On Saturday, September 26th, 2026, during Independent 20th Century, a screening of Guy Bloch-Champfort’s 2015 documentary film Joan’s Friends was followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and author of the 2023 book of interviews, Joan Mitchell: By Her Friends, joined by one of Mitchell’s friends, poet and critic John Yau. The conversation, moderated by Sotheby’s contemporary specialist Alya Sama, ranged from personal recollections of the artist to insights about her work. Below are highlights from the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
Photo by Jean-Pierre Biot.
Alya Sama: We all know so much about Joan Mitchell, this mythic giant in the art world, but we are here to discuss Joan as a friend, as a person. I would love to start by hearing from both of you about how you first met Joan and if there is one moment in particular that really stands out to you as an essential memory that captures who she was as a person.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: I met Joan in New York when I was a young lawyer and I was invited by her Parisian gallerist Jean Fournier to a party after an opening of Joan’s at Xavier Fourcade Gallery. It was in the late ‘70s. When I went back to France one year later, I got in touch with her and she invited me to go to her house in Vétheuil. Vétheuil was where she got her house, where she lived and worked, and where Monet lived before going to Giverny. When we had lunch, I had just come back from Mexico and she told me, "Well, I love Mexico. Come back with your pictures." That is how our friendship started. She was the age of my mother, but we were really good friends. One little story that I like is that, a few years later, at the end of the ‘80s, I came to New York when she had a big show in the United States and I was given a poster of the show and I said, "Joan, could you sign it for me?" And she said, "What do you want me to write?" I said, "Well, write something personal." So she wrote, "Guy, I love you. Is that personal enough?"
Alya Sama: John, you mentioned when we were talking earlier about a job posting that you saw that would have taken you to Vétheuil.
John Yau: An artist—I was a poor poet living in New York, I think my rent was $75 a month—and she knew that I could not even afford it and I did not have a phone anyway. She said, "There is a job in France, you can work for Joan Mitchell." I said, "What do I have to do?" I am not a painter, so, I just thought, you are going to be a studio assistant. What am I going to have to do? She said, "Oh, well, you just have to walk her dogs every day." I said, "Okay, I think I can do that. But is there anything else I have to do?" She said, "Well, you have to have dinner with her and Jean-Paul Riopelle at night." I said, "Okay, I think I can do that." And I kept thinking there has got to be something more to this job because why would I be the person picked for this job? There must be many people that would want this job. I said, "Okay, what else is there?" And she said, "Well, at a certain point, they will drink a lot and argue with each other and probably start screaming and maybe throw things at each other and you are not allowed to leave the room." And I said, "I don't think I'll take that.”
Alya Sama: So, you did not end up meeting her then, but life brought you together later?
John Yau: I met her at Robert Miller's [gallery]. Someone was making a film of her— two women. I forget who they were. Somehow it came up that I may be in the film. So, I was invited to meet her. I ended up not being in the film. And she had a book of my poetry on her lap. She was seated at a table and I came in and she said, "Oh, I have your book on my lap. Why don't you sit on my lap and read from it?" Then, of course, everybody completely quickly changed the subject because they did not want this conversation to go further. I think what Paul Auster said in the documentary is true. She did test you. I think she felt she had to find out if she trusted you, or that there could be a conversation. Almost every time we talked, there would be a moment when she was testing me to see if I would get angry at her or something. I did not, so it was fine.
I never tried to guess why she did this. I felt, as a woman artist in a male world, she probably always had to define her territory.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Alya Sama: One thing that comes across in the film and from speaking to you is how big of a personality she was, how volatile and emotional. I am curious, Guy, in your experience in Vétheuil, how that really translated when you were spending time with her?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: I would go to Vétheuil, I would say, once a month for over 10 years. She only worked by night, so, she would go to bed in the morning and get up early afternoon and start having coffee. We would talk and she was very curious about people. We really did not talk about painting. We talked about what was going on in Paris, what I was doing. She was extremely curious and very generous. She could be very aggressive when she drank too much. I really think she really started to drink because, as a woman artist in the ‘50s, she really behaved like men. So, she smoked a lot. She drank a lot, just like men. And she died of it in a way, because she died very young when she was 66 or 67; she had cancer after having smoked and drunk too much.
