TOUGH LOVE.(artist Joan Mitchell)

At a boozy dinner party that I attended in a New York walkup nearly thirty years ago, a woman announced that she was getting married. Joan Mitchell, who was there, exploded. How could anyone even think of doing something so bourgeois? The buzzer sounded. It was Mitchell's longtime lover, the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. He wanted to speak to her, but he wouldn't come upstairs. From the landing, she told him in scorching terms to leave her alone. Back at the table, she resumed denouncing the insidiousness of marriage as a trap for free souls. The buzzer again. Another cascade of profanity down the stairwell. I was awed. Here was craziness of a scary and rare order. Those who knew Joan Mitchell pass these kinds of stories around like sacred-monster trading cards. But Mitchell's personality was one thing, and her art is entirely another. They share only the energy of a towering original who, ten years after her death, in France, where she lived near Monet's gardens at Giverny, has yet to receive her due.

"The Paintings of Joan Mitchell," at the Whitney, should remedy that. This dense, dazzling retrospective of works spanning her career, from 1951 to 1992, confirms that Mitchell was not just the best of the so-called second-generation Abstract Expressionists--a status already hers by common consent--but a great modern artist who started strong and improved with age. Her work at the Whitney makes it hard to imagine why anyone would want to paint other than abstractly, revelling in the liberty and purity of oils wielded with articulate passion. Mitchell seems to me the best argument for redressing the long-standing bias against contemporary expressionist painting that was mandated by Clement Greenberg in his promotion of mannerly colorfield abstraction. (According to Mitchell, she was "kicked out" of a gallery owned by Lawrence Rubin after Greenberg told the dealer, "Get rid of that gestural horror.")

Mitchell was born in 1926 to a wealthy family in Chicago. She was lavishly educated in literature and art by her mother, Marion Strobel, the co-editor, with Harriet Monroe, of the leading American magazine of modern verse, Poetry, and at a private school that she later described as "progressive, not conventional, full of Jews." (I quote from the introduction to the Whitney catalogue, by the show's curator, Jane Livingston.) Her maternal grandfather, a bridge engineer, imparted a love of structural design. Her father, a dermatologist and an amateur artist, pushed her to excel in all things. As a teen-ager, she became a championship figure skater, as well as a diver and a tennis player. She said that she chose a painting career to escape her father's control. (In psychoanalysis for much of her life, she surely plumbed that subject.) She was a natural--witness the chromatic inventiveness of several landscape gouaches that she painted in art school.

In 1949, she married her former schoolmate Barney Rosset, whose eventful ownership of Grove Press began in 1951. Their intense union ended in divorce a year later. In New York, she made a point of befriending Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Another ally was the poet Frank O'Hara. She held her own in the hard-living downtown scene. This wasn't easy for a woman painter who--unlike Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Elaine de Kooning--was not the mate of an alpha male. She kept an apartment on St. Marks Place but lived mainly in France, where her work was always well regarded. Indeed, she might be seen as the last great foreign-born French painter, invigorating Parisian painterly sensuousness with American nerviness and ...