Joan Snyder Paints to Face Herself Molly Snyder-Fink on Joan Snyder for Woman's Art Journal

In the summer of 1969, Joan Snyder (b.1940), the renowned American artist, made what she considered to be her breakthrough painting. She painted Lines and Strokes (Pl. 1) in her New York City loft on Mulberry Street at the very same time that the Woodstock Music Festival was happening. Snyder was starting her own cultural revolution right in the center of her studio. With Symphony (1970; Pl. 2), which she painted during that same period, she was in part rebelling against Color Field painting, “macho Minimalism,” and generally the male-dominated sensibility of the art world. But more significantly, she was in the early stages of creating her own iconic visual language and establishing herself as a bold, uncompromising creative force whose prolific career would later receive national recognition—as a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the MacArthur Fellowship. Snyder has remained in her studio for nearly six decades now, resulting in nearly eighty solo shows. As she recently told me, she is unlikely to “hang up her brushes” anytime soon. She is continually beckoned to the altars of her canvases to create, and in turn her paintings give life back to her with renewed meaning. I have the good fortune to say that Joan Snyder is my mother (Fig. 1).

Growing up with an artist for a mother meant that wherever we lived, a studio was attached, and she would consistently go to work in that studio, permeating our lives with stability and purpose. She was a then single parent, having left my father, the photographer Larry Fink, when I was just a toddler, and her paintings plus her decadeslong artist teaching gigs were our bread and butter. Her career had taken off in the early seventies, before I was born, when the prominent New York art dealer Klaus Kertess put three of her large stroke paintings in a group show at Bykert Gallery. That opportunity helped to secure her first solo show, in 1971, at Paley & Lowe, a newly opened gallery in the Soho district of New York City. As a child, I distinctly remember gloating adults hovering over me with my mother’s paintings behind them on the white, sterile walls of high-end galleries. I was overwhelmed. But at home, I took refuge in her studio. The smell of turpentine was comforting to me, and I’d wander into her work space just to be reminded of it. There was always something new to look at. At the age of six, I recall my mother inviting me to fasten white squares of silky fabric around ghostlike trees in The Orchard/The Altar (1986; Fig. 2), rendering an eerie, wintry scene. And at the age of ten, she offered that I write a catalogue essay for a Joan Snyder exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern. An excerpt read: As I go to my mom’s studio each time, I watch it develop, paintings popping up in different areas of the wall. As I watch our life develop, I think of how paintings and life relate. Over the years, our life developed just like her paintings did. Joan Snyder would agree. She has been reflecting upon how her paintings mirror her personal life from as far back as the early 1970s. In 1972 she wrote in a journal: “I have discovered that everything in my work relates to my life and all the important changes in my work are related to changes in my life, the most dramatic being summer 1969 when I was deciding whether to get married and was also struggling to do the grid layer stroke paintings.” The entry continues: “The strokes in my paintings speak of my life and experiences. They are sometimes soft ... they sometimes laugh and are often violent ... they bleed and cry and struggle to tell my story with marks and colors and lines and shapes. I speak of love and anguish, of fear and mostly of hope.” These insights are included in a longer essay by the art historian Hayden Herrera, in Joan Snyder, a 2005 monograph of my mother’s work.

In the introduction to that book, Norman Kleeblatt wrote: Today, looking at the trajectory of Snyder’s oeuvre provides a view that is at once intimately diaristic and overtly operatic…. it ties together four threads. The oeuvre in its entirety serves as a barometer of the broad movements of her emotional life—it reflects the different environments in which she has lived, and it demonstrates her keen awareness of (and commitment to) urgent needs of contemporary society. Not least— though least discussed in the literature—the course of Joan Snyder’s art over the last forty years demonstrates how she continually draws upon internal resources toward formal experiment and self-reinvention. 

Joan Snyder is a self-made person. The choices she made as a young woman strayed from the norm. Yet her gravitation towards painting as an undergraduate student in her last year of Douglass College, Rutgers University (she graduated in 1962 and completed the MFA at Rutgers, 1964–66), wasn’t a complete anomaly. Her father, a toy salesman, had painted when he was a boy and then again in his older age. Having tried her hand at painting while growing up, my mother never thought that it could become her occupation, because women of that time became teachers or often social workers, which is the direction she seemed to be heading. But during her last year of college, she took an art elective that changed her life. She has said that the experience of painting in those early days was like “speaking for the first time.” My mother was made from a different kind of cloth than most people whose conventions she was expected to follow as a child in the small, upwardly mobile community of Highland Park, New Jersey. She has often characterized her feelings of alienation growing up in the 1940s and 1950s by pinning some of it on her mother’s insistence that she wear matching outfits “like all the other girls.” The idea of conformity, she has acknowledged, made her anxious. She often felt that somehow she was different. And she was different, in search of her true self, as she was becoming a pioneering feminist artist. Embarking on this journey, she would soon find kindred spirits that aligned more closely with her sensibilities and values. She would also find herself.