Intimacy Exposed

Throughout a remarkable career spanning more than five decades, Joan Snyder has created vigorously expressive paintings and prints that explore female sexuality, a spectrum of emotions, and nature’s rhythms. New Jersey–born and educated, in 1967 Snyder gravitated to the New York art world, where she has mostly remained ever since. She evolved her own distinctive visual vocabulary of gestural strokes, textural forms, and fleshy brushwork; her paintings often incorporate collage elements such as fabric, glitter, paper, sand, seeds, rose hips, berries, straw, and threads to evoke inner landscapes or personal narratives full of abstract, biomorphic imagery. Snyder also has an extraordinary color sense imbuing her works with insistent vibrancy.

In 1971 Snyder had her first solo exhibition, which met with favorable critical and commercial success. In Artforum (May 1971), Marcia Tucker wrote, “Seeing Joan Snyder’s paintings…is the paradox of an intimacy aggressively exposed.” Today, after more than 100 exhibitions prompted by a prolific body of work on canvas and on paper, viewers will find that Tucker’s observation still rings true. During the early 1970s, Snyder responded to the under-representation of women artists in the American art world by taking a pioneering role in the feminist art movement. After 1974, Snyder created work that more emphatically presented her distinctive aesthetic, based upon her own life as well as the experiences of other women. In 1976, she wrote a moving thirty-line declaration in reply to the question “What is Feminist Art?” An excerpt provides insight into Snyder’s art and her motivation for creating it: “Feminist sensibility is layers, words, membranes. . . repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing, repetition, lists, life stories . . . the sun, the moon, roots, skins . . . flowers, streams . . . seeds, threads, more, not less, repetition.”  

Although Snyder is a painter first and foremost, her involvement in printmaking dates back to 1963, when she was a student at Rutgers University. Despite a minimum of formal training, Snyder’s earliest woodcuts and lithographs, inspired by German Expressionist artists, were amazingly powerful. In the decades since, during sporadic spurts of intense activity, she has been exceedingly adventurous in tackling printmaking techniques, particularly woodcut, intaglio, and monotype. In 1993, she began combining different printmaking techniques and color applications in boldly unorthodox ways, often making varying impressions of a given image. This open-ended inventiveness has resulted in editions that are exceedingly complex to produce. Encouraged by fruitful collaborations with master printers (Patricia Branstead in the 1970s; Chip Elwell in the 1980s; Robert Townsend, Eileen Foti, Jennifer Melby, and Maurice Sanchez in the 1990s; Andrew Mockler/Jungle Press Editions from 1995 to the present), Snyder restlessly began to experiment with details in her prints and to push the boundaries of what is technically possible. She continues to try out coloring options with painterly applications, using color to nuance the emotional force of her images. To date, Snyder has created seventy-one fully documented prints; additionally, she has made about 100 print compositions, most being astonishingly different working proofs (which are a vital part of her printmaking process) or monotypes. Her prints, like her paintings, declare her anxieties and passions; they strongly express joy, rage, and sorrow.

In 1973, without prior experience, Snyder began to make etchings and quickly moved beyond linear techniques to explore tonal and textural possibilities. Her 1975 intaglio print Imagine is an intriguing black-and-white-image combined with words expressing excitement about pink flesh, beauty, symphonies, bodies, and souls. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Autobiographia Literaria” inspired Snyder to create her own poem (the left panel of the etching), an intimate blending of her work and life, complemented by the image’s blissful sexual representation – a vulva-like form (which recurs in her paintings and prints, often with seed pods and lips) – arising from the transformative imprint of cheesecloth into the soft ground layer on an etching plate.

