Joan Mitchell.

According to Deirdre Bair's biography of Samuel Beckett, the writer saw Joan Mitchell, at least on first acquaintance, as a younger version of his close friend Brain van Velde. To him she expressed the same relentless quest for the void that he found in the older man's painting. She refused, however, to explain her art, just as Beckett himself was unable and unwilling to discuss his writings. Her manner of speaking tended to be economical, in any case, and after a few drinks became increasingly, provocatively epigrammatic - she was, like Beckett, a prodigious drinker. For a time, as Klaus Kertess also tells us, the two were close friends.

According to Kertess' astutely reasoned, sensible, and gracefully expressed essay, what Mitchell was seeking, however, was not "the void," but a reconciliation or perhaps comprehension, in the full sense of the word, of the various dualities or paradoxes in her life: vastness and containment, chaos and order, joy and rage, the furious intimacy of her closest personal relationships and the positive joy of her relationship to nature; the urban versus the natural elements in her landscapes; her place, within her chosen French landscape, in an American tradition "of a somber, nature-bound aloneness"; her "inordinate fear of death" and her resilience in the face of severe physical disability - she was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1984 and underwent painful hip surgery in 1985 that left her working on crutches; the intense physical invitations of her canvases and her gestures of brutal, self-protective rejection in personal encounters, even with relative strangers - what Kertess aptly calls "preemptive strikes." Perhaps the prevailing paradox of her work, however, was the fact that although she sought, even to the end, to go beyond the limits of what she had already done as an artist, she remained during the forty-odd years of her painting life resolutely within her self-imposed limits as an Abstract Expressionist painter.

In a motion that replicates Mitchell's own painting habits, Kertess steps back from the work to look at the historical context in which Mitchell painted, describing - with admiration for her close focus, her single-minded concentration - how through periods in which Abstract Expressionism fell out of favor, through periods when "the hand was being withdrawn from action . . . undeterred, Mitchell continued on her chosen path." Demonstrating her evolution as a painter in satisfyingly specific and revealing examinations of the canvases themselves, including many of the 120 handsomely reproduced in this book, Kertess explores some fascinating areas, including Mitchell's influences (she acknowledged Matisse and van Gogh but denied Monet); her use of the center of the canvas; her circularity versus her rectangularity in canvases from different periods (with a beautifully worked-out aside on her use of the sunflower as metaphor for painting); and of particular interest, given Mitchell's opulent use of white, how that color in her paintings functioned in different ways at different times, ranging from interactive, to atmospheric, to nurturing, to perilous, deathly, smothering, and finally to haunting.

The question of why one artist will evolve and change within relatively narrow limits while another will move from one expressive form to another is just one of many Kertess raises, alongside others he does not explicitly address but inspires - for like any good piece of writing, this one galvanizes the reader's mental energies. With the hold insistence of the paint itself, paired nouns juxtapose themselves and demand consideration or reconsideration - order and disorder, mess and clarity; dark paint in a rosy canvas; dark paint and dark mood, black as a joyous color, white, again, as a dark color. And why, indeed, do some artists and writers need to leave their native lands in order to paint the childhood landscape or write about it (Beckett, Joyce) while others do not (W. C. Williams, Charles Olson, Mitchell's close friend Frank O'Hara)? "I carry my landscape around with me" was something Mitchell said more than once, though not, of course, as any son of explanation.

Lydia Davis is the author of Break It Down; The End of the Story; and most recently Almost No Memory.