Joan Snyder An interview with Rose Courteau
The artist Joan Snyder was born in 1940, the second of three children, and grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey. Her father was a salesman; her mother was unhappy. As an undergraduate at the women’s college of Rutgers College, she studied sociology in preparation for a career in social work. During her senior year, she took an art class. A professor looking at her work assumed she was influenced by the work of Alexej Jawlensky. But Synder hadn’t heard of him; she hadn’t even been to a museum. Then the professor showed her paintings by Jawlensky and other Russian and German Expressionists. “They were so much like what I was working on,” says Snyder, referring to everything from their earth tone palettes to their interest in landscapes and, more profoundly, their visualisation of energy and emotion that bordered on Cubism. Snyder’s own ancestry – German, Jewish, Russian – made these inadvertent resonances feel particularly significant. “It clicked,” she says. “I related. I am related.”
Ever since, Snyder, now 84, has been painting and receiving sustained critical attention, most notably in 1971, when Marcia Tucker – later founder of The New Museum of Contemporary Art – wrote in Artforum that Snyder’s paintings inspired a paradoxical feeling of “an intimacy aggressively exposed” much like “looking into a partially demolished building filled with the remnants and debris of its occupants’ lives.” So it’s remarkable that her new show, ‘Body & Soul’, opening later this month at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, will be her first with a blue chip gallery. Recently, on the eve of America’s presidential election, I spoke with Snyder at her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and asked why, over the course of such a prolific career, she was never courted by a comparable gallery in New York. “I don’t know,” She says. “But I think it’s significant.” She suspects she must have longed for such recognition even if she didn’t pursue it. “I don’t go to openings. I don’t hang out, I never did. I’m anti-social.”
Anti-social, perhaps, but not a wallflower. Even Snyder’s early work displayed her lack of reserve. “One of the things I knew early on was I wanted more in a painting, not less,” she says. In the ’60s, while earning an MFA, Snyder studied under the famed Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. “His things back then was gray boxes,” she recalls. She scandalised Morris with her thesis, which included a plaster torso of an angel with plywood wings that appeared to be squatting, legs open, atop a wheeled platform decorated with purple plastic flowers. Snyder’s work since has been comparatively tamer – how could it not be? – but her oeuvre as a whole has stayed true to that youthful project: bold, often provocative, incorporating everyday objects, avowedly and ineffably feminine.
But what exactly does that last part mean… feminine? In 1976, the curators Lucy Lippard, Ruth Iskin and Arlene Raven posed a similar question to artists participating in their exhibition ‘What is Feminist Art?’ Snyder replied with a long list that: “Female sensibility is layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing, repetition, lists, lifestories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feels colors, the sun, the moon, roots, skins, walls, yellow flowers, streams, puzzles, questions…repetition…” Nearly 50 years later, I ask if Snyder stands by that minor manifesto, now famous in some art circles. “Absolutely,” she replies.
