The highlight of the Whitney's intermittently brilliant 2002 Joan Mitchell retrospective was the second gallery, where six paintings from the late '50s and early '60s were installed. Each was a cacophonous swirl of oils that you could easily imagine freeing itself from the canvas and surrounding you like a cocoon. This new exhibition, titled "Frémicourt Paintings" after the Parisian street in which Mitchell's studio was located, presents over a dozen works made between 1960 and 1962 that possess the same vibrancy, urgency, and energy. The paint is applied liberally and with varied means (brushes, palette knives, pours, and fingers). The not-quite-allover compositions often radiate outward, like bursts of fireworks, from a dark mass near the center of the canvas. The net result definitely looks like the work of an American in Paris: Brash first-generation Abstract Expressionism married to the color palette of late Matisse and the scrambled surfaces of Dubuffet or Jean Paul Riopelle, her longtime companion. Mitchell would continue to make extraordinary paintings until the end of her life, but never again with the consistency exemplified by this exhibition.