Joan Mitchell Foundation
We've been celebrating #NationalPoetryMonth by highlighting a selection of Joan Mitchell’s artworks that were inspired by poems and poets. Our final installment: Joan Mitchell’s painting "Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara)." A poet, curator, art critic, and leading member of the New York school, O’Hara was also a close friend to Mitchell. In an homage to O’Hara and his poetry, Mitchell’s painting borrows its title from his poem of the same name, which begins: “We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying / on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs / for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter / over an insatiable sexual appetite / and the streets will be filled with racing forms / ..."
Image caption: Joan Mitchell, Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara), 1970-1971. Oil on canvas, 100 1⁄2 x 197 1⁄4 in (280.67 x 501.02 cm). Collection University at Buffalo Art Galleries, © Estate of Joan Mitchell.
Excerpt from “Ode to Joy” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
