Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior and Rudolf Sagmeister

You can’t overlook a Joan Mitchell painting once in its range. This sprawling survey promises continual reckoning before the artist’s bold abstract canvases, made in New York, Paris, and Vétheuil, France, just a short drive from Monet’s garden. During her lifetime (1925–1992), Mitchell supported a legion of young painters; fittingly, the catalogue includes contributions by such artists as Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman, and Ken Okiishi, as well as new scholarship by Dziewior, Isabelle Graw, and Suzanne Hudson. And in keeping with current interest in the ephemera around artistic practice, miscellany from the Joan Mitchell Foundation archive will be displayed. For a figure with a famously acerbic tongue, who counted Frank O’Hara and Samuel Beckett as dinner dates and pen pals, such material can only enrich the scene. But Mitchell’s paintings will surely provide its view: Their vibrant, thickly daubed surfaces don’t ever seem to settle or set. Travels to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Nov. 14, 2015–Feb. 22, 2016.

— Prudence Peiffer