What's up for five more days

FIRST CYPRESS 1964

Many of Chelsea's doors are locked not because it's summer, but since Cheim & Read has Joan Mitchell's Trees what's the point? I have been reading about Riopelle: her earlier paintings here, with him in Vétheuil in the Île-de-France, frame the trees more closely, while the paintings from the early 90s, well after her split with Riopelle and deteriorating health are of orchards from a distance. Riopelle railed against symbolic content, Mitchell was against the Exressionists, calling Willem de Kooning an Expressionist, saying she has more kinship with the Impressionists. Riopelle thought the Impressionists were "cheats" but that Van Gogh was the "extension" of the history of Dutch painting. The Île-de-France inspires a war with Van Gogh, whom Artaud called "bodily the battlefield of.. the problem of the predominance of flesh over spirit, or of body over flesh, or of spirit over both.." with Monet near by. Provence gets you Van Gogh and Cezanne: Picasso holed himself up there to do battle with Manet and Velazquez; Kiefer ties the landscape in to controversial aspects of German history. Mitchell admired Van Gogh a great deal, and would, like him and not Riopelle, call herself spiritual. The show revolves around two paintings of cypresses, the first from '64 can't be reproduced (hence this note). Riopelle said "I don't take anything from Nature, I move into Nature." (which Mitchell doesn't like capitalized, saying "Larry Rubin [William Rubin’s brother] kicked me out because Greenberg 'dropped me.' Because Greenberg said, 'Get rid of that gestural horror.'")

CYPRESSES 1975