Joan Snyder
Joan Snyder, Duet in Three Parts, 2021. Oil, acrylic, ink, paper mache, burlap, paper, twigs, leaves on linen in two parts, overall: 60 x 64 inches.
Regulars of New York City’s contemporary art scene have recently been treated to two doses of Joan Snyder’s paintings. Joan Snyder: To Become a Painting, currently on view at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery on the Upper East Side, includes seven recent works whose combined energy and elegant, clear installation in the gallery’s domestic-scale spaces contribute to the rewards of such a modest presentation. Those intrepid denizens who also attended the Frieze Art Fair at the Shed got an additional dose with a broader spectrum—at least in chronological terms—of Snyder’s canvases. This included one early work from her breakthrough series of stroke paintings, titled Birth (1972), which received significant attention.
With a contemporaneous article in the May 1971 issue of Artforum by the legendary Whitney Museum curator and subsequent New Museum founder Marcia Tucker, Snyder’s stroke pictures have become iconic, even historic, within the ever-changing, expanding and contracting canon. Dare I even use the term “canon,” with all its chauvinist and colonial implications, in this context? But however paradoxical a position the stroke pictures may hold within the larger discourse of postwar art, they have become highly visible during the last several years.
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