Joan Mitchell: I Carry My Landscapes Around with Me

I Carry My Landscapes Around with Me is the first publication devoted to Joan Mitchell's multipanel paintings, the large-scale works she built by joining two to five canvases across four decades of practice.

The book accompanied a 2019 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York organized with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, drawing on paintings held in public and private collections as well as the Foundation's own holdings. Its 104 pages reproduce 57 works in color, including detail views that show the surface and brushwork up close, with new essays by Suzanne Hudson and Robert Slifkin examining how the multipanel format let Mitchell build continuity and rupture into a single field and open onto something closer to a remembered landscape than a depicted one. The title comes from Mitchell's own account of her process, written in 1958: she painted not nature itself but what it left her with.

Mitchell (1925–1992) was a central figure of second-generation Abstract Expressionism, known for a synesthetic, intuitive use of color and a reworking of the figure-ground relationship that set her apart from her peers; David Zwirner has represented the Joan Mitchell Foundation's holdings since 2018.