Joan Snyder A review of 'Body & Soul' . (This link opens in a new tab).

By Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

Billed as Joan Snyder’s introduction to a non-US audience, “Body and Soul” comprised thirty-three paintings spanning sixty years and was accompanied by a hefty catalogue. The earliest work here, the small, atypically somber semiabstract Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting, 1964, anchored a selection of generally brightly hued paintings from the 1960s—variously evoking landscape, the human body, and the legacies of organic and geometric abstraction—in which we could see Snyder feel her way toward the body of work for which she is still most renowned. Her place in the canon was established by the “Stroke” paintings she made between 1969 and 1974—the least painting-friendly era in postwar American art. Five of them were duly given pride of place. The six-by-twelve-foot Whole Segments, 1970, dominated the back wall. The painting is a symphony of discrete strokes and patches of oil, acrylic, and pearlescent spray in black, red, brown, dirty pink, and blanched teal, playing out across an expanse of lightly primed canvas marked by the faint trace of a penciled grid. The picture’s anatomized elements, combined with its elongated horizontality, the latter a favored format, encouraged an up-close reading from left to right, as one might follow a musical score. There is more to this painter’s indebtedness to music than a Paterian aspiration to its ideal condition among the arts, including her habit of jotting notations into her ever-ready sketchbook during the course of concert recitals. “Music moves me through a painting,” she once wrote.