Joan Snyder, Roxy Red Fugue

0:00:06.6 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Hudson River Museum looking at a painting by Joan Snyder called Roxy Red Fugue. This is a relatively recent painting. It’s from 2017. When I look at it, I’m paradoxically reminded that for much of the history of art in the West, one of the objectives was to make sure that you forgot that you were looking at paint, that the paint disappeared. And here we’re looking at a work of art where the artist is emphatic that we understand that this is painting.

0:00:34.6 Shilpi Chandra: Besides the way that you can see the strokes of paint that she may have applied with things that are not traditional modes of applying paint, such as a paintbrush—it might have been some sort of knife or some sort of carpentry tool—you also have things like rosebuds and glitter that have associations of femininity and womanhood and things that were not often used in painting.

0:01:01.5 Steven Zucker: It’s a painting that is all pinks and reds and yellows, colors that we associate with flowers, with delicacy, and, as you mentioned, with femininity. But this is an aggressive painting. This is a tough painting. There’s nothing delicate about it. This is a grid, and yet it’s wildly complex.

0:01:22.5 Shilpi Chandra: She’s not trying to be pleasing. She wants to make you stand up and take notice that the paint is tough. It’s applied roughly. It stands out.

0:01:33.9 Steven Zucker: This is an artist who became a professional painter during the feminist movement, although this particular canvas was made decades later.

0:01:41.1 Shilpi Chandra: She came of age on the heels of Minimalism, which was very much a movement that looked at the grid, that looked at making things very sparse, very reductive. And she consciously rejected that and said, I want to make things painterly. I want to bring that emotion of paint back and into what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a painter.

0:02:05.6 Steven Zucker: Let’s take a look at these squares for just a moment, keeping in mind the title, which includes the word fugue, which refers to a musical composition where there’s repetition and a building on a theme or an idea over time. And I feel as if the same thing happens with each of these squares. There is reference to the ideal of the square. But in each case, that square has been deformed, it’s been attacked, it’s been overlaid with a cloth, it’s been torn. And so the ideal of the geometry seems to have met with a kind of violent reaction.

0:02:39.1 Shilpi Chandra: And process was very important to her being an artist, being somebody that worked with her hands, that worked with paint. She wanted to make that apparent in her paintings. She wanted it to be layers that you could see. It was not something that you wanted to keep hidden.

0:02:54.7 Steven Zucker: It’s so different from the way that the Minimalists dealt with the grid, where the grid was meant to be an ideal, where the grid was meant to reference almost a geometry that was beyond the physical world. This is incredibly physical. And something interesting happens for me visually as a result of her process. Whereas in the Minimalist grid, the emphasis is on the two dimensionality, the flatness of the plane. Here, there really is a kind of space that is constructed. Those squares seem to float in space. The flowers that seem to almost grow up from the bottom of the canvas seem to be in a kind of foreground. Is there a kind of almost landscape-like space that’s being constructed that is at odds with the rigorous ideals of the geometry of Minimalism?

0:03:43.8 Shilpi Chandra: There are many instances in this work where even the play of color, red against black, black on top of pink, taking that pink and totally obliterating with black, but then maybe scraping away the black so you can see some of that pink come through. So, yes, there is that violence taking away something from the canvas at the same time that she’s applying and making this three dimensional in many places.

0:04:12.2 Steven Zucker: This is actually not canvas, it’s linen. And if you look at the linen closely, you can see some charcoal marks that the artist laid down below the surface of the paint. She laid down a pretty careful grid, but did it in charcoal, so it’s not that precise. And then she freely layered her paint over that. But that grid is maintained, at least for the most part, around the periphery of the painting, so that the painting has its own internal logic. It is, in a sense, framed. It is structured, and within that is this universe of multiplicity of the artist’s hand.

This work at Art Bridges

The artist’s website

Oona Doyle, editor, Joan Snyder: Body & Soul, exhibition catalogue (London: Thaddaeus Ropac, 2024).

Molly Snyder-Fink, “My Mother’s Altar: Joan Snyder Paints to Face Herself,” Woman’s Art Journal, volume 39, number 2 (2018), pp. 3–11.

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction