The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled plans for a major Joan Mitchell retrospective. The BMA is set to open in April 2020 with an exhibition that will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September of that year. It will then make a stop at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in early 2021.“The time is right for a thoughtful reconsideration of Mitchell’s work and her impact on postwar painting on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Neal Benezra (director of SFMOMA). Joan Mitchell was based in New York and, later, France, where she died in 1992. Director of BMA, Christopher Bedford, said that Mitchell is “a riveting subject for the present moment.”The artist was well-known during her lifetime as a painter of abstractions. A lot of these featured an intense bursts of vibrant hues that were a reminiscent of the landscapes upon which they were loosely based. Joan Mitchell was a key member of the New York School and one of the few female Abstract Expressionists to be immediately written into art history.The retrospective by Baltimore Museum of Art and SFMOMA is expected to include some of her most famous works, including "1956’s East Ninth Street,” a painting in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This painting draws on half-remembered visions of a Manhattan cityscape, with swirls of burnt umber, mustard yellow, and deep blue evoking the commotion she may have once witnessed outside her studio window. It will also feature rarely seen works and materials related to Mitchell’s career, among them sketchbooks and archival photographs. In 2002, the Whitney Museum in New York held a 60-work Mitchell retrospective. However, the new retrospective is expected to be twice the size.
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