When I was going to Vétheuil to her house, I knew that when it was getting late, she had too much to drink and she could get to you. So, we would go to her studio after dinner and she would really show me her last painting. Her studio was not so big. So, when she made those huge polyptychs, they could not stand on her walls. It was very interesting. You had this woman, very fragile, very slim, and she would carry these huge paintings and you could not touch them, obviously. I had a trick. At midnight I said, "Well, Joan, I think I have to go to bed."
Alya Sama: It was very strategic. It is so interesting that she was painting these really large sunny compositions at night. It seems so incongruous to me.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: Yes, but I know that she would go back to the studio by daytime to check the paintings, to see how they looked in natural light.
Alya Sama: She always painted from memory.
John Yau: She said she carried the landscapes inside her. She was a figure skater, so, she had a way of moving through space that you feel in her work. There is a way, particularly in the drawings and pastels, of graceful moving through space.
Alya Sama: There are a lot of contradictions in her work. I wonder if you feel there are also contradictions in her personality?
John Yau: I think anybody that is interesting is full of contradictions. I did do one thing with her. I knew she did not like Helen Frankenthaler. I knew why she didn't like Helen Frankenthaler, and she had invited me to her hotel and she said, "Be here at 11:00." So, I was there at 11:00 and she had already drunk half a bottle of white wine and she said, "We are going to finish this and start another one." I said, "Okay," and I thought, "What is going to happen?" Then, I just finally blurted out, "So, what did you think of Helen Frankenthaler?" And her immediate response was, "At least I did not fuck that toilet seat Clement Greenberg." And I thought, "Okay, this is who she is." I was really happy because I thought, “What an answer,” and how quickly it came out and how confident she was when she said that.
Then she did not say anything more. We went on to another subject.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: She was very tough, but also very sensitive, and she was very touched by people. People say that she was difficult. She was, but she was also extremely generous, and not so many artists were as generous as she was. For Christmas, she would give me a painting; for my birthday, she would give me a work on paper.
Alya Sama: There are so many paintings of hers that are named after friends or moments in time or places—or dogs, of course. Her dogs are a very important part. The Clement Greenberg point is interesting because, obviously, we think of her sometimes as an Abstract Expressionist, but she really would not have felt comfortable with that definition.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
John Yau: I do not think she ever said that she was uncomfortable with it. I think the whole thing with Greenberg was that he dismissed de Kooning and the Abstract Expressionists and the whole thing with the “Tenth Street touch.” She felt aligned with those people and just rejected that. Then Frankenthaler had a relationship with Greenberg and she just rejected that whole thing.
In a Life magazine article [“Women Artists in Ascendance,” which appeared in Life on May 13, 1957], where Jane Wilson and Helen Frankenthaler, and I forget who the other woman artists were—she is the only one dressed in painting clothes. All the other women posed and she rejected that. I mean, Jane Wilson is lying like an odalisque on a couch. She just rejected that: “I am not going to be put into that position. I just will not accept it.” You feel that her whole life she had to fight for her independence. I think that just became an ingrained part of her personality. It is not like once you do that for 20 years and the world changes, you go, “Oh, I will now be different.” It was an ingrained, deep part of her personality.
Alya Sama: She left to France at a moment when the women artists in New York were heading in one direction and forged her own path in France.
John Yau: She goes there [but] she had that apartment on St. Mark's Place. I remember her being quite sad when she gave it up and telling me about it, that she had kept it all the time that she was in Paris and that the only two men that she allowed in it were husband and Frank O'Hara who wrote poems in that apartment.
Alya Sama: Poetry is another interesting narrative link. It is interesting to hear from you, John, how that factored into her work, whether it is latent or something she is thinking about.
John Yau: Her mom [Marion Strobel] was an editor [of Poetry from 1920–25] and also a novelist. She wrote six detective novels and Guy said that Joan loved detective novels. So, her mother was clearly literate and had this amazing salon. Poetry was the first magazine in America to register the beginning of modernism in poetry, publishing Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen. She was part of this world, and her mother and she were quite close because there is a detective novel that she wrote where the main figure is a 13-year-old figure skater, and that is clearly based on Joan and that the girl solves the crime.
