Part of 'Bedford' series 1981
color lithograph printed from four aluminum plates, crayon on white, wove, machine mould made Arches 88 paper. Size is the sheet size, not image size. Flower III is considered one of the most successful of the 1981 Bedford Series collaborations between Joan Mitchell, the artist and Ken Tyler, the printmaker. Flower III has the same powerful, explosive quality of Mitchell’s best paintings. It is simultaneously expressive and richly colored.

In 1950s New York, Joan Mitchell was a lively, argumentative member of the famed Cedar Bar crowd, alongside Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and other notable first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters. Based on landscape imagery and flowers, her large-scale paintings investigate the potential of big, aggressive brushstrokes and vivid color to convey emotion. "I try to eliminate clichés, extraneous material," she once said. "I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem." Mitchell, who moved to France in 1959, has had numerous museum exhibitions, and examples of her work hang in nearly all the important public collections of modern art.