Includes bibliographical references (pages 431-487) and index.

"Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead," said a New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell in the 1950s. She was a steel heiress from the Midwest (her grandfather built Chicago's bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution--Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian. She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn't paint. This is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Biographer Patricia Albers reconstructs the painter's large, impassioned, messy, reckless life: her growing prominence as an artist, her marriage and affairs, her friendships with poets and painters, her extraordinary work.--From publisher description.

SACFinal081324