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| View other artists in: Crafts | Mixed Media | Painting | Photography | Sculpture | Works on Paper |
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| (1921-1999) |
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Medium/Discipline: Crafts, Mixed Media, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Works on Paper
Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
Place of Death: Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland Affiliation: Active while in residence
Prominent Theme: Abstract
Style/Period: Expressionism; Art Brut; Cubism; Surrealism
Places of Residence: Brooklyn, NY; Long Island, NY; Baltimore, MD
Gender: Male
Race/Ethnicity: White
Biography: Born and raised in Brooklyn in 1921, John Blair Mitchell's art and art education careers were primarily spent in the Baltimore area from 1949 until his death. Mitchell's mother painted in oils, and his uncle taught John perspective in the second grade; Mitchell drew a lot. By age 10, he had lost his mother and grandparents. His father took him to study art each week at the Kit-Kat Club in New York City. Mitchell won awards in high school, and his advisor encouraged him to apply to New York University for a scholarship to study art, which he decided against, instead opting for the Pratt Institute where he felt his interest in painting in the style of Norman Rockwell would be better supported. He was awarded a Pratt scholarship in 1939 based on a watercolor he submitted.
John Blair Mitchell served in World War II in Europe and North Africa from 1942 to 1944, and was awarded the Purple Heart; upon his return he trained under Alexander Kostellow at the Pratt Institute, who was impressed by Mitchell's first cubist-inspired pieces. In 1946, Mitchell began experimenting with abstract form and negative space, in the media of sculpture and painting, in part as a result of exposure to Picasso's work in the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso was Mitchell's favorite artist, but he admired those of many diverse movements, including Karel Appel. Max Beckman, Jean Dubuffet, Albrecht Durer, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Kathe Kollwitz, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz and James McNeil Whistler. Mitchell's admired Baltimore artists Keith Martin, Carmen Robb, Olin Russum and Tammra Sigler.
From 1947 to 1949, Mitchell pursued his master's degree at Teachers College at Columbia University, and credits his instructor Arthur Young of starting him in the direction of printmaking. Printmaking was an area where Mitchell displayed considerable talent and innovative techniques. A turning point in Mitchell's career came when he was appointed to teach full time at the State Teachers College at Towson University in Baltimore in 1949, where he taught art until 1960. During this time, he produced paintings as well as a collage and oil in 1954 entitled Homage to Drury Cargill, who arrived at Towson University as Director of Publicity to chronicle the political, economic and cultural news about the college. Mitchell befriended Cargill, and would later admire Aztec and Mayan cultures as chroniclers of their own time.
In 1954, Mitchell also taught art classes at the Maryland State Normal School along with Bernice A. Brouwer and Stanley M. Pollack. In 1955, a high school friend of Mitchell's from Long Island, William F. Pelham, became a Science professor at Towson University and he and Mitchell began experimenting with photographic techniques and developing. In Mitchell's early years at Towson, his work was accepted into nearly all annual juried exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., including the Corcoran Biennial. Other activities during Mitchell's first decade at Towson University included photographing Sputnik streaking through the sky on October 4, 1957. In 1956, he won first place in the Corcoran Gallery of Art area exhibition for a tall vase, and continued with ceramics in 1959 with Olin Russum, the famous Baltimore artist.
Mitchell worked in collage just before entering the doctorate printmaking program at NYU in 1960, where he focused on gravure, specifically the color-intaglio process. Mitchell then taught printmaking at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) from 1963 to 1973: "He was a great teacher, for he not only made the often mysterious techniques of printmaking available to the amateur, but he also encouraged more experienced artists to experiment with printmaking...John always presented [the] methods as a means for artistic expression." (Jay Fisher, John Blair Mitchell: A Retrospective, p. 2)
Mitchell's work is well represented in the permanent collection of the BMA, where he also showed ceramics, prints (etchings, intaglio, dry-point, aquatint, engraving, lithography, woodcut), paintings, and sculpture in many shows from 1952 on. Mitchell worked successfully in a diverse range of media over the course of his life; in addition to those already mentioned, Mitchell also worked in drawing, collage and photography, and with materials he used in his paintings or alone, including clay, sand, epoxy, polyurethane, Styrofoam. "John was a true 'Renaissance man,' a man with an indefatigable intellectual curiosity, comfortable with a variety of media and constantly experimenting with new ones ranging from forays into electron microscope photography, colored earth on polyestrene prints, to expanding foam sculpture." (Christopher Bartlett, John Blair Mitchell, p. 3) One of Mitchell's trademarks was to make and finish most of his own frames, in keeping with Paul Klee's belief that the mat and frame should be an integral part of the completed work.
