At 84, Joan Snyder is Still Energised by her Bold Feminist Painting An interview with the artist
By Gabrielle Schwarz
Joan Snyder’s Body & Soul (1997–98) is one of those paintings that photos don’t quite do justice to. Perhaps it’s to do with how the rectangular canvas is divided into discrete sections, all teeming with texture and exuberant detail, defying you to flatten them into a single image. The top and middle thirds contain a series of painted and collaged rectangles: a block of teal with paint dripping from the base; a piece of leopard-print fabric, the backdrop to a red-lipped open mouth; a white-ish field dotted with pink and green, and so on. Occasional details, such as a sparkly pink scribble, cross from one section to the next.
In the bottom third, meanwhile, are two pictures. On the right is a choppy seascape, and on the left, a woman laying naked on her back, legs spread apart. In lieu of a fig leaf, Snyder has affixed a bunch of plastic grapes to the canvas.
“Body & Soul” is also the title of Snyder’s debut exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in London—a survey of more than 30 pieces spanning the American artist’s six-decade career, open through February 8, 2025. (The gallery announced European and Asian representation of Snyder, in collaboration with New York gallery Canada, earlier this year.) The painting’s title made a fitting choice, Snyder told me when we sat down for an interview ahead of the opening. The work, with its eclectic mix of abstract and figurative elements, is itself “kind of a little retrospective” of the various phases and preoccupations of her career.
While not as widely known as she should be, Snyder is a highly respected painter: She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship in 2007, and has enjoyed museum shows at venues including the Jewish Museum in New York. But her route into art was not the most straightforward. As a child, born to a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey, she was never taken to any museums or galleries. She did a bit of painting as a teenager—“mostly copying magazine covers”—before studying sociology at Douglass College. Then, in her senior year, she signed up for an elective art class. The instructor remarked that her paintings reminded him of German and Russian Expressionists, particularly Alexej von Jawlensky. “It was like speaking for the first time,” Snyder said. “I sensed that I could express my feelings through paintings in a way that I had never done before.”
[...]
In the decades since, Snyder’s work has remained rooted in the personal, while drawing on an expansive array of expressive tools. She tends to begin with sketches, which she then translates onto the canvas. Recurring elements include lines of text and embedded three-dimensional objects. In the triptych Love’s Deep Grapes (1984), for instance, a quote from Virgil is etched into a woodblock on the right-hand side and printed on canvas on the left. Other works feature rose petals, clumps of straw, and bits of lace. These are dispersed among painted figures, landscapes, and abstract shapes, often rendered as simplified forms in gestural brushstrokes. The isolated stroke is also a continuing motif, although no longer the sole focus. “The strokes are like the notes in music,” Snyder told me, “while the other imagery I use is like the lyrics.”
The comparison is a helpful one: Music is crucial for Snyder, who always has something playing on a CD while she’s painting in the studio, which she still does every day, from 9 a.m. until 1 or 2 p.m. “I will listen to a piece over and over,” she said. “It helps me move, it energizes me.” The exhibition at Ropac features eight substantially sized paintings, all made since the beginning of this year—including one, Selfie (2024), which she finished after all the others had been shipped to London. Near the center of the canvas is a stick figure whose open-mouthed face is made up of thickly encrusted blobs of pink. You can still smell the paint.
“It’s incredible for me to see all this work together,” said Snyder of the career-spanning show, which is billed as her most comprehensive outside of the U.S. to date. A handful of the historic pieces have been borrowed from private collections—this is Snyder’s first time seeing them for years. Most, however, have come directly from her own stores. “I’ve held onto quite a few of them for dear life,” she said. “But I’m about to be 85 and so I had to talk myself into it. And here they are!”
