Joan Snyder hates art openings and hates going out

The artist Joan Snyder was born in 1940, the second of three children, and grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey. Her father was a salesman; her mother was unhappy. As an undergraduate at the women’s college of Rutgers College, she studied sociology in preparation for a career in social work. During her senior year, she took an art class. A professor looking at her work assumed she was influenced by the work of Alexej Jawlensky. But Synder hadn’t heard of him; she hadn’t even been to a museum. Then the professor showed her paintings by Jawlensky and other Russian and German Expressionists. “They were so much like what I was working on,” says Snyder, referring to everything from their earth tone palettes to their interest in landscapes and, more profoundly, their visualisation of energy and emotion that bordered on Cubism. Snyder’s own ancestry – German, Jewish, Russian – made these inadvertent resonances feel particularly significant. “It clicked,” she says. “I related. I am related.”

Ever since, Snyder, now 84, has been painting and receiving sustained critical attention, most notably in 1971, when Marcia Tucker – later founder of The New Museum of Contemporary Art – wrote in Artforum that Snyder’s paintings inspired a paradoxical feeling of “an intimacy aggressively exposed” much like “looking into a partially demolished building filled with the remnants and debris of its occupants’ lives.” So it’s remarkable that her new show, ‘Body & Soul’, opening later this month at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, will be her first with a blue chip gallery. Recently, on the eve of America’s presidential election, I spoke with Snyder at her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and asked why, over the course of such a prolific career, she was never courted by a comparable gallery in New York. “I don’t know,” She says. “But I think it’s significant.” She suspects she must have longed for such recognition even if she didn’t pursue it. “I don’t go to openings. I don’t hang out, I never did. I’m anti-social.”

Anti-social, perhaps, but not a wallflower. Even Snyder’s early work displayed her lack of reserve. “One of the things I knew early on was I wanted more in a painting, not less,” she says. In the ’60s, while earning an MFA, Snyder studied under the famed Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. “His things back then was gray boxes,” she recalls. She scandalised Morris with her thesis, which included a plaster torso of an angel with plywood wings that appeared to be squatting, legs open, atop a wheeled platform decorated with purple plastic flowers. Snyder’s work since has been comparatively tamer – how could it not be? – but her oeuvre as a whole has stayed true to that youthful project: bold, often provocative, incorporating everyday objects, avowedly and ineffably feminine.

But what exactly does that last part mean… feminine? In 1976, the curators Lucy Lippard, Ruth Iskin and Arlene Raven posed a similar question to artists participating in their exhibition ‘What is Feminist Art?’ Snyder replied with a long list that: “Female sensibility is layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing, repetition, lists, lifestories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feels colors, the sun, the moon, roots, skins, walls, yellow flowers, streams, puzzles, questions…repetition…” Nearly 50 years later, I ask if Snyder stands by that minor manifesto, now famous in some art circles. “Absolutely,” she replies.

Snyder’s earliest works, like the barn–snow scene i, 1963, and grandma cohen’s funeral painting, 1964, were figurative and imbued with tentativeness, while the late ‘60s saw her moving more confidently into abstraction. Altar III, 1965–66, for example, can be seen as a reiteration of her thesis sculpture: a pink open-legged figure with tapestry fringe hanging from her breasts floats below a chorus line of irregularly white torsos that recall both marble statues of antiquity and unruly mannequins. Her series of “flock” paintings from the late ‘60s evoked membranes and fleshy interiors complicated by the downy softness of textile flocking, plus other domestic materials like Christmas lights and wallpaper. By the ‘70s, when Tucker wrote about her for Artforum, Snyder had entered her ‘Strokes’ era, which saw her disaggregating marks and distributing them across canvas in formations that refused to subjugate themselves to a central image – a visual corollary to the growing anti-hierarchical consciousness that emerged from the ‘60s. Some of those paintings, including Wild Strokes Hope, 1972, will be on display at ‘Body & Soul’.

“The Stroke paintings were more analytic than personal,” says Snyder, who stopped making them around 1974. “Then it got back into the very personal stuff.” By then she’d married the renowned late photographer Larry Fink and moved with him to a farm in Pennsylvania. She credits Fink – whom she divorced in the 1980s when their daughter, Molly, was a child – with exposing her to jazz and classical music. That introduction was profound and emboldened Snyder’s instinct for abundance and narrative. “I wanted the same type of thing you might find in a symphony, where you have a lot of different moods, and a beginning, a middle and an end,” she says. Paintings like Small Symphony for Women, 1974, inspired by Snyder’s experience arranging exhibitions of women’s art and panel discussions at her alma mater, and Vanishing Theater/The Cut from the same year are, like many subsequent works, triptychs: the first panels contain sketches and written notes for the painting’s intentions, the second panels act as a visualisations of the first, and third offer so-called resolutions with blocks of impasto color aligned on a grid like chaos contained.

Snyder has long said that Vanishing Theater – currently on display at Ropac Paris for ‘Expanded Horizons’, an exhibit of works by major American artists in the 1970s – was about her conflicted sexuality as she grappled with her attraction to women. Tom Hunt, a Director who works with Snyder at Ropac, also interprets the painting – whose large, red middle panel contains chicken wire protruding from a violent gash in the canvas – as announcing a “new beginning” for Snyder creatively. “She was in the thick of a very productive, successful part of her career,” says Hunt, referring to the Stroke paintings. “And something in her recognised that there was a danger for it to become formulaic or rote.”

Snyder’s post-Strokes works are especially diaristic, reflecting her motherhood (Apple Tree Mass, 1983), romantic affairs (Love’s Deep Grapes, 1984), various homesteads and landscapes (Summer Fugue, 2010), and a longtime partnership (Lovers, 1989) with Maggie Cammer, a now-retired judge. ‘Body & Soul’ includes these paintings, plus several new ones. Of the most recent, Hunt says his favorite is perhaps Roses for Souls, 2024, which Snyder began making on Good Friday as she listened to requiems and thought about Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 16,000 children. (“I don’t know why we would give Israel money,” says Snyder, referring to the American government.) In it, dried roses, straw, and isolated strokes surround a pond of thick, shiny black and a spectral cross, with paint splatters and drips recalling children’s scribbles and blood. Snyder isn’t Catholic; as the cross emerged, she recalls thinking, “what is going on?” Eventually she pulled The Divine Comedy from her shelf and opened it to a verse she’d underlined some four decades ago that speaks of roses as garlands of souls – almost a perfect description of the work already well underway.

Describing this experience, Snyder becomes uncharacteristically animated with a sort of awe; later, in her backyard studio, she hands me her copy of Dante so I can read the passage myself. Her excitement makes me reflect on Snyder’s embrace of common imagery and repurposed mediums – how they reflect what so many of us have on hand both materially and associatively, yet their very genericism opens them up for appropriation. Who has not felt a similar excitement when discovering that something so specific to us corresponds to something, or someone, beyond us – that we are part of an infinite ouroboros of associations, emotions and symbols that makes analysis of the self as a discrete entity feel artificial? This question makes me ambivalent about applying the word “diaristic” to Snyder’s practice. It’s a word, I suspect, most often used to describe women’s art. It’s not necessarily offensive, but it implies a neat distinction between the internal and external, the personal and collective, that is rooted in denial of their connection.

But denial is not for Snyder. She’s got her dislikes, sure. For one, “I’ve never liked labels,” she says. “I’ve been labeled all kinds of things. A feminist. A lesbian. A woman artist. Jewish. Autobiographical expressionist. It’s endless. It’s all true.”