P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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P.S.1 Newspaper

2008 Spring

Joan Snyder: Catching Up with the History of Painting

P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui interviews Joan Snyder in her Brooklyn studio.

Joan Snyder

Courtesy the artist

Phong Bui: Joan, you initially studied Sociology but in your senior year, you took a painting class which dramatically changed the course of your life. Could you briefly retell us of your beginnings?

Joan Snyder: I did what every young painter does—paint still lives, portraits of family members, friends, and so on. Then one day my painting teacher took me into the slide room to view German and Russian Expressionist paintings, especially those of Aleksey von Jawlensky whose portraits I completely identify with, and from that point on, I knew that I was going to be a painter for the rest of my life.

PB: Could you describe what your feelings were, and how you managed to paint, given the political situation of the 1960s?

JS: Honestly, I wasn’t that involved with the outside world. Since I had a late start, I stayed inside the studio and painted around the clock in order to catch up with the history of painting.

PB: How about the contemporary art scene?

JS: My teacher was Robert Morris, and while all of my classmates, which included Keith Sonnier and Jackie Winsor, were building gray boxes, I was making an angel with splayed legs and plywood wings sitting on a wheeled platform covered with plastic flowers. Since I had spent so many years of my childhood and teenage years being anxious, painting became a way for me to deal with my internal feelings. Therefore color field paintings and Minimalism were contrary to what I wanted in my work.

PB: But wouldn’t you regard your flock and altar painting series as the most legible and most referential to the female body, which perhaps coincides with your own responses to the Women’s Rights Movement?

JS: True, but that was before we had the dialogue about female sensibility. As far as allowing myself to feel liberated about my own explorative spirit, the urge to put lentil seeds, flocks, threads and all kind of other materials in the paintings has to do with my own sexual awakening. In the early 1970s when I was teaching at various universities, I remember seeing works by young female students that I really loved, and these women would say that their teachers wouldn’t approve of what they were doing. Well, let’s face it: their teachers were men who didn’t understand the feminine sensibility or our language.

PB: Were you able to recognize that same feeling in the works of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, or Grace Hartigan—women painters who were able to sustain their own growth during the first and second generation of the New York School, which were somewhat predominantly male movements?

JS: They were terrific painters but in some ways, they were partially buying into the male myth, and therefore couldn’t fully express their feminine sensibilities.

PB: Unlike some of the artists of your generation who, out of personal necessity, take on specific images that advocate or intensify the feminist cause, your paintings seem more concerned with having their own, singular, organic life. Could you elaborate this?

JS: As a young painter I was very involved in building up my own language by painting in various styles and going through different periods in art history. At a certain point, I decided to make works that revealed more of my own womanhood without losing my interest in form and content.

PB: Marcia Tucker told a story once in her loft in 1969: Richard Serra, who was sitting across from her said, “Painting is dead!” and she replied, “Yeah, for a sculptor of course it is.” Painting has continually been pronounced dead and so serious painters must always find good reasons to sustain their belief in it. How did you deal with yours?

JS: All of that never meant much to me because that pronouncement is a result of certain male sensibilities.

PB: Do you think all the works that you and artists from your generation paved the way for younger women artists today, at least in the last decade or more?

JS: I think we paved the way for male artists, too! I’m thrilled that women artists from all over the world now are making works in reference not only to their sexual orientations, but also to their own cultural heritages.