An artist I know, who is also an accomplished writer, told me that art is just another language. I didn’t want to hear it; I wanted to believe that printmaking, painting and sculpture are infinitely more complicated than writing, and can capture inexpressible depths. But after seeing an exhibit of paintings that Joan Mitchell, the acclaimed abstract expressionist, completed in the last decade of her life, I might agree. The canvases are recognizably Mitchell’s, with an unbridled physical vitality. But they’re rendered in discrete, stripped-down forms that are set out as purposefully as words in a sentence. The paintings have an impact that’s less pictorial, less romantic, than her earlier works, and more succinctly structured. The brushwork is like calligraphy.

I was put off by the show’s title, Joan Mitchell: The Final Paintings, which seemed both sentimental and opportunistic. But there’s nothing soft or diminished about the work. These are huge, wall-sized canvases. And the brushstrokes, in their strength and certainty, are indelibly masculine. Is this assurance related to finality or mortality? I don’t think the artist suddenly felt she didn’t have any more time to waste with painterly frivolities. I think maybe she just arrived at a point where she didn’t want to fuss. After decades of serious work, she could just get down to business.

The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star.  In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place.  Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract expressionist New York painters of the 1960’s, but ran away to New Mexico and stopped painting altogether for a while.  Looking at her paintings today, they seem to get at the fundamental conundrum that a painting is both its own new world and a canvas covered with paint.

The works at Pace, all six-by-six-feet squares, have been carefully gridded with graphite and filled with washes of white and light grey paint.  They are delicate – one needs to step right in front of them to see them – and they are luminous and musical.  I’m reminded of Robert Ryman, who also painted mesmerizing all-white squares.  But Ryman’s canvases are highly fetishized objects, all about the richness of the surface.  In contrast Martin’s canvases seem ideal, like fields of possibility.

I escaped the midday heat last Tuesday inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s museum for contemporary art.  There I crept through the cool, dark galleries full of cool, dark sculptures and installations.  Then, at the end, I found myself in a light-filled room with three enormous Cy Twombly canvases.  In contrast with the other art, terse assemblies of plywood, steel, felt and humming neon lights, they had a sweet, expansive lyricism.  It made me think of Twombly as more than a conceptual artist who fetishized the acts of drawing and making, and, for the first time, as a painter.  So I was sad to heard that he died earlier this week at the age of 83 at this home in Rome.

The canvases in Berlin are textural and textual.  Each is a blank field of white paint layered with scrawls, splotches and writing, and then more white paint.  The surfaces float in and out of focus; they’re ephemeral and engaging.  There is, across one, in Twombly’s looping script, “I am Thyrsis of Etna/blessed with a fine voice,” and it seems less like a literary allusion than a cry for someone, anyone, to listen and bear witness.  These canvases have at their heart an elemental need for expression.