When artist Joan Mitchell was born in 1925, her father wanted a boy. He let her know that her entire life, leading her to seek psychiatric help. As much as that experience shaped her mind, Joan’s mind already set her apart, and set her on the course to become an artist. As revealed in Patricia Albers’ Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, the first full-length biography of the artist, Mitchell had both synesthesia and an eidetic memory. In other words, Mitchell saw much of the world—letters, sounds, people, and even emotions—as colors, while at the same time remembering every detail of the past as vividly as the present. That unique combination and Mitchell’s drive to become an artist helped her rise within the male-dominated art world of the 1950s. Albers’ sensitive and insightful biography provides a whole new vision of Mitchell and her art and raises fascinating questions about what it meant to be an artist and a woman in 20^th century America.

Albers’ revelation of Mitchell’s synesthesia and eidetic memory steals the show initially. Of contemporary artists, David Hockney is also believed to be synesthetic. Artists such as Van Gogh may also have been synesthetic. Mitchell hid her condition during her lifetime, vaguely alluding in interviews to the colors she saw when listening to music, meeting people, or experiencing emotions. But, Albers cautions, “[t]o reduce [Mitchell] to a case is to disregard her painterly intelligence, her professionalism, her years of training and work.” Mitchell’s unique perceptions may have served her art, but it was her devotion to her craft and fierce intelligence and passion that made her who she was.

Mitchell fed her fascinating head furiously. Daughter of the poet Marion Strobel, Joan read voraciously, finding herself drawn, among others, to Wordsworth and Proust—two writers who probed memory in ways that captivated her. Whenever she painted, Mitchell played music—everything from Mozart to the Blues to Charlie Parker to Billie Holiday. The music inspired colors in her imagination that fueled the paintings flowing from her hands. Painting became an ecstatic, religious epiphany. “Mitchell might have had Blue Territory [detail shown above] in mind when she bemoaned to a colleague that art had ‘lost some of its spirituality,” Albers writes, “Not only does Blue Territory conjure a book of hours… but also shines as Mitchell’s Starry Night.” As mind-blowing as thinking about Mitchell’s mind is, Albers manages to keep pace with the dizzying possibilities and helps us follow, too.