One of Joan''s favorite haunts, the smoke-and stale beer-perfumed San Remo had black- and- white tiled floors, a pressed-tin ceiling, a dark-mirrored bar, and a clientele that included James Agee, Miles Davis, Judith Malina, Tennessee Williams, and young New York poets. There painter Jane Freilicher used to observe Joan and Mike across the room--she in jeans and the talismanic long leather coat-- smoking, drinking, huddling conspiratorially over a little table, and looking "very French New Wave." Besides painting, jazz held the two rapt. A connoisseur of early jazz--Louis Armstrong, Buck Clayton, Bessie Smith--Mike knew everything and everybody, while Joan dug, above all, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, and that fabulous "B. Holiday woman." Jazz had seduced her with its urban cast, moody romanticism, blend of discipline and instinct, and aura of freedom and authenticity. Trombonist and painter Howard Kanovitz (to whom she introduced Beethoven''s late quartets) saw distinctly, however, that Joan wasn''t really there as far as I was concerned. She was a square, and we were hip.

A very clear distinction as far as I was concerned. Although Joan smoked some grass like everybody else, that didn''t make her hip . Mike Goldberg was hip. And Miles Forst was hip. And Ray Parker was hip . [But] Joan didn''t have rhythm in her soul. She did have a near-mystical feeling for paint. Squeezed by the class she was taking at NYU (Painting of the Early Middle Ages), three weekly sessions with Fried, and a chockablock social life, Joan nonetheless painted hard all that fall.

Loading her brushes with blacks, whites, ochres, blues, and reds, she was producing muscular, jostling canvases rife with ambiguities, complexities, and urban tensions, using Hofmannesque push and pull. By the first of the year, Joan had what she considered sixteen decent paintings, fifteen of them squarish and around six by seven feet, and one, Cross Section of a Bridge , six and a half by nearly ten feet. In early January these went to the New Gallery, where they were installed by consultant Leo Castelli. Two flights above the Algonquin Hotel''s Oak Room restaurant, the New Gallery occupied the top fl oor at 63 West Forty-fourth Street. Up on Fifty-seventh Street, Betty Parsons had invented the white-box gallery, but the New Gallery retained the staid gray walls and abbreviated neoclassical decor of an earlier day. A modest outpost of the art world in the theater district, it lacked the cachet of a Fifty-seventh Street venue, yet, with the New Yorker a block away and Times Square just to the west, it enjoyed a little scene of its own. The cast party of the popular Broadway play I Am a Camera , starring Julie Harris, took place at the New Gallery during Joan''s show. Her opening threw the artist into a panic but turned out okay.

Marion and Jimmie flew in for the event, but, more important, her fellow downtown artists came out in force. Grace perceived "a fantastic display of youthful talent and virtuosity, without the real thing," but others who felt Joan had been slow to assimilate avant-garde thinking now lavished praise upon her. John Gruen found her a "remarkable artist, full of fire and sweeping gestures," and Mimi saw her as "full of talent and drive-- articulate, as though [she] were ripe with intention to hold the sun in [her] orbit as long as possible." The older men also took notice. One day Pollock strode into the New Gallery, stared hard at her paintings, then turned heel without uttering a word. According to Tom Hess, writing in 1976, another (unnamed) Abstract Expressionist elder proclaimed ruefully that it had taken him eighteen years to get to where Joan Mitchell had arrived in as many months. He didn''t intend it as a compliment. He felt that the situation had changed so drastically between 1947 and 1950 .

that younger artists could make direct contact with new ideas almost as soon as they came off the easel. Looking back, however, it becomes clear that it was a compliment; Mitchell didn''t jump on a bandwagon; she made tough decisions and she stuck to them. It took courage, skill, and a fierce delight in competition. Most of Joan''s paintings bore the names of places or place concepts: East Side, Le Lavandou, Guanajuato, Coastline, Midwest 5 P.M . These she bestowed after the work was completed. Her 34th St. and 7th Ave.

