In Joan Mitchell: Bedford Series (Bedford: Tyler Graphics, 1981), Barbara Rose (author of American Art Since 1900 and Autocritique: Essays on Art and Anti-Art, 1963-1987) suggests that Joan Mitchell attempted to "translate her painterly vision into a print medium" and adds that her collaboration with Ken Tyler "is clearly a triumph for both." Rose goes on to describe the scene at the studio: "Mitchell is a painstaking and careful worker. No snap decisions. She works on her lithographs as she paints, revising, considering, criticizing the work in a process that takes time. 'Ken,' she says, 'I want to try a color like the color of dying sunflowers.' Her instructions are precise but not literal. What she has in mind is a sensation, not an objection or even a place. Mitchell, with her roots in American action painting and the romantic subjective esthetic of the New York School, paints an inner vision. The 'landscapes' she paints are expressions of emotions felt, not of things seen. Joan Mitchell's lithographs are an extension of her recent painting." All 10 of the lithographs are illustrated in this publication.

See also Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), the text published on the occasion of a major traveling retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in June 2002 and will travel over the next two years to The Birmingham Museum of Art (6/17/03-8/31/03), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (9/21/03-1/7/04) and then to the Phillips Collection in Washington DC (2/14/04-5/16/04). This work included full-page color reproductions of Bedford I and Bedford II.

For brief comments and bibliography, see Mitchell 1.