Joan Snyder’s Painterly Abstractions Are Neither Coy Nor Evasive Barry Schwabsky discusses Snyder's work
By Barry Schwabsky
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Today, Snyder is as uncompromising as ever, but she is getting more widely known. Her career up to now has been almost exclusively American, with just a couple of one-person shows abroad. But that’s about to change, as she has recently signed on to be co-represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, a global behemoth with branches in London, Paris, Salzburg, and Seoul (Canada will continue to represent her in the United States).
There is one sort of equivocation that does occur in Snyder’s paintings, and that is especially important to them. It’s the ambiguity that’s right there in the verb to paint. If I say, “I painted my bedroom,” you wouldn’t know without some specifying context whether I’d given the walls a fresh coat of paint, or represented the room in paint. By contrast, if I say, “I painted a rose,” that would normally seem less ambiguous—as if I had painted a picture of a rose.
But remember that song from the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland: “Painting the Roses Red,” in which three animated playing cards sing of literally slathering white flowers with paint so as to change them to the preferred hue of the Queen of Hearts. Snyder paints roses in both senses: There are roses in her works that are, as it were, modeled in paint, but in paintings like My August and Soulcatchers, both from 2023, she also applies paint to real roses affixed to the canvas. She often paints her collaged rosebuds red, but unlike the three playing cards in Alice, she is under no constraint and can paint her roses any color she likes.
It’s the red roses painted red that strike me most forcefully, because the reiteration of color puts the strongest emphasis on the congruence of naturalness and artifice. Painting the roses red in this sense inducts us into the slightly dizzying terrain where we also find poet Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” or maybe Brian Eno, in the song “Golden Hours” from his great 1975 album Another Green World, singing about “putting grapes back on the vine,” which has always struck me as a perfect encapsulation of the constructed naturalness of great art. I think of how, in Snyder’s breakthrough paintings of the early 1970s—among them Summer Orange (1970) and Smashed Strokes Hope (1971)—the artist redoubled her brush marks, not translating them into artifice like Roy Lichtenstein (who had rendered such strokes as cartoons of themselves in the mid-1960s) but reasserting them as both what they literally are and as something more. In a 2005 monograph on Snyder, which served as the catalog for her retrospective that year at the Jewish Museum in New York, Hayden Herrera explains the process: “Once the strokes made with acrylic medium (which was sometimes transparent) dried, Snyder would either spray-paint them to give them a kind of aura or paint over them with colored pigment, either acrylic or oil…. She was painting paint strokes the way a house painter paints a house.” Snyder uses this device of reasserting the mark by redoing it differently, accenting the literal by artificializing it.
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TO THINK OF A WORK like Grounding with Snyder’s “stroke and grid” paintings of the early ’70s in mind is to understand how consistent she has been over the course of more than five decades, and how expansively she has handled her steadfast focus. Her way of making a mark and then re-marking the mark, doubling down on her impulse and in the process revising it, means that her work adheres to its history without getting stuck in it. “I never wanted to make the same painting over and over again,” Snyder told me recently.
Snyder seems profoundly aware of what other painters have done and has never taken any of their practices as rules to be followed nor avoided anything that a painting of hers might require because it was territory claimed by some contemporary or precursor. In her work, the fizzy frou-frou style of Florine Stettheimer can sit next to the telluric mud of Anselm Kiefer; the commodious spacing that Roland Barthes observed in Cy Twombly can coexist with the cluttered patchwork of Robert Rauschenberg; and the chromatic flux of Morris Louis can jibe with the material congealment of Eva Hesse.
And yet Snyder remains very much on her own. “I don’t have a lot of contemporary artist heroes,” she told me, though she cited the late Ida Applebroog as her closest comrade among artists. “Honestly, I think I learned more from listening to music than I do from looking at other art.” She even draws in her sketchbook at concerts—Simone Dinnerstein performing Bach, say, or Philip Glass—to generate ideas that can turn up in a painting years later. It’s to the inspiration of music that she attributes her quest for complexity in painting, a love of “seeing two or three different parts of one thought.” As she said, “in one piece of music, you can have so many different emotions and feelings and colors and tempos.”
That musicality is always evident. As Andy Robert, another younger fellow painter enamored of Snyder’s work, put it, “There is a poetry and rhythm to Joan’s palette, and music and improvisational structure in her composition. The paintings are score-like and speak to color, nature, music, and landscape.”
Snyder’s embrace of multiplicity allows her to keep renewing her work without turning her back on that work’s long history. I find myself thinking of something she wrote back in 2001, in the catalog for an exhibition she called “Primary Fields” at a Chelsea gallery that has since closed. There she wrote:
It seemed to me that in order to go forward, I had to also push back hard. To again embrace ideas that were at the very foundation of all my thinking about painting—about structure, about application, about meaning, about materials.
