Joan Mitchell's Sunflowers in Chelsea

If Van Gogh had had a daughter, she might have been Joan Mitchell. Mitchell, too, was racked, obsessive and sad, and her paintings, also, were too beautiful for joy— a harmony just off-kilter, with a bitter, acidic color (usually a blue or a green) lurking at the edge of Eden's feast. "Bitter glory," Dave Hickey calls it in his catalogue essay, and the term seems right enough.

Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, lived with the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and died in Paris in 1992. She mixed with the New York School without being of it, and went unserenely her own way. From first to last, she described herself as an Abstract Expressionist, and the startlingly beautiful exhibit of her sunflower series in Chelsea's Cheim & Read Gallery doesn't yield much in the way of representation— if these paintings and etchings had been called something else, no one would likely have been the wiser.

Still, the bell-like shapes of the two large diptychs from 1990-91 that dominate the central hall of the gallery are at least suggestively floral, while the orange field of Two Sunflowers (1980), with its aggressive thicket of color (the hint of menace here is purple), seems a garden in riot. Even when something arguably naturalistic emerges, however, it's still a shape of the mind, a datum of experience processed by thought and emotion. Which might be thought a serviceable enough definition of Abstract Expressionism to begin with.

What seems to appeal to Mitchell in the sunflower is what appealed to Van Gogh: its brief, vivid efflorescence, its rapid decay, its naked ruin. The latter is particularly the subject of the etchings, with their spare, desiccated lines weaving about dejected, bulb-like forms. There's nothing dejected about the lineation, though, which has a spare, fierce energy.

Indeed, the core of Mitchell's sensibility is calligraphic. Each form seems built of an essentially graphic impulse, and even the richest, densest knots of color never clot, the skeins remaining distinct. In a deep way, this seems related to Mitchell's complex sense of integrity, for just as she resists color saturation, so she never settles for the settled structure or statement. Her art, that is, impresses without imposing; you can't enter it with facile assumptions or easy expectations, and you must be ready to stay awhile. The journey is rich with reward for those who do.