Diabolo (neige et fleurs) 1969

Curator: This is Joan Mitchell’s "Diabolo (neige et fleurs)", created in 1969. Editor: It hits me like a burst of untamed joy—though there’s something slightly unsettling lurking beneath the surface. Curator: Unsettling how? The canvas presents fields of color, energetic brushstrokes, layers upon layers. The eye travels, charting compositional relationships more than representational ones. Editor: It’s in the tension between the chaotic explosions of pigment and the vast white voids. It feels like suppressed energy about to erupt. I keep thinking of flowers blooming in a blizzard, an image of resilience but also stark fragility. Curator: Precisely. Notice how Mitchell’s use of impasto generates physical dimension, pushing the painting’s surface forward. Color serves less to define forms and more to evoke emotions. How do you read that? Editor: It feels like raw emotion rendered visible. The patches of intense blues and yellows could evoke sunlight fractured through snowdrifts. But what about that shape near the bottom – almost a collection of human figures? I'm getting hints of a crowd... maybe of celebration? Or perhaps mourning? Curator: The suggestion is interesting, though any figurative element would be highly subordinate. The painting strikes me as the artist internalizing the landscape and rebuilding it through subjective experience, line, and color. There's that underlying feeling of conflict, and acceptance. Editor: Perhaps it reflects that delicate balance – how beauty and brutality so often coexist. Snow and flowers both represent very potent, diametrically opposing concepts in a large number of belief systems. The visual dialogue is very provocative. Curator: Provocative, and deeply affecting because of it. A potent example of Abstract Expressionism. Editor: Yes, I leave it with a slightly different understanding. There’s almost a warning within the beauty, and an invitation, too.