Why the hell have I never heard of this movie, let alone seen it?

Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter.

I love her paintings so much my stomach hurt looking at them on screen. A scene with Elizabeth Murray talking about the color yellow made me teary eyed.

There was a scene shot in the old Museum of Modern Art, in the Abstract Expressionist wing that I recognized immediately. If you stood in the gallery looking  straight ahead at the Jackson Pollack on one side of you was a room containing DeKoonig and the other side the Motherwell. I’ve been through that exact spot so many times. It doesn’t exist any more.

It’s so funny, so many artists of this era have been so discussed ad nauseum, every detail exposed and perhaps over analyzed.

But I had not even heard Joan Mitchell speak before. She is my favorite. She nails it.

How come when I was in art school in the late ’80s no one mentioned the name Joan Mitchell?