The Grand Valley by Morgan Meis
In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human connection.
The Grand Valley paintings, born from a memory not her own, become a focal point for understanding Mitchell’s approach to abstraction and landscape. Meis examines the pain and, at times, even violence within Mitchell’s work, connecting it to her turbulent life and the critical interpretations of her art (including her struggle to be treated as seriously as her male peers).
As with the previous acclaimed volumes in this trilogy, Meis begins with a work of art and moves outward toward history, philosophy, and religion to provide context and insight. With his characteristically disarming wit and linguistic playfulness, Meis investigates the idea of the artist’s self, drawing upon the mystical aspects of Carl Jung’s thought and discovering parallels between Mitchell and obsessive creators like Claude Monet and Gertrude Stein.
Humorous and accessible, yet always willing to grapple with the most vexing and challenging issues of human finitude, The Grand Valley brings an innovative trilogy to a rich and satisfying conclusion.
Author
Essayist and critic Morgan Meis writes about art and culture for newspapers and magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer, and was the critic-at-large for The Smart Set, an arts magazine at Drexel University. A co-founder of the arts collective Flux Factory, he is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily. He holds an MA and a PhD from the New School and a BA from Eugene Lang College, where he has also taught philosophy. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant and a Whiting Award in Nonfiction.
Praise
The best book I have read in years—profound, charismatic, and funny. It makes you happy to be able to read and to play out the life you are, even if selfhood is an absurd endeavor and even if “Life” per se really isn’t something that you should try to write about. Meis doesn’t “try,” and yet what emerges is a shimmering story of existence, via Joan Mitchell, big valleys, Gertrude Stein, foliage, Carl Jung, Aeneas and Dido, the color blue, fuckfests, Lord Chandos, dogwalkers, water lilies. Utterly absorbing. -Jane Bennett, author of Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman
Once again, Morgan Meis shows he’s one of the most perceptive, interesting, and inventive critics working today. I’ll read anything by him—and so, I implore, should you. -Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and Magic Hours