I think the girl solves a crime about a father being indiscreet. I have always wondered how autobiographical that might be, but that is just me speculating. She met all these people. At some point, I gave a talk in Chicago on Joan and somebody told me that her mother had an affair with William Carlos Williams. So, quite an interesting life for this child to grow up in. There is a biography of her, but I do not think any of the interesting stuff gets discussed.
Alya Sama: Guy, did she ever really talk about her work with you or was it the time you spent together much more about other things?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: She really did not talk about her work and she talked about her work with very few people. She really wanted to know how life was outside of her house. And, thinking of it, she never had any children. When I met her, she was surrounded by about five young people, men and women of my age who could be her children. So, in a way, she kind of adopted us.
Alya Sama: I am curious about the Monet connection.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: The Monet connection is complicated.
Alya Sama: She was friendly with Monet's grandson as well.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: Yes, absolutely. But when she bought this house, by chance it was in Vétheuil, where Monet lived before going to Giverny and where the first wife of Monet is buried. She bought this beautiful house, but her housekeeper’s house was where Monet lived when he was in Vétheuil. There is a sign. Obviously, she did not like to be associated with Monet at all. When there was this big exhibition in Paris, Monet-Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, she would not have liked it at all.
She loved Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne.
Alya Sama: John, at some point I read that you had written an article in which you made a connection to Monet and you called Joan to understand what her feelings about it would be. What did she say on that phone call?
John Yau: I gave the essay to John Cheim and then a few weeks passed and I called him up. I said, "What did Joan think?" And he clearly had not given it to Joan and said, "You have to call her." So I called her. She said she liked the essay. We talked a few minutes. Then at the end—this is the testing part—she said, "So, do you read T.S. Eliot?" And I actually had not read Eliot in years, but I got so nervous, I said, "Uh yeah, I read Eliot." She said, "You read him too much," and hung up. So, that was our conversation about the catalogue.
Alya Sama: Aside from Monet-Mitchell, how do you think she would feel about the way that her trajectory, in the more than 30 years since she passed, has taken off—these multi-location retrospective exhibitions?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: One should realize that, when I first met her so many years ago, she was already a star. She was not unknown. Many people really liked her work even though she was not as well known as now and she didn't have those big exhibitions. I think she would have been quite happy about it.
Alya Sama: Is there a reason, Guy, that you felt that now was the moment to put together a documentary with all of these testimonies and accounts?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: The idea came a few years back. I was talking with Rachel Stella, the daughter of Frank Stella, who does movies, documentaries, and she said, "Oh, why don't we do a documentary?" Finally, she did not do it with me, but I did it alone and I interviewed 25 people. It is interesting because we really discover many things about Joan Mitchell as a human being.
Alya Sama: Did you feel that after these interviews, conducting them and learning different aspects of her personality, you now think of her work in a different way? Is that a difficult, complicated question?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: That is a tough question. I was always very fascinated by her work. As a matter of fact, she was in the hospital dying and I saw on French TV that they were saying, “Well, Joan Mitchell, the great artist, is about to die in the hospital” and I knew that the house in Vétheuil was completely isolated with no security at all." I thought, "My God, everybody can come and empty the house." So, finally her lawyer in New York got in touch with me, told me, "Well, you should do the inventory of all her works and put them in a safe place." So that is what I did with her gallerist and other people. But then I discovered all those amazing paintings that she had in her storage. In her house, she had very few paintings of hers on her walls, very few.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1958, oil on canvas, 74 3/4 x 74 7/8 inches. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Courtesy of Bueno & Co.
Alya Sama: It is always interesting to think about what artists surround themselves with. John, do you feel now, looking back, that the person Joan has taken on a separate identity from the mythic figure, Joan Mitchell to you? Or, when you look at her work, do you still see her in it?
John Yau: I still see her in the work. I liked the paintings long before I met her and was always intrigued, because of all the women in that group, she and Lee Krasner always struck me as the strongest, most powerful. Then I did have the opportunity to be around both of them and they did not disappoint me in how powerful they were. Both of them were very opinionated and direct. They did not mess around. If they disliked something, they just said it to you. I respected that. I was young and I was a little unsettled when I first met Joan, she said of the three art historians in front of me, "Oh, they are just waiting for me to die so they can have a bigger reputation." I was, like, "What do I say now?" And then she said, "Sit next to me and eat." I was, like, "Okay, I will do as you say."
