"Joan Mitchell was one of the preeminent painters of the Abstract Expressionist episode in American art. During the prime decades of her career, the 1950s through the 1980s, she produced a body of ambitious, lyrical, and often bravura oil paintings which rank with those achieved by her mentors, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. It is the ambition of The Paintings of Joan Mitchell to introduce Mitchell's life and work to a far wider audience than has ever been exposed to her contribution. ". "The Paintings of Joan Mitchell is published on the occasion of a major exhibition of Mitchell's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, mounted ten years after her death. It is perhaps only now that we are able to tell her story both as an artist and as a brilliant, complex, and sometimes turbulent woman. Many aspects of Mitchell's career that have been virtually unknown to the American audience are revealed here from different perspectives by authors Jane Livingston, Linda Nochlin, and Yvette Y. Lee. These texts, together with many previously unpublished images, offer a riveting narrative and a powerful visual experience. "--BOOK JACKET.