Joan Snyder in her studio.
Courtesy Joan Snyder
Joan Snyder’s Painterly Abstractions Are Neither Coy Nor Evasive
On my way to take a last long look at “ComeClose,” Joan Snyder’s exhibition this past winter at Canada gallery in New York, I happened to stop in at a nearby gallery where I saw a show by a young painter whose work beguiled but left me frustrated with its too-coy interplay between abstract and figurative elements. At Snyder’s show, the feeling led me to reflect on something that had not previously occurred to me in the nearly 40 years I’ve spent looking at her work and occasionally discussing it with her, but which suddenly emerged as crucial: In Snyder’s work, nothing is ever coy or evasive. A brush mark laid down atop another always asserts itself as just that, a brush mark: color of a certain quantity and quality marking the path along which it has been pushed or pulled. Likewise, an impastoed mass of paint representing a rose—however physically palpable it may be, however insistent that it is a quantity of paint—always unequivocally represents a rose. In Snyder’s painting Grounding (2022–23), that takes the form of some white matter with a drizzling of translucent red over it.
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That decisiveness is one of the main sources of the intense pleasure I take in Snyder’s art. Seeing how everything in her work is what it is makes me feel—I don’t know how else to say it—encouraged in my own being. And if what a thing is in one of Snyder’s paintings is in fact two things (or even many things) at once—a splotch of paint but also a rose, for instance—it is all those things with equal insistence and without prevarication: never just a bit of this mixed with a bit of that, never hedged.
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.
THE IMPERATIVE THINGNESS of the things in Snyder’s paintings, the adamant quiddity of them, becomes all the more important in that each painting, rather than appearing as a unity or totality with different parts, presents itself as a compendium of distinct things that exist independently of the encompassing whole. For a younger fellow painter like Hannah Beerman, the relative autonomy of the parts in Snyder’s paintings is a large part of what makes them fascinating. “Her squares and lines overstep one another and then step back,” Beerman told me. “They ask what responsibility one part of the painting has to another.” And what might that be? “They don’t have to answer to anyone!”
Given Snyder’s propensity for floral imagery, I’m tempted to call each of her painterly compendia or compilations an anthology (definition from the Online Etymology Dictionary: “literally ‘flower-gathering,’ from anthos ‘a flower’ … + logia ‘collection, collecting’ … The modern sense [which emerged in Late Greek] is metaphoric: ‘flowers’ of verse, small poems by various writers gathered together”).
The anthological patchwork nature of Snyder’s paintings is well exemplified by Grounding, one of the highlights of her recent Canada gallery show. The horizontal composition is divided into six distinct zones. For any painter but this one, the four zones comprising the top and middle could each have been four separate paintings. Top left: On burlap collaged to the underlying canvas, a sequence of horizontal strokes of color, sometimes blurring into one another, occasionally overlapping. Top right: a pastoral green and yellow field with scattered white and yellow blossoms accompanied by small blue marks, many of which suggest stems. A band of mostly blank canvas beneath this upper pair of paintings-within-the-painting also carries, as if they were footnotes, a few more brief redoubled brush marks: red over white, blue over white over blue, and so on.
In the middle row: two more flowery fields, white blossoms on a red ground to the left, red on white to the right—but then the white ground seeps over the boundary into the red zone to its left, an incursion across the painting’s implicit inner order. There, where the white overflows its boundaries, we see a couple of lightly indicated clusters of purplish curlicues: bunches of grapes, I think—maybe the ones Eno wanted to put back on the vine. And then, again, below this middle stratum, more bare canvas flecked by a few further coloristic footnotes.
The lower zone of Grounding respects the division into left and right segments but complicates it. On the left, we see another field, this time dark and earthy and sprinkled with small white flowers, but in the center is a cluster of pink brush marks arrayed as a set of concentric half circles. This dahlia-like bundle of pinkish florets is mirrored to the far right, but this only occupies half the rectangle. This framed image is clearly square, and it calls to attention the fact that the six subdivisions of the painting are all roughly double squares, and there is a solid mathematical foundation to the work: its 54-by-72-inch proportions are essentially equivalent to a dozen 18-inch squares, four across and three down.
This rational geometrical structure underpins a set of lyrical paeans to vital energy and natural flourishing. At the center of the lower zone, a crucial position in the composition, we see mirroring bundles of fleshy-floral brushstrokes that can’t help but be the kind of “central imagery”—implicitly vaginal imagery—identified by Lucy Lippard and others at the time of the great wave of feminist art in the early 1970s, of which Snyder was an adherent. In that sense, Snyder’s Grounding is closer than one might imagine to Courbet’s 1866 Origine du monde, though also in its way more encompassing.
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.
She continued:
I am still seeking clarity, a purity, an essence, but have never been willing to sacrifice the ritual, the need for the deep, the rich, the thick, the dark—the wild wake of the brush and the often organic application of materials—and always working consciously to be in control and out …
What better testament than this could there be to the artist’s conviction that to paint is to keep faith with a promise made by who knows who or a wild surmise coming from who knows where that all oppositions may eventually be reconciled, that control and spontaneity, luminosity and obscurity, origin and destination are all to be made manifest together, at once, indissolubly, as a kind of presence that goes beyond presence.
I suppose that’s one way of explaining what the “promesse de bonheur” (“promise of happiness”) that Stendhal famously saw as synonymous with beauty really promises. It’s a fuller kind of being than our present existence permits: a life with more life in it. That’s why one of Snyder’s most qualified explicators, writing in Woman’s Art Journal in 2018, summed things up this way: “When you are an artist at work, you are assuming the role of the creator. You are your own Goddess.”
Those words were written by the artist’s daughter, Molly Snyder-Fink, the center of a web of connections among us. When we were all much younger and neighbors in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in the 1990s, Molly would babysit my daughter. I had written about Snyder’s work before I ever met her or her daughter, and had been fascinated by it before I ever wrote about it.
Today, with new horizons beckoning at the age of 84, Snyder told me, “I decided I had to prove to myself that I could still paint. I thought, Oh my god, how am I ever going to get in there and paint again? You know, it’s too much.”
But it’s not too much, in the end. “Anyway, I’m still painting,” she continued. “I can still paint.”