Post-War & Contemporary Art

Provenance:

Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Neilsen Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts

Exhibited:

Water Mill, New York, The Parrish Art Museum, Dreams for the Next Century: A View of the Collection, 1998

New York, New York, the Jewish Museum, Joan Snyder Painting Survey, 1969 - 2005, August 12 - October 23, 2005; Framingham, Massachusetts, The Danforth Museum of Art, November 10, 2005 - February 5, 2006

Literature:

Hayden Herrera, Joan Snyder, Harry N. Abrams, NY, 2005, pp. 122-123, illus.

Mark Stevens, Iron Joan, New York Magazine, NY, September 8, 2005, illus.

Joan Snyder: Painting Pioneer, Lilith Magazine, NY, Fall 2005, pp. 20-21, illus.

Maryanne Garbowsky, Joan Snyder: Painter, Printmaker and More, The Print Club of New York, Inc., NY, Fall 2006, pp. 4-5

Joan Marter, Snyder, Joan, The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Oxford University Press, NY, 2011, pp. 507

Marilyn Symmes with an essay by Faye Hirsch, Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Prestel Publishing, NY, 2011, pp. 111

Lot Essay:

Ah, Sunflower

Throughout her storied career, various artistic movements have staked a claim to Joan Snyder’s work: abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism, feminist art – yet Snyder’s brilliant talent has managed to slip past all of them, while being everything all at once. Though her practice has evolved, the specific language that Snyder uses to communicate with her viewers was developed early on. It’s through this language that Snyder continues to speak -- deeply narrative and raw, both isolating and community-building, sometimes political and then all at once intensely personal – but rarely quiet and never apologetic.

Snyder was born on April 16, 1940, eventually receiving her undergraduate degree from Douglass College, and an MFA from Rutgers University. While she originally pursued sociology, Snyder was inspired to begin painting. With the distinction of ever visiting a museum prior to college, Snyder was wholly able to pursue her own artistic interests, her vision unsullied by movements currently in vogue, including the sterile world of Modernism--then popular--which she firmly rejected. She has since been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other accolades. As her work first began to gain traction in the 1970s, she increasingly abandoned formality for something more primal and confessional. 

Central to the themes of Snyder’s work has been the concept of womanhood. 

“