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Barney Rosset, who took these photographs in Brooklyn in 1947, wound
up some fifty years later as one of the preeminent publishers of
our era. Joan Mitchell, the subject of many of these photographs,
became during the same period of time one of our great American
painters. Barney Rosset took over Grove Press in 1951 and went on
to publish such writers as Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William
Burroughs, and Marguerite Duras, and time after time created landmark
cases against censorship in the United States for the right to print
them. Joan Mitchell became not only a great painter among her generation
of Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, but as a woman had to fight
the system to survive and continue to develop as one of the premiere
painters of our times.
Both were embattled,
and both were romantics. Barney Rosset loved books and fought for
them. Joan Mitchell loved painting and believed that without such
love you could not make art. 
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