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Indepth Arts News:
"Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005"
2005-08-12 until 2005-10-23
Jewish Museum
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
The Jewish Museum is pleased to present Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey,
1969-2005, an exhibition that features a selection of thirty-one major
works representing more than three decades of the artist’s career. Joan
Snyder is an avowed feminist and belongs to the first generation of women
artists to identify themselves as such. Along with Elizabeth Murray, Mary
Heilman, and Miriam Schapiro, Snyder strove to tame the heroic gestures of
male-dominated Abstract Expressionism into a new intimate painterly
language. The paintings on view range from monumental (some as large as
six by twelve feet) to modest in scale. They take the viewer by surprise
as the artist skillfully invests the large canvases with an intensely
personal sensibility and the smaller ones with astonishing grandeur.
Snyder gained early recognition with her "stroke paintings" which she
made between 1969 and 1973. These works relied on the repeated gesture of
a paint-laden brush applied over a grid penciled on the canvas. With the
physicality of their drips and marks, the stroke paintings exploited new
opportunities for narrative within abstraction. The tension between
narrative content and formalism in these works may be seen in the larger
context of the art world of the late 1960s, in which cool, hard-edged
minimalism was pervasive and painting with any emotional reference was
suspect. The artist has said that the strokes are about paint itself—paint
moving across the canvas; paint as medium for feelings, sensations, or
sounds; paint suggesting a storyline. After making these abstractions,
Snyder felt the need to create more complex works, which express her
political and social concerns. She moved on to paintings that integrate
personal associations she has with her family, feminism, her Jewish
heritage, spirituality, and the environment. Consequently her work moved
from an implied narrative about the act of making art to a more personal
narrative.
Snyder’s works serve as a barometer of her emotional life, simultaneously
reflecting specific places in which she has lived, as well as her social
concerns and commitment. Works such as Women in Camps (1988) and Study for
Morning Requiem with Kaddish (1987-88, in The Jewish Museum’s collection),
attest to the artist’s ongoing engagement with social issues, while
Moonfield (1986) and Ode to the Pumpkin Field (1986) reveal a feeling of
physical and spiritual kinship in nature. Many of the paintings from the
1990s are requiems for the deceased. The devastating losses from AIDS
prompted Journey of the Souls (1993), and The Cherry Tree (1993) was
inspired by a fruit tree she had seen in a Brooklyn yard as she was
driving to visit her dying father. The cherry tree as a metaphor of life
and death recurred in many other paintings by Snyder in the 1990s and
provided her with a sense of release from grief. Snyder often incorporates
collage elements—cloth, dried flowers, branches, seeds, plastic
novelties—and painted graffiti-like writing. This scrawled writing,
sometimes incised into the paint layer, is as much a part of her artistic
vocabulary as the images themselves. In Snyder’s intuitive approach,
sensation and idea, image and text, emotion and material fuse to create
her unique and highly personal canvases.
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