American painter, born in Chicago, where she had her main training at the Art Institute of Chicago School, 1944–7. In 1950, after a year in Europe on a scholarship, she moved to New York. She began her career as a figurative painter, but in the early 1950s she met several leading *Abstract Expressionists and became a representative of the second generation of the movement, painting in a free, vigorous, rough-textured style that owes much to *de Kooning in particular. Mitchell said that ‘Music, poems, landscapes and dogs make me want to paint’ and her work often conveys a feeling of landscape (which was her main subject in her figurative days). From 1955 she lived mainly in France and she died in Paris.