Guy Bloch-Champfort: I was lucky enough, at the end of the ‘80s, to be able to buy a fairly large painting of Joan Mitchell’s. She always told me, "No, don't buy one. I will give you one." But then I could afford one, so I did buy one. In the mid ‘90s, I sold my apartment and people came to visit it with a real estate agent. If I was there, they would ask me, "Oh, you paint?" I am still lucky enough to have this painting hanging, and now people kind of kneel in front of it!
Alya Sama: The story of a painting over time is quite amazing. To me, every time I look at a painting by Mitchell, it conjures up a certain sense of emotion, and she was evidently a very emotional person. So, it is interesting to consider the person behind the painting on a more granular level than just the artist behind the painting.
John Yau: There is an exuberance to the paintings. When you met her, that exuberance was not the first thing you noticed about her, but you felt it. There is a kind of joyful exuberance in the paintings.
Alya Sama: Especially in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. She painted quickly, but she was very intentional about it.
John Yau: I do not think she painted that quickly. Klaus Kertess said in the documentary that she gets on a ladder and she makes the brush stroke, then got down off the ladder, looked at what she did. I do not think it was one thing after another, the way we think. There is a kind of mythology about Abstract Expressionism that it all came quickly. I do not think it came quickly for her at all. I do not even think it looks quick to me.
Alya Sama: Her works on paper are one of the most interesting facets of her whole body of work. In the pastels, especially, she really masters the medium and you feel that sensitivity in those works.
John Yau: She is one of that generation that drew the whole time, as did de Kooning, but you do not see a lot of the others always drawing, and certainly not in pastel.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1970, pastel and marker on paper, 8 1/4 x 5 3/8 inches, photography by Alex Yudzon © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Courtesy of Bueno & Co.
Alya Sama: [To the audience] We have about 10 minutes left for some questions to continue the conversation, if you have anything you'd like to share.
Audience Member (Leila Pinto): I was wondering if you could explain how she used negative space, because I think that is part of the canvas and a lot of the artists who came after her tended to fill every inch of the canvas. Can you speak to how she activated negative space?
John Yau: I have no idea. She did not just put the paint on the canvas. She made the canvas become part of the painting, which I think is quite different. Basically she is drawing on a painting. She is not just painting, she is drawing on a painting.
Alya Sama: And there is a sense of depth to her works.
John Yau: She can make a space. It is not all just on the surface. She makes a space. She is against the notion that all surfaces are two dimensional, the kind of notion of flatness that got emphasized, particularly by Greenberg. So, I think she does a lot of different things and the paintings change over time. If you see the really early ones before she becomes gestural, and it is shapes interlocking with each other. It is amazing how she got from there to the next phase. I think those are the more interesting questions to think about than just the notion of negative space.
Alya Sama: I always think about the variety of brush work as well, especially in her work from the ‘60s, where you have this washy ground and she builds on that with ribbons of color and then layers of impasto.
John Yau: If you think about that relationship to Kline, she has got a much more varied approach. Or even with Pollock—she does not settle into a thing. She is always experimenting or opening up the way she draws in paint. And you can see that it is always a Joan Mitchell, but it is not always the same. I think that is quite extraordinary. Also, her color sense changes over time, because in the beginning, in the ‘50s, it is narrower and it gets bolder, particularly after she moves to France. It is like she is really looking at those flowers differently.
Guy Bloch-Champfort: At some point, when we talked about Monet, she said, "Well, when I go in my garden in the morning, I saw the light and it was the same light as Monet."
Audience Member (Yana Nigen): When you do a 20-minute documentary on an artist, what is the most important thing you seek to deliver?
Guy Bloch-Champfort: That is a tough question. To tell you the truth, these are just excerpts of interviews and the film would be much longer if we showed everything. In this movie, I really wanted to show sides of Joan Mitchell that we did not know. I am still very moved by hearing those people.