Joan Mitchell at the Whitney

Never quite emerging from the shadow of her influences long enough to consistently dazzle with a painterly vocabulary all her own, Mitchell's story, interesting though it is in parts, is the oft-told tale of the talented finalist and the meritorious runner-up. A gifted and determined painter, her problem is one that has been around at least as long as there have been artists and their teachers. Namely, that she never slew the artistic father figures who, creatively speaking, gave her life.

"I think being a woman is like being Irish," the UK novelist Iris Murdoch once said. "Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same." The bitter and stinging comment is doubly so when applied to the life and work of Joan Mitchell, for many a kind of Joan of Arc of the abstract expressionist cult. The original hard-drinking woman painter at the Cedar Tavern, Mitchell gave as good as she got from the roughneck artists who set the social and creative standards of the blustery bohemia of 1950s New York.

Mitchell sought out de Kooning and Franz Kline, whose work she particularly admired, and was invited to join the leading artists of the day at the famous Eighth Street Club (aka, "The Club"). Having gained the respect and admiration of her peers, she exhibited at the right vanguard galleries (the New Gallery in 1952 and the legendary Stable Gallery in 1953). Finally, Mitchell adamantly rejected the notion of herself as a "woman artist," a principled act that won her the respect of important male artists but was likely to confuse subsequent generations of females searching for their own artistic lineage.

She became one of a small company of women to be accepted as an equal by the members of the tightly knit, testosterone-fueled abstract expressionist circle (the group includes Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, though the latter two long played nursemaid and muse, respectively, to their more famous husbands), and managed to make a significant contribution to an artistic movement whose history is, to this day, rarely recounted without striking the heroic note. A maker of supple, striving abstractions with a constricted edge, Mitchell's most ambitious early paintings looked like controlled explosions of paint and energy (Hartigan once criticized her for being too calculated in her work, the philosophical opposite of an action painter). Subsequent paintings traded in diverse influences (Maxim Gorky, Franz Kline, Matta), while switch-hitting between the two dominant modes of ab-ex composition: the all-over manner exemplified by Pollock and de Kooning and the push-pull scheme that was the legacy of Hans Hoffman.

Mitchell's best paintings, done in a style that is most accurately described as everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, were full of stabs, slashes, daubs, swoops, drips and runs, celebrating an ecstatic variety of gesture and color in a store full of brush sizes. Several paintings currently at the Whitney, like City Landscape and Hemlock, attest to the strengths that Mitchell would later tamp down in favor of an elegant but decorative "painterly" formula: they bristle with cyclonic vigor and possess the messy beauty of iced cake after a mauling by a posse of five-year-olds. But just as Mitchell was getting started, it seemed, the fickle waters of the art world changed from ebb to flow tide. The shift inaugurated by the detached, ironic cool of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol set Mitchell adrift in an historical sea that rapidly, and somewhat prematurely, washed her up onto the beaches of tradition.

Where Mitchell landed was France, the country that had produced all the old avant-gardes. She had been traveling to France since 1950, when she visited with her first husband, Grove Press founder and publisher Barney Rosset. In 1959, just as she began to feel the pinch of neglect in New York, she took up permanent residency there. Living first in Paris, Mitchell continued to paint in the restless mode that characterized the early part of her career, appearing to eschew specific signature style for a changing if raucous vibrancy. Until, that is, her move to Vétheuil, a small village an hour northwest of Paris that had previously been the painting home of Claude Monet (Mitchell's gardener, in fact, lived in Monet's cottage). Her relocation to this impressionist outpost hardened the veins of her paintings as surely as if she were slathering her canvases with goose liver and cassoulet.

A sort of Atkins diet of painting, the pastoral mode Mitchell adopted became popular among an old-fashioned French elite eager for glimpses of the not-so-new (she received major plaudits from the French establishment, like the Commandeur des Arts et Lettres and the Grand Prix National de Peinture) and a certain stripe of conservatively liberal collector. Taking her newfound connection to Monet to heart, she launched into a series of large-scale, multipaneled works whose inspiration were clearly the master of Giverny's epically scaled waterlily polyptichs. Her color, too, turned from the complex dark tones of a hard-won urbanity to an elegantly pared-down version of lavender lyrical. By the time her paintings took on the look of the gardens and trees and landscapes that made up her gilded exile, the transformation was complete. Her derivative but provocative second-generation New York School canvases had turned into their opposite?domesticated decorative abstractions in a French impressionist guise.

Walking through the last half of the Whitney's Joan Mitchell retrospective is to recognize the sanitized and pretty abstract house style of company boardrooms and stuffy cultural foundations. Imitated by many for the glory of buttondown art consultants, the style has taken up residency inside places congenitally unfriendly to art; like, say, the big-time offices of Mississippi lawyers or the lobby of a Kentucky lawnmower manufacturer. They're elegant facsimiles of an art style whose entire essence was once daring, oozing precedent while cruelly recalling the harsh truth behind Picasso's quip about art and originality: "Somebody does it first, then somebody does it pretty."

"The Paintings of Joan Mitchell," through Sept. 29 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave (75th St.), 570-3676.