At Her Centennial, the Market for Joan Mitchell Has Come a Long Way

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

If you were asked to guess the artist behind the most expensive artwork on offer at Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month, a few (male) artists’ names would likely come to mind: Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol would probably figure on the list.

Guess again: A 1979 untitled abstract work by Joan Mitchell, on offer from Chicago’s Gray Gallery, was tagged at $18.5 million, making it the priciest work on view at the Miami Beach Convention Center (beating out an $18 million Warhol sold by New York gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan).

This year marks a century since the birth of the American painter, who spent much of her time in New York and France, where she died in 1992. Known for deeply expressive, lyrical abstractions, Mitchell was one of the key artists of the Abstract-Expressionist movement. Women artists have long lagged behind their male counterparts in the market, but Mitchell’s paintings have commanded heady prices at auction and on the private market, rising to nearly $30 million. At the same time, her auction high trails behind those of male contemporaries like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who have achieved more mythic status. 

What makes Mitchell one of the greats?

“She brought to the conversation around abstraction in the 1950s, both in the US and France, a singular sensibility for culture and energy and space that distinguishes her from her peers on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, in New York, which helps to steward her legacy. “And she continued to pursue that, through a widely ranging series of bodies of work, with what I would call a unique intensity and persistence and a dedication to pursuing her own direction regardless of trends and what her market was, up or down, or where she was showing at any given time.”

November’s marquee New York auctions saw robust results for Mitchell, with Christie’s selling Sunflower V (1969) for $16.7 million, at the higher end of its estimate, and Phillips placing an untitled 1957–58 canvas for $14.3 million, near its high estimate. Of nine pieces that came to auction last month, nine found buyers. It wasn’t a flawless autumn for the artist; an untitled, 10-foot-wide abstraction in four panels came to the block at Sotheby’s Paris in October with a modest €6 million ($7 million) high estimate but failed to find a buyer. 

Mitchell’s top auction results, and the time window in which they have occurred, indicate a market catching up with a major force. Her record, set just two years ago, stands at $29.2 million, within estimate, for an untitled 1959 canvas, sold at Christie’s New York in November 2023. That work “stands as a best-in-class example, declarative of Mitchell’s deep understanding of color and demonstrative of the fearlessness with which she wielded her brush,” Sara Friedlander, who was recently promoted to chairman of postwar and contemporary art for the house’s Americas division, told ARTnews.

What’s more, three paintings have sold for north of $20 million, all since 2023, and 17 other pieces have sold in “trophy” territory, above the $10 million mark, some 12 of them in 2020 or after. (That painting at Richard Gray’s Miami booth, if sold at the sticker price, would be the fourth-highest publicly known price achieved for her work.) And there are many works that may yet come to market. The artist’s foundation is currently at work on a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings; according to their research, roughly 1,400 canvases exist, with only around 150 of them accounted for in museum collections. 

“When I look at her top auction results,” New York adviser Erica Samuels told ARTnews, “I wonder, why isn’t Mitchell playing with Willem de Kooning? They’re basically equal colleagues in the Abstract Expressionist group. Why couldn’t she be a $30 million or $40 million or $50 million artist?” 

Prices for single works don’t tell the whole story, of course, but it’s instructive to compare market highs: Mark Rothko’s record stands at a stratospheric $86.9 million, Willem de Kooning’s at $68.9 million, Pollock’s $61.2 million—two or three times Mitchell’s record. But she does outpace her female contemporaries by far: Lee Krasner’s high is $11.7 million, Helen Frankenthaler’s just shy of $8 million, Grace Hartigan’s $1.6 million, and Elaine de Kooning’s just $1.1 million.

On the secondary market for work by women artists, Mitchell is beat only by Georgia O’Keeffe, whose Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932) sold for $44.4 million, a record it held for over a decade. That record was reset in November, when Frida Kahlo’s 1940 El sueño (La cama) sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s. Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington comes close, with a record of $28.5 million, set in 2024 after a 10-minute bidding war.

Samuels acknowledges that sales have certainly been robust. “[Mitchell] is a woman who has a market across every decade of her career,” she noted. Indeed, her top 10 auction prices include works from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

“People are waking up” to the significance of her work, Samuels said, noting that one collection she works with was offered “an incredible amount of money” for a piece that was loaned to the recent retrospective—and turned it down. “The world has come around,” she said, “to the beauty and the story of Joan Mitchell.”