, for instance, got its title when Surrealist Max Ernst blurted out as he stood before it during the installation: "Oh! But this is Thirty-fourth Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue!" Hired by the ever-attentive Barney to write a thousand-word essay for Joan''s announcement, Ernst''s pal, literary man Nicolas Calas, saw the work''s grounding in the material world as a relief after other avant- garde painters'' suffocating insistence upon expressing their feelings. For Calas, a Mitchell painting derived its meaning as much from shrewd omission as from subtle observation: fragmented and heterogeneous, it was "endlessly interrupted" yet forever becoming. (Not only had Barney persuaded Calas to produce this fi rst important essay on Joan''s work, but also he paid for the announcement on which it appeared, and he personally documented the show using his old Rolleifl ex.) Joan also garnered three brief but generally positive critical notices. Betty Holliday of ArtNews praised her "savage debut" (what looked savage then looks lyrical today), while New York Times critic Stuart Preston looked favorably on the paintings'' fast-paced shapes and serial explosiveness even as he detected a certain shrillness and monotony. And Paul Brach, writing for Art Digest , singled out Cross Section of a Bridge , Joan''s first self-consciously important canvas, for its "tense tendons of perpetual energy" and "wide arc-shaped chain reaction of spasmodic energies." Reflecting New York School attitudes about putting oneself on canvas, he heralded the show as "the appearance of a new personality in abstract painting." As usual in those days, nothing sold.

Shortly after the show closed, however, the gallery''s co-owner, Eugene Thaw, visited the small yet elegant apartment of twenty-four-year-old William Rubin, then a conductor in training but later chief curator of painting and sculpture at the New York Museum of Modern Art. There hung a Mitchell, Rubin''s first serious art purchase, made directly from the artist, paid for in fifty-or seventy-dollar installments, and fi nanced, in part, by the sale of two fine prewar clarinets. On the heels of her show, Joan more or less cut Thaw dead: "She already knew she was a star." Indeed, she was quickly elected to membership in the Club, the mark of approval that mattered to her more than anything else. A month later she participated in a Club panel about Abstract Expressionism, alongside Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, painter Larry Rivers, and poet Frank O''Hara--a bunch of kids (the oldest, Grace, turning thirty the following day) sharing their tremendous excitement about what was still to come. In her third semester of graduate study that spring, Joan took latemedieval art and advanced French at NYU and audited Wallace Fowlie''s course on Marcel Proust at the New School. Fowlie''s class coincided with her slow plow through the final volume of the "absolutely marvelous" In Search of Lost Time , which she was reading in the original French. There were many reasons for Joan to adore Proust''s novel, including its sensuousness, luminosity, poetic language, psychological subtlety, intense opticality, and inward and outward focus.

Beginning with the opening episode of the narrator''s traumatic bedtime separation from his mother, she would have seen her own childhood self in the work''s ultrasensitive protagonist. Moreover, reading Proust made her even more acutely aware of music''s capacity for delicious magnifi cation and confusion of desire. When the novelist''s character Swann hears a stirring little musical phrase as he is falling in love, that ineffable phrase--"airy and perfumed"--unseals an otherwise inaccessible part of him and amplifies his being. At novel''s end, Proust''s narrator discovers the secret of the bliss he fi rst felt when, against his habit, he had tasted a madeleine soaked in linden tea that whisked him back to childhood Sunday mornings in the country. This slipping outside time explains, Proust writes, "why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future." The only way to grasp and make meaningful the past, which is all that truly belongs to us, he realizes, is through art made from one''s resurrected past. Similarly, the memory of a feeling, transformed as she painted, would become the basis for Joan''s work. She would think of painting--"not motion .

not in time"--as a way of forgetting death: "I am alive, we are alive, we are not aware of what is coming next." Moreover, for Mitchell as for Proust, art had the power to transform pain into beauty and to make sense of the messes we call our lives. Not infrequently the insomniac Joan read all night. Besides Proust, she devoured novels by Faulkner and Joyce as well as the brilliant six-volume autobiography of Irish playwright and socialist Sean O''Casey. She also kept up with newsmagazines and the Times (and always held strong opinions about current events). But, above all, poetry still held her rapt. She dipped into Valéry, reread Baudelaire, knew much of Verlaine by heart, and d.