"'Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead,' said a New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell in the 1950s. She was a steel heiress from the Midwest (her grandfather built Chicago's bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution- Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian. She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it,...