Early Success for Mitchell, Followed by Heightened Recognition

Mitchell started out strong, early in her career, despite the roadblocks that often kept women artists from achieving their due. Among her early triumphs, ARTnews called her 1957 New York show, at Stable Gallery, one of the year’s ten best; paintings from that show went to important collectors as well as the Whitney Museum. That same year, critic Irving Sandler wrote a feature, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” for the magazine. (In it, she pithily pointed out, “The freedom in my work is quite controlled.”) At the same time, her work appeared in major museum shows from the Netherlands to Japan.

In 1958, she was in both the Venice Biennale and the show “Nature in Abstraction” at the Whitney; the following year, she accomplished a hat trick, appearing in the Bienal de São Paulo, Documenta II in Germany, and the Whitney Annual (the earlier form of what is now the Whitney Biennial). New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired her Ladybug (1957) in 1961. Not bad for an artist not yet 40 years old.

Mitchell’s work remains in the spotlight to this day. Her foundation points out that more than 70 museums worldwide—from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra—have displayed nearly 100 of her works over the course of the year, whether as part of their collections or in temporary exhibitions.

Recent years have seen historical women artists see rises in their market as they have been rediscovered as part of a larger attempt to redress historical imbalances in the canon (not to mention find undervalued assets). But Mitchell’s strong start in the market during her lifetime has seen only a steady climb since as early as the turn of the century, notes David Leiber, a partner at David Zwirner, the global mega-gallery that began representing her estate in 2018.

“An important marker was her (posthumous) acclaimed traveling survey organized by the Whitney Museum in 2002,” he noted in an email. “This led to the first sale of her work to exceed $1 million, in 2004, and there have been a series of ongoing new benchmark levels reached over the years since, most dramatically in the last ten years.”

Other major shows have kept up the momentum, including a retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, which toured between 2021 and 2023. Zwirner recently mounted its third show of her work: “To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965,” which was on view in New York through December 13. And when ARTnews Top 200 collectors Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez made a major gift of artworks to London’s Tate Modern this past spring, the donation included Iva (1973), a monumental Mitchell triptych, which now hangs alongside Rothko’s Seagram Murals.

Demand for Every Phase of Mitchell’s Career

Leiber told ARTnews that the breadth of Mitchell’s oeuvre is increasingly being recognized in the market, which initially only prized work from a specific period of her output. 

“When we started working with Mitchell, we would hear from clients very clearly that they were only interested in works from her New York School period, the 1950s or maybe early ’60s, but that has changed,” he said. “A lot of her high auction results are for later paintings, post-Blueberry [1969], which sold at Christie’s in 2018 for $16.7 million, what was then a record price.

“After her move to Vétheuil in 1968, there’s an explosion of color,” he said. “That landscape comes through in her work, as does her clear affection for 19th- and 20th-century painters, including Monet and van Gogh. Now, there are more clients who are interested in her works from the ’70s and ’80s. The market is broadening. People are interested in multiple periods, and that’s a sign of a great artist.”

Leiber acknowledged that the artist has had relationships with many galleries, during her life and since, including Cheim and Read, Xavier Fourcade, Jean Fournier, Martha Jackson, Robert Miller, and Stable. The challenge, then, is to come up with new ideas for exhibitions. Zwirner’s first exhibition, 2019’s “Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me,” focused on her multipanel paintings, a rarity for an artist of her generation.

As Mitchell famously said of these abstractions, “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me, and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” 

Zwirner’s recent show, staged in collaboration with the Mitchell Foundation, according to Leiber, focuses on a period, 1960–65, not as well represented in the recent retrospective. “These are tough, gritty paintings,” he says. “They were misunderstood and mis-described as her black paintings when in fact she rarely used the color black. It’s surprising how much color and experimental mark-making there is in these works. We felt by seeing a lot of work from a very narrow range of years, you have a more intimate look at the work and really get a sense of how she developed them. You can imagine them in the studio all together.” 

Prices ranged from $3 million to $15 million.

“In terms of her market, I feel like there’s a long way to go given the depth of Mitchell’s career, its many twists and turns,” Leiber said. “When you think of what was emerging in France when she first moved there, with Nouveau Réalisme or what you could call Pop, what she was doing was so far removed from that and very gutsy. She was a risk-taking artist and I think people are still catching up with her contribution, and there are several exhibitions yet to come that are in discussion.”

Leiber reckons that her current auction record could certainly be exceeded.

“Her canonical works of the late ’50s are mostly in museum collections,” he said, “but if one were to come to market I could certainly imagine new records set for an important painting of scale from 1956–1959, for instance, or even a later work, such as one from her celebrated ‘La Grande Vallee’ series (21 paintings made in 1983). I’m talking $30 million or more.”