In the 1980s, Snyder’s prints (and her paintings) vacillated between joyous and painful imagery. Starting in 1983, she would make the most searing color woodcuts of her career, returning to the German Expressionist style of her earliest prints. Her deliberately crude carving and simplified imagery also recall African carvings and children’s art. In Mommy Why? (1983-84), Snyder aggressively cut the wood block to convey a mother’s anguish over the heart-wrenching cry of a child, whose pain she is unable to assuage. Although the naked mother’s face is mask-like and skeletal, her voluptuous body bespeaks life-giving sexuality. Snyder manipulated the red and green coloring to vary each impression in the edition of fifteen, so that no two impressions are exactly alike; she thus subverted printmaking’s traditional capability to make an edition of uniform impressions. In Things Have Tears and We Know Suffering (1983-84), Snyder drew inspiration from a line in the Aeneid by Virgil: “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent.” The words “Lacrymae rerum (tears of things)” appear above a head that vigorously suckles a large, fleshy breast against a background of vertical slash marks (a physical evocation of profusely shed tears) and other words in Latin and English. The print is a grand lament about the experience of loss: a parent’s loss of a child, the child’s loss of a parent, the loss of a lover or of dear friends (akin to Aeneas’s grief over the deaths of his Trojan War comrades).

During the late 1980s, working in the luscious, painterly technique of monotype, Snyder created delightful images of flowers, nudes in meadows, planted fields, moons, and ponds. When she made Field of Flowers (1993), a print remembering victims of AIDS, her heart was full of sympathy for them, yet she was also grieving for her father, who died the day the project began. The print is ablaze with flowers, thereby alluding to life’s fragility, yet honoring the departed with a loving tribute. Prompted by printer Robert Townsend, Snyder combined imagery done in woodcut and in etching (techniques which are difficult to print together) and used monotype methods to vary the robust coloring.  

My Work . . . (1997) is a technical triumph combining various demanding etching techniques and woodcut, printed by Jennifer Melby. Snyder presents an audacious image: part heart/part female anatomy amid energized color strokes and words – “totems, birth, breasts, blossoms, paint, drips, rose, crimson, fear, oceans, symphonies” – all characterizing her art. Yet, also written in large letters across the bottom is the line, “MY WORK HAS BEEN ABSOLUTELY FAITHFUL TO ME.” Updating what she did twenty years before in Imagine, Snyder more confidently fuses her art (i.e., work born after great labor) with female sexuality and sensibility – unquestionably the primary source of life, passion, and creativity.  

Snyder’s largest print is . . . and acquainted with grief (1998), based on a large 1997 diptych painting with the same title; the image pulsates with lists of words, strokes, drips, and falling blossoms that surround a heart and a gaping slit – both bright red. As Snyder recalls, “Sometimes when I make a painting it’s not over until I do more, keep going, explore it further… this was one of those times and a big complicated print seemed the perfect way to proceed.”

Displaying an uplifting harmonic vibrancy, Madrigal X and Madrigal XI from 33 Madrigals (2001) are ambitious monoprints — unique color variants of a combined lithograph/monotype/woodcut print series done with Andrew Mockler. Snyder, who also enjoys playing the recorder, used the circle formation of madrigal singers she observed at a recorder workshop as a point of departure for the image’s circular composition. Solidly colored disks or moons surround a luminous central pool or pond, filled with abstract blossoms of color. As the artist remarked, the circles surround “a larger circle, creating a beat, a rhythm, making music. This, I suppose, is my attempt to bring order and beauty to ever increasing times of great disorder [a reference to 9/11 and the contemporary political climate].”

In Altar (2010), Snyder presents words and dissolving letters amid falling blossoms, cherries, lips, and seedpod (or boat-shaped) forms. As the artist explained: “It’s all about the idea of aging and my mental state at the time I made it . . . I mention many different states of the mind and body . . . like sex, love, fear, anxiety, death.” After making two more prints in 2010, Snyder took a hiatus from printmaking while she was involved in a traveling print retrospective (2011-12), organized by the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Snyder’s paintings have rightfully received increased exposure in major museum and gallery exhibitions during the past decade. In recognition of her artistic achievements, Snyder was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2007. Her studio continues to teem with art making—repeating images, words, and requiems. In 2016, Snyder began a glorious new print at Jungle Press, which debuts here: Chant/Forever I/XII (2018) – bathed in dusty pinks and spring greens, roses, and the words “chant” and “always” repeated rhythmically. At the top is a singing (shouting or crying?) face – a chanter with mouth agape. This new print reminds us that Joan Snyder’s art is never hushed; with her strongly voiced visual language, the artist reveals pleasures, obsessions, even pain, yet always, beauty.