Overview

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions-at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human connection. The Grand Valley paintings, born from a memory not her own, become a focal point for understanding Mitchell's approach to abstraction and landscape. Meis examines the pain and, at times, even violence within Mitchell's work, connecting it to her turbulent life and the critical interpretations of her art (including her struggle to be treated as seriously as her male peers). As with the previous acclaimed volumes in this trilogy, Meis begins with a work of art and moves outward toward history, philosophy, and religion to provide context and insight. With his characteristically disarming wit and linguistic playfulness, Meis investigates the idea of the artist's self, drawing upon the mystical aspects of Carl Jung's thought and discovering parallels between Mitchell and obsessive creators like Claude Monet and Gertrude Stein. Humorous and accessible, yet always willing to grapple with the most vexing and challenging issues of human finitude, The Grand Valley brings an innovative trilogy to a rich and satisfying conclusion.

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9781639822003

Table of Contents

Reviews

The best book I have read in years-profound, charismatic, and funny. It makes you happy to be able to read and to play out the life you are, even if selfhood is an absurd endeavor and even if ""Life"" per se really isn't something that you should try to write about. Meis doesn't ""try,"" and yet what emerges is a shimmering story of existence, via Joan Mitchell, big valleys, Gertrude Stein, foliage, Carl Jung, Aeneas and Dido, the color blue, fuckfests, Lord Chandos, dogwalkers, water lilies. Utterly absorbing. -Jane Bennett, author of Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman With The Grand Valley, Morgan Meis is back with another one of his topsy-turvy, loop-de-loop joyrides of an appreciation. This time his ostensible subject is Joan Mitchell (on whom he is very good), but Claude Monet, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Heloise and Abelard, Carl Jung, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, among others, all get roped in to compoundingly delirious effect. Indeed, this thin volume is one long prose poem, and Meis is Mitchelling away, doing in thinking and writing-thrusting, daubing, scritching and scratching, keening, recanting, abreacting, dis-individuating, becoming present and nothing else-exactly what he's shown us Mitchell herself was doing with her great painting series. It's all dazzling to watch, and in the end quite devastating. -Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and the Wondercabinet Substack Once again, Morgan Meis shows he's one of the most perceptive, interesting, and inventive critics working today. I'll read anything by him-and so, I implore, should you. -Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and Magic Hours

Author Information

Morgan Meis writes about art and culture for such magazines as n+1, Harper's, and Slate. He is a contributor at The New Yorker. Meis is the author of The Drunken Silenus, The Fate of the Animals, and Dead People (with Stefany Anne Golberg). He won the Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2013. He has a PhD in philosophy from The New School for Social Research. He lives in Detroit.

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