artist of the day: joan snyder

Courtesy of the Jewish Museum Shocking, graphic, memorable: Joan Snyder’s Women in Camps, 1988.

Painter Joan Snyder Takes On the Big Boys: Pollock, de Kooning By Hilton Kramer

What, for other artists, might be considered excess—excess energy, excess emotion, excess ambition, excessive quantities of paints and other materials for making paintings—is, for Joan Snyder, a minimum of what a painting requires. She belongs to the school that labors in the belief that Too Much Is Hardly Enough. As a consequence of this painterly overload, Ms. Snyder’s work has an immediate and compelling impact on the viewer—so much so, indeed, that the initial encounter doesn’t leave much room for later discoveries. The paintings on view in her show at the Jewish Museum are so “out front” to begin with that subsequent encounters with the work simply confirm one’s first impression of the artist’s hell-bent appetite for excess. What results from this high-energy ambition are paintings that are big and blowzy and blatantly competitive. It’s not with her immediate contemporaries, however, that Ms. Snyder enters into fierce competition. (She hardly bothers to acknowledge the existence of contemporaries—unless they share her ardently feminist views on art and life.) The artists she’s eager to compete with and surpass are the big boys of the Abstract Expressionist generation—Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Hofmann et al. Born too late to be a member of that generation, she nonetheless stakes her claim as its principal successor...................