Stylistically, Mitchell frowned upon decorative art, including that by Henri Matisse, believing that art should express the artist's perspective and serve humanity on a deeper level than the purely decorative. Some of his paintings, including The Family of 1955, have been attributed to his personal experiences in World War II for their symbolism and mood, and are stylistically similar to the geometric forms and dark outlines of Picasso's Cubism. During the 1970s, Mitchell spoke about his photography and drawing in black and white: "Color, with a gently graduated tonal range can, of course, be lovely; it's the full orchestra. But for the adventurous eye, the sharp contrast of crow-black and pure white has its own mysterious impact; it's the solo trumpet...stirring, moving, miraculous." (Mitchell, John Blair Mitchell, p. 18)
Mitchell had two retrospectives during his life: one in 1964 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the other in 2000 which was the most important show of his life, spanning 60 years of his work in various media from 1939-1999. Of this show, Eric Miller writes: "His work moved from the painterly and sculptural influences of Picasso to the graphic, expressive qualities of German Expressionism and Art Brut, to the organic, manipulative, aesthetic and scientific aspects of photography, and to the multiculturalism (Mayan influences) of his recent collage-paintings." (Miller, John Blair Mitchell, p. 5)
In addition to being a committed teacher and prolific artist, Mitchell was also a leader in the arts community who supported artists as vital to the cultural life of society. Mitchell was a founding member of the BMA Print and Drawing Society in 1968, through which he promoted educational programs and workshops to promote printmaking. He was also a leader in the Artists Equity Association during the 1970s.
Mitchell's work is in the permanent collections of many regional institutions such as the BMA and Towson State University (see full list below), as well as in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York and the Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut.
Regional commissions included a large-scale mural in the early 1970s for a 7 x 24 ft. mural for Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center with Mitchell's motif of "Bioglyphs" rendered in paint and mixed media. Towson University also commissioned a Mitchell intaglio of 100 prints.
In the 1980s, Mitchell's photographic experimentations resulted in a show at Towson University showing macrophotography (photograph of an object that is magnified by many diameters using the scanning electronic microscope) and photomicrography (photograph of a microscopic image). In 1988, Mitchell explored the 19th C technique of Armand Sabattier to the fullest. Sabattier's technique was to expose the film mid-way though development so that forms have white outlines, lending a surrealist style: "I like the Sabattier effect...because it removes the photo from its literal base and makes it more magical and less documentary." (Mitchell, John Blair Mitchell, p. 15)
In 1991, Mitchell retired as Professor Emeritus from Towson University but continued teaching one printmaking course annually. He devoted his time to ceramics, graphics, painting, photography and sailing. Mitchell produced a sizable number of lithographs based on Mayan art from 1992 to 1996: "The ancient Mayan forms in my prints," he said, "do for me what African art did for Picasso." (Mitchell, John Blair Mitchell, p. 19) "Picasso was Mitchell's all-time favorite artist because he successfully experiments in so many different mediums." (Miller, John Blair Mitchell, p. 27)
Education/Training: Pratt Institute, 1939-1942, and 1946-1947; B.S. and M.A. Fine Arts and Fine Arts Education, Columbia University, Teachers College, 1947-1949; Ph.D. Printmaking, New York University, 1960-1963
Taught By: Alexander Kostellow, Pratt Institute; Edwin Ziegfield and Arthur Young, Columbia University; Michael Ponce de Leon and Leonard Edmondson, New York University
Art-related Employment: Founding member, Baltimore Museum of Art Print and Drawing Society, 1968
Print and Drawing Society Board of Directors, 1968-1999
Early member, Maryland Printmakers
East Coast Representative, Artists Equity Association
President of the National Board of the Artists Equity Association, 1975-77
Board of Directors, Maryland Art Place, 1986-1989.
Towson State University Faculty Senate, 1987-88.
Selected References: Mitchell, John Blair, Eric Miller, Jay Fisher et al. John Blair Mitchell: A Retrospective. Holtzman Art Gallery, Towson University, 2000.
Maryland Institutions Holding Artworks: The Baltimore Museum of Art; Baltimore County Arts Commission; Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C.; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland; College of Notre Dame, Baltimore, Maryland; Silvermine Guild of Artists, Connecticut; Taylor Manor Hospital, Ellicott City, Maryland; Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland; University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland; University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus; McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland
Single-Artist Exhibitions: Johns Hopkins University, 1963.
John Blair Mitchell: Prints, Baltimore Museum or Art, 1964.
Towson State College, 1964.
Easton Academy of the Arts, 1974.
Plastics and Prints, Towson State University, 1977
The Under (Your Nose) World, Towson University, 1985.
It's a Small Small World (Big Pictures of Little Things), Maryland Science Center, 1987.
Un Faux Pas De Mr. Sabattier's Mishap (and Other Photographic Exasperations), Towson State University. 1988.
Recent Prints and Drawings, Hoffberger Gallery, Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, 1998.
Multiple-Artist Exhibitions: John and Marge Mitchell: Taylor Manor Hospital, Goodman Gallery, Ellicott City, Md., 1970; Mechanic Theatre, Baltimore, Md., 1977; Hoffberger Gallery, Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, 1986; Liriodendron Museum, Bel Air, Md., 1990; With Lens and Brush: Looking at the Shore with Photography and Watercolor, Rehoboth Art League, Del., 1996.
Regional Art from the Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1983.
Inaugural exhibition of permanent collection by Maryland artists, Celebration of Maryland Artists, 1986.
Awards: First Prize for slides, Chesapeake Bay Appreciation Day contest, 1967.
First Prize Purchase Award, for Bioglyph VII, Hochschild Kohn's invitational Maryland Today show, 1972
First Prize, Towson State University Juried Painting Exhibition, 1972
First Prize, Easton Academy of the Arts Annual Juried Show, 1973
"President's Award for Distinguished Service to the University" from President Hoke Smith at Towson State University commencement. 1986
Purchase Prize, Eleventh National Drawing and Print Competitive Exhibition, Juried Show, College of Notre Dame, Baltimore, Md., 1999.
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