[1] She enjoyed diving and skating growing up, and her art would later reflect this athleticism; one gallery owner commented that Mitchell "approached painting almost like a competitive sport".

[5] After moving to Manhattan in 1947, she wanted to study at Hans Hofmann's school in New York City but, according to curator Jane Livingston, Mitchell attended only one class and declared, "I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified.

[10] Then throughout the 1950s, Mitchell was active in the New York School of artists and poets, and was associated with the American Abstract expressionist movement,[11] although she personally abhorred aesthetic labels.

[8]: 32 Mitchell maintained a robust creative discourse with fellow New York School painters Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, whose work she greatly admired.

[8] As Katy Siegel wrote in Joan Mitchell, "She went to their studios and shows, and they came to hers; she had dinner and drinks with them, in company and alone, talking painting materials and great art.

"[13]: 31  Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Jaffe, Elaine de Kooning, and Sonia Gechtoff, Mitchell was one of the few female artists in her era to gain critical acclaim and recognition.

[16] Her friends Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning thought her work was excellent and put the painting in good place in the exhibition.

[18] In an interview with Linda Nochlin, Mitchell admitted that though many of her colleagues were very supportive of her artistic career, because she was a woman in the art field she did have a few setbacks.

[21] In 1956 Mitchell painted one of her breakthrough works, Hemlock, named by the artist after it was completed for what she called the "dark and blue feeling" of Wallace Stevens' 1916 poem Domination of Black.

The marks on these works were said to be extraordinary: "The paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across their surfaces and smeared on with the artist's fingers.

"[27] In 1967, Mitchell inherited enough money following the death of her mother to purchase a two-acre estate in the town of Vétheuil, France, near Giverny, the gardener's cottage of which had been Claude Monet's home.

[31] Writing for The New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl predicted that Mitchell would ultimately be recognized "as one of the best American painters not only of the fifties, but of the sixties and seventies as well."

He continued, "This claim will not, I think, seem large to anyone lucky enough to have viewed the recent massive and almost awesomely beautiful Mitchell exhibition—49 paintings, some of them huge, done during the five years the artist has been living in France—at the Everson Museum in Syracuse.

In 1979 Mitchell completed two of her [what went on to be] best known large scale works, the polyptychs La Vie en Rose (named after the famed song by the French chanteuse Edith Piaf) and Salut Tom (dedicated to her friend the art critic and curator Thomas B. Hess who died in 1978).

[33][34] Tausif Noor in writing for the New York Times says of La Vie en Rose [that in it] ... "Mitchell juxtaposes energetic — nearly violent — sections of black and blue brush strokes against a haze of lavender and pale pink, warping the viewer’s sense of the painting’s scale and directing the eye"....[35] In 1982, Mitchell became the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

[36] In Paris, Mitchell had a circle of artist friends, such as the composer Gisèle Barreau and painters such as Kate Van Houten, Claude Bauret Allard, Michaële-Andréa Schatt, Monique Frydman, Mâkhi Xenakis, Shirley Jaffe, Zuka, and Katy Crowe.

In October, she obtained a second opinion from Jean-Pierre Bataini, a pioneer in radiation oncology with the Curie Institute, whose therapy was successful, but left Mitchell with a dead jawbone (osteonecrosis), along with anxiety and depression.

Fourcade and Mitchell visited Lille in December to view an exhibition of works by Matisse from the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad.

[37] It proved to be very popular, and featured paintings described by John Russell of The New York Times as "self-portraits by someone who has staked everything on autonomous marks that are peculiar to herself".

[49] Established in New York in 1993 as a not-for-profit corporation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation awards grants and fellowships to U.S.-based painters, sculptors, and artist collectives.

[60] The Foundation provides artists with free resources and instruction in the areas of career documentation, inventory management, and legacy planning.

[63] Past residency participants include Laylah Ali, Firelei Báez, Heather Hart, Maren Hassinger, Laura Kina, Carrie Moyer, Shani Peters, Alison Saar, Amy Sherald, Cullen Washington, Jr., Carl Joe Williams, and Mel Ziegler.

[64] In addition, the Foundation manages a collection of Mitchell's artwork, her papers (including correspondence and photographs), and other archival materials related to her life and work.

On the eve of the exhibition's opening, friend and art writer Klaus Kertess wrote in the New York Times: "A passionate inner vision guided Joan's brush.

[67] In 2015, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, organized Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings, which traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2015–2016).

In a review for The New York Times, critic Tausif Noor wrote that the exhibition "tracks how Mitchell’s steely resolve to be written in history as one of the greatest painters produced a signature style that extended the contours of Abstract Expressionism.

"[70] Following the run at SFMOMA, the show traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art (March 6 – August 14, 2022) and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (Fall 2022).

[71] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[79] At Christie's New York in 2014, Mitchell's untitled 1960 abstract painting sold for $11.9 million, surpassing the high estimate and setting an auction record for the artist.

The result also established a new record for an artwork by any female artist at auction, formerly held by Berthe Morisot's Apres le dejeuner (1881).