Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Joan Mitchell
American; 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
43%
The Sink. 1956. Oil on canvas
There's something tragic about the way this painting fails: it almost manages to hold itself together, but then in the last leg of the race it just can't quite find the energy for that final push, and since it's so rent apart and disheveled by its exertions, it doesn't just flop, but fucking plummets. In modern art, close to good is often really bad. That ganglion of marks to the left of center, which eases out into a slightly less surfacey section at its right, is nearly distinct enough to have rooted everything, but then its edges aren't quite sufficiently defined and there's no single stroke inside it that makes you feel like it's calling all the painting's shots. The horizontal marks above and below the messy midriff feel like too little, too late vis-à-vis imposing order. The failure of any one stroke to converse with any other gives things an air of randomness. (TFS, 2026)