Joan Mitchell

Hemlock

Oil on canvas

1956

Whitney Museum of American Art

Mitchell was an avid and lifelong reader of poetry. Poems inspired strong emotions without narrative in much the same way that natural views, music, and painting did for the artist.

A single mood could connect specific paintings with poems: the dark greens of this work evoke the nocturnal hemlock trees in Wallace Stevens’ “Domination of Black.”

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks...

—Wallace Stevens, “Domination of Black,” 1916