Mitchell, Fred

Madison Fred Mitchell emerged as a painter in the years immediately following World War II, a period when New York was becoming the center of the international art world. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Mitchell studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and his early development was shaped by an unusually broad exposure to modern art. A 1947 Pepsi-Cola scholarship enabled him to travel to Rome, where the experience was formative, with tremendous exposure to Modernism.

The artist settled in New York in 1951 at the Southern tip of Manhattan and quickly became part of the city’s experimental downtown community. He was among the first artists to establish a studio at Coenties Slip, the area along the East River that would become an important center for younger artists; Elsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman were based in the same building. Mitchell’s paintings of the 1950s reveal an artist deeply engaged with Abstract Expressionism but unwilling to surrender completely to its most dramatic conventions. Rather than relying primarily upon the sweeping brushwork or dense impasto associated with the movement’s better-known figures, Mitchell developed a more measured language of thinly applied paint, softly defined shapes, and floating areas of color. His paintings often seem to hover between landscape and abstraction.