Spy Arts Diary: Joan Mitchell, Fabulous Forgeries, and BSO News

It’s not that I didn’t believe Mary Carole McCauley in her excellent story in The Sunday Sun just after the opening of the eye-popping Joan Mitchell retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). I’d just seen Guarding the Art, a show curated by museum security staff members, and couldn’t resist asking one of the security guards if anyone had asked them something along these lines: “I didn’t know Joni Mitchell painted?”

Satisfying my curiosity, a couple of security guards verified the Joan v. Joni confusion among some of those viewing this show. Apparently, a few of Joni’s fans never realized that the singer, perhaps best known for her colorful “Big Yellow Taxi” single, was also an artist who considered herself a painter first and a musician second (although these days, she rarely sings in public due to a brain aneurysm).

The other Mitchell — Joan — whose monumental-scale, multi-panel abstract paintings explode with colors off entire walls of several galleries that struggle to contain the power of her brushstrokes, suffered lifelong mental health challenges. Possibly breaking Woody Allen’s record, she was treated by the same psychoanalyst for 30 years who died a decade before Mitchell succumbed to cancer in 1992.

Born in 1925 to wealthy parents in Chicago, Mitchell had the advantage of skipping out of Smith College to study art in Paris. It changed her life and might’ve changed the lives of many women artists who came after her, especially in the abstract movement that was the focus of her career. Perhaps reflecting jealousy over the attention and success of such female contemporaries as Helen Frankenthaler and Baltimore’s Grace Hartigan – Mitchell criticized them as “those two bitches.” Not to mention male counterparts to whom she was later compared, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, Mitchell was not genuinely recognized in her 67-year lifetime. But in 2021, nearly 20 years after her death, her 1962 painting 12 Hawks at 3 O’Clock sold for $19.5 million at auction. Not that Mitchell necessarily needed the cash, but the affirmation of her artistry might’ve been nice.

This is a not-to-miss retrospective and afterward, take the time to stroll through the museum’s sculpture garden and then reserve a table for lunch at Gertrude’s elegant café. Joan Mitchell’s exhibition continues at BMA through August 14. But if you can’t make it there, don’t despair. In the fall, the show opens in Paris, Mitchell’s expatriate home. (Hey, it’s worth the voyage. Tell them you heard about it on Talbot Spy.)

I recommend starting Mitchell’s show with her first diptych, The Bridge. This 1956 abstract makes the relatively obvious one-side-to-the-other connection. It may not be realistically observable, but let your mind’s eye, enhanced by a bird’s-eye perspective, decipher the imagery.

Mitchell’s moods, reflected in both mind and place, depending on her mental state and physical surroundings, are evident in artistic periods skillfully delineated by BMA curator Kathy Siegel. It is most apparent in the brilliant sunny yellows of her Sunflower VI triptych painted near the French village of Vetheuil, where she bought a home once owned by Claude Monet with inheritance from her mother. Compare that vividness to her later darker period, 1987-89, represented in part by No Birds, suggestive of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, reflecting his torments while living in a creative frenzy, like Mitchell’s, near Arles.

This is a not-to-miss retrospective and afterward, take the time to stroll through the museum’s sculpture garden and then reserve a table for lunch at Gertrude’s elegant café. Joan Mitchell’s exhibition continues at BMA through August 14. But if you can’t make it there, don’t despair. In the fall, the show opens in Paris, Mitchell’s expatriate home. (Hey, it’s worth the voyage. Tell them you heard about it on Talbot Spy.)

JOAN MITCHELL
Through August 14, Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, until 9 p.m. on Thursdays; artbma.org

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About this time last year, Daniel Weiss served as competition judge of the 17th annual Plein Art Festival Easton. And now he’s back, this time judging Fabulous Forgeries at downtown Easton’s Troika Gallery during the week of the 18th annual Plein Air Festival. His encore comes barely a week after Weiss announced his intention to retire from one of the most prestigious art jobs anywhere on the planet.

“Leading the Met has been an extraordinary honor,” Weiss understated in his retirement announcement, giving the board of directors about a year’s notice before leaving his post as president and CEO of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In May, he gave a personal tour of the Met to an Easton Elementary School art teacher, Anna Matachik, who conducts after-school programming for her students related to the Avalon Foundation’s annual Plein Air Festival.

So what brings Weiss back to Easton and Plein Air year after year? For one thing, he and his wife Sandra have a home in Oxford where they’re likely to spend more time than occasional weekends starting next June. For another, he’s a distinguished art scholar and appreciator who recognizes that Easton’s Plein Air is a premier art happening of its kind.

Meanwhile, you can see Weiss’ winning selections of the Fabulous Forgeries daily throughout the festival and during regular gallery hours through late August, when favorites among audience-choice voters will be announced. The so-called “forgeries” are honest copies of famous-artist paintings by Troika’s roster of regional artists whose works are regularly up for show and sale. The Judge’s Choice award went to Laura Era for her Watching the Breakers after Winslow Homer. Weiss also recognized Mark Hiles as the Most Believable in the show for The Brook after John Singer Sargent and Deborah Elville as the Most Creative for her Irises after Van Gogh.

Troika Gallery, 9 S. Harrison St., Easton. “Fabulous Forgeries” and “Raoul Middleman, a Life Well-Painted,” through August 29, troikagallery.com. Plein Air Festival Easton, through July 24 at various locations in and around Easton. pleinaireaston.com

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When the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra introduced its next maestro, it became the first major American symphony orchestra to hire an African-American as

its music director. Jonathon Heyward, 29, will succeed Marin Alsop starting in the fall 2023 season. When she took the BSO job in 2007, Alsop became the first woman to lead a major American symphony orchestra, loosely defined as one of the top 25 in the nation in terms of size and reputation.

Heyward, a native of Charleston, S.C., originally studied and played cello, but turned his attention early toward conducting, winning podium positions with orchestras in England and Germany. In the U.S. he won acclaim as guest conductor for symphony orchestras in Atlanta, Detroit and San Diego, catching the attention of the BSO search committee tasked with finding a worthy successor to Alsop.

Heyward won rave reviews in his BSO debut in March with a challenging program embracing both diversity and classical tradition. Before his five-year contract as music director begins, Heyward will conduct the orchestra at its main concert venues in Baltimore and Bethesda, Md., as music director-designate near the end of Alsop’s tenure.

Heyward’s appointment comes on the heels of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s announcement last month of Michael Repper, 31, as music director, succeeding Julien Benichou.

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Chesapeake Music will present a treat for jazz lovers at the sumptuous Ebenezer Theater when they host the Loston Harris Trio, the resident jazz ensemble of Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle in New York City. Bemelmans Bar is famous for headlining greats like Bobby Short, Eartha Kitt, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Elaine Stritch, and John Pizzarelli..

The Loston Harris Trio will perform for one night only. Expect to hear Harris’ soulful vocals and piano virtuosity accompanied in his trio by Mike Lee on tenor sax and Gianluca Renzi on bass. Together they play their interpretations of great American classics. Harris combines familiar jazz riffs with gospel and blues as you’d expect of a protege of Ellis Marsalis, father of his famed family of musicians, including Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Harris is also reminiscent in his vocal and piano stylings of another elder Marsalis protege – Harry Connick Jr.

The Loston Harris Trio concert, 8 p.m. August 13, Ebenezer Theater, 17 S. Washington St., Easton. chesapeakemusic.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts journalist now living in Easton.