The intense life of abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell

"Perhaps if I hadn't had to fight, I would have quit," the artist Joan Mitchell once said. "I don't know. I doubt it, though." Stanley Whitney (Gagosian Gallery)

Mitchell's work may have been born out of struggle, but there is no question that she was able to prevail, creating paintings now considered 20th century masterpieces.

And Katy Siegel, who co-curated a show of Mitchell's work for the Baltimore Museum of Art, says that it is, in part, an effort to place Mitchell in the pantheon of other abstract expressionists (such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner) who exploded onto the New York Art Scene in the 1950s. "Her work is strong, muscular, declarative, aggressive," said Siegel. "It is everything that abstract expressionist thought that it wanted to be."