<A Small Garden>

This lush composition, with its acid colours, is inspired by the spectacle of nature. The American painter Joan Mitchell applied broad strokes of colour with energetic and rapid gestures that involved the whole body. The cobalt blue, dense at either end, narrows in the middle to reveal a large lemon-yellow aperture. The memory of Claude Monet at Giverny seems to emerge in this painting, which reproduces the impressions of a nearby garden. In 1968, Mitchell moved to Vétheuil, a town a few kilometres away from Giverny.