell's work, connecting it to her turbulent life and the critical interpretations of her art (including her struggle to be treated as seriously as her male peers). As with the previous acclaimed volumes in this trilogy, Meis begins with a work of art and moves outward toward history, philosophy, and religion to provide context and insight. With his characteristically disarming wit and linguistic playfulness, Meis investigates the idea of the artist's self, drawing upon the mystical aspects of Carl Jung's thought and discovering parallels between Mitchell and obsessive creators like Claude Monet and Gertrude Stein. Humorous and accessible, yet always willing to grapple with the most vexing and challenging issues of human finitude, The Grand Valley brings an innovative trilogy to a rich and satisfying conclusion.

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. One day in 1983 Joan Mitchell started painting a bunch of paintings. You could call them landscapes. Or are they something else? She painted, finally, twenty-one versions of this place that wasn’t quite a place. These great paintings are hard to understand.
• 2. We are introduced further to Joan Mitchell and to the puzzles and mysteries of Joan Mitchell and that leads to a more general discussion of difficult people and what makes them also wonderful.
• 3. The pain and difficulty of Joan Mitchell’s paintings, which can be very difficult and painful indeed. The difficulty of people who show things by hiding and vice versa, people like, for instance, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
• 4. Joan Mitchell was an abstract painter, more or less. But what is that, really? What were mid-twentieth century abstract painters trying to do? What was Joan Mitchell, specifically, trying to do with abstraction and, also, isn’t it interesting to talk about Clyfford Still sometimes?
• 5. What is a landscape? What is a crucifixion scene? And why did John Ashbery know so much about what Joan Mitchell was doing and why she went to France?
• 6. A return to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and some reflections on The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein’s most brilliant and unaccountable work. And are there two Gertrude Steins?
• 7. The critic and personality Dave Hickey enters the picture. He brings with him the idea, which he repudiates, of there being two Joan Mitchells, Big Joan and Little Joan. The existence and the nonexistence of Big Joan and Little Joan.
• 8. Talking about Dave Hickey forces us to talk about Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss academic and also, it turns out, strange mystic or prophet or something. This Swiss person took a train ride to hell and came back with some interesting news.
• 9. More is learned about the travels of Carl Gustav Jung into hell. Hell is a place that must be encountered. Down there in hell, you learn to be the person you had always been in the first place. It’s a paradox. But a nice one.
• 10. Back to Joan Mitchell and the intractable France problem. And not just France, but a little town in France in particular. You can’t confront Joan Mitchell without also confronting Vétheuil, which also means confronting Monet, which also means confronting sunflowers, which also means confronting death.
• 11. A few more brief thoughts on loss and death.
• 12. Going to hell. Lots of people have done it. Odysseus did it. He did it because of Circe. And what does any of this have to do with Poseidon? What do the depths conceal?
• 13. Some further thoughts about Jean-Paul Riopelle. The beast plays his role and runs off with the dog walker, as was also necessary.
• 14. The wrongness of Dave Hickey even though he was also a little bit right. Also, the letter “S” is red. And the importance of paintbrushes, lots of them. The way that Joan Mitchell went within herself and then beyond herself when she was alone with her brushes.
• 15. On the nature of the self, which has no nature. On the paradox of the self, which isn’t even a paradox, because it is nothing. The something of a nothing. The importance of music. The importance of the sound of certain human voices. The infinity of certain experiences.
• 16. Joan Mitchell sees the direction in which art history is going and runs in the opposite way. Joan Mitchell feels sorry for herself after Jean-Paul Riopelle runs off with the dog walker. Joan listens to opera. Opera leads to considerations of some of the great fuckfests of history.
• 17. Another glimpse into history as a test. Another glimpse into the denials of the great losers. The way rarely taken: Dido, Carthage, the Suffering Servant.
• 18. We get a little abstract and we make up a bunch of words and phrases in order to describe what Joan Mitchell was doing on the canvases she painted in 1964, a kind of annus mirabilis for Joan Mitchell in which she obliterated herself and therefore also became most herself.
• 19. The ongoing painterly descent of Joan Mitchell and then the unexpected appearance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Francis Bacon, and The Lord Chandos Letter. The secret that is held within the terrible dying of the rats.
• 20. From the terrors of The Lord Chandos Letter to the obsessions of Monet and the repetitive nature of Impressionism at its essence. The fear and desire that drives Monet forward.
• 21. Where we explore the fact that Joan Mitchell, who not only went to live more or less in Monet’s old house, also took on large painting projects that are not unlike what Monet took on in his serial paintings.
• 22. A little dive into the lives of children and how they experience special places and then how that experience might be transferred into a specific style of painting, a specific style of painting that was of specific interest to Joan Mitchell.
• 23. Why was Monet so obsessed with water lilies? Why did he paint the same subject matter over and over? What happened in those final paintings where the water lilies seem to become unmoored from any anchor in visual reality?
• 24. The unique way that space and distance operates in the special places where children go. The big valley is a place you can’t go to. You are either in it or you aren’t. There’s a way to paint that, it turns out.
• 25. Joan Mitchell had a relationship with previous painters and she acknowledges this. But she was never happy being compared to Monet. And she was never happy with what anyone said about her paintings. She was not happy with theories about art. She was not happy. She preferred to say no.
• 26. Joan Mitchell and the serpent.
• 27. Carl Jung and the serpent.
• 28. Lord Chandos and the serpent.
• 29. Paintings and words.
• 30. The final whirlpool into which Monet descended in his final paintings of the water lilies.
• 31. The final whirlpool of language that eats itself in the ouroboros of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
• Further Reading