Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Painters tend to be limited by the frame within which, and the plane upon which, they work. But not Joan Snyder. Since the 1970s, she has layered her work with fabric and straw, gel and glitter, lentils and flowers. Her work might hang on a wall, but it pushes itself outwards into the world, disrupting the space around it as well as the process of making art itself.“I have bags and bags of rags, bottles of Chinese herbs, twigs and dried roses, straw and stalks of sunflowers . . . loose jewels, piles of plastic grapes,” Snyder says, sitting in her Brooklyn studio, describing the armoury of stuff that surrounds her. “No wonder I don’t fit well into the art world.” In truth, Snyder fits into the art world very well indeed. New work is about to be revealed by the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach, and a survey of her career has just opened in the gallery’s handsome townhouse in London’s Mayfair. “I may be letting go of several that have been in my collection for decades. I find it hard to part with my paintings, very hard,” she says. I’d spent most of my childhood and early adulthood being very anxious. The second I started painting, the anxiety lessened for the first timeHer older work is shown in major cultural institutions with regularity — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2018 for Epic Abstraction; at Tate Modern in 2023 for Painterly Gestures — while this year at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, young female curators discovered an eight-panel painting from 1977 called “Resurrection” in the store. The work, a fraught layering of news clippings, cloth fragments and words, is physically fragile nowadays, but its message — a tirade against and lament for violence against women — is as fresh as the day it was made. As we talk over video call, Snyder is sitting in her home studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her T-shirt is minty green, her thick white hair curling around a face that belies her 84 years. Outside is a garden. In it grow the roses which frequently find their way into her more recent paintings. Her wife of 12 years, Margaret Cammer, a former judge who now works on behalf of undocumented aliens, appears to say hello.Joan Snyder was born in 1940 in New Jersey. “A working class upbringing,” she says. “We didn’t go to museums.” It was while studying sociology at Douglass College — then the women-only section of Rutgers University — that she took the elective art module that changed her life. “I’d spent most of my childhood and early adulthood being very anxious,” she says. “And the second I started painting, the anxiety lessened for the first time.” In 1969, she made her breakthrough. “Lines and Strokes” was a painting that played against the monumental, closed-down surface of the then-dominant colour field movement. Seven strokes float across the surface, as though picked up from a Cézanne landscape and laid back down. “It was so clear and beautiful and strong,” says Snyder. “It was what I’d been looking for.” In subsequent works Snyder stamped out her own identity with drips and elegant sweeps, blotches straight from the tube and fine slicks of translucent primer. This wasn’t irony or dereliction. Her marks, which hovered over an invisible grid, were more like a process of painterly dissection and charmed the New York art world. “I was attracting people like butterflies,” she says of her sudden success. “I got horribly confused by who was and wasn’t my real friend.” With her husband, the photographer Larry Fink (who went on to be a celebrity in his medium), she moved to a farm in Pennsylvania. There she developed her work, sticking or sewing glitter, glue, burlap, seeds and flock to the surface of the canvas. If Robert Rauschenberg activated what was around him in his works, then Snyder was choosing a repertoire of items that spoke to the feminine world. “I was thinking about the female body. I was interested in what’s inside and what’s underneath,” she says now. Snyder’s marriage came to an end in the early 1980s, after she had a daughter. “I had an abortion, a miscarriage and a child,” she says. “I was pregnant for three years.” A painting that she still owns, “Apple Tree Mass”, is has travelled to London for her show. Made in 1983, it expresses the sorrow and pain she felt concerning the marriage petering out; the loss of the farm; the unforgettable ache of miscarriage. On it she wrote “I loved him”, and stuck painted wooden letters to the canvas: they spell out “GARDEN”. “It’s a very personal work,” says Snyder. “I’ve never even hung it in my house.”Snyder describes painting as her religion; the altar she goes to to face herself. It is personal, though not confessional in the way of Tracey Emin or Louise Bourgeois. She didn’t lie in the bath and sketch her crotch, like her close friend Ida Applebroog. (Applebroog, she says, “was my great art world love. I could tell her anything, good or bad, and as you succeed in the art world there are fewer people you can do that with.”) Instead, she tells her own and women’s stories in abstract form. She delves into what it is to be female.“I am a feminist — not a feminist painter,” she tells me, attributing her politics to lived experience rather than ideological choice. “It came out of not being able to get a job.” In the 1970s in the US, women were rarely given tenure in the colleges. “We had to go to all over the country — the token woman painter as a visiting lecturer — and I’d see a young woman’s work and say, that’s fantastic, and she’d say: my teacher doesn’t think so. I loved all the different materials they were using, and I started to believe that there is a female sensibility.” As early as 1971, she started the Women Artists Series at Rutgers, in the library lobby, to give women’s work exposure. “The library eventually built a dedicated gallery,” she smiles.Snyder knew what those encounters with male tutors felt like. At Rutgers in the early 1960s, she was taught by the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. “He was making huge boxes and I was making an angel with plywood legs and feet, stuck on a board with plastic roses on wheels,” she laughs. “He said he’d put my work in the attic and look at it every 20 years.” And besides, Abstract Expressionism did nothing for her. “I wanted more than those guys wanted to offer,” she says. “I’d walk into a museum and see that work and walk straight out.” Snyder’s inspiration is music. “The beginning, the end, the sadness, the emotion. I can put every emotion possible into one painting, and music can do that too.” The minute Covid restrictions were lifted, she went with Cammer to hear the pianist Simone Dinnerstein perform a Bach and Philip Glass double bill at the Maverick, an open air venue near to the Woodstock home in which they live from June to October. “The moment she started playing, the tears came flowing,” says Snyder, who was also busy scribbling in her sketchbook, something she has done at concerts for as long as she can remember, her symbols and flowers filling up pages of playbills. In Miami, Snyder’s most recent painting will be on show. It is a small work called “The Arbor”. “It was made after everything for the London show had gone,” she says. “I remembered I’d applied leftover paint from my palette knife to this small stretched linen canvas until the strokes formed a sort of arch.” She added a splayed female figure, then rose petals, then twigs embedded in brown glaze. Those who admire Snyder’s work will see it as the continuation of a story. The twigs form an altar, and for Snyder that altar is art. ‘Joan Snyder: Body & Soul’ at Ropac London to February 5Thaddaeus Ropac, Booth F11, Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6–8, 2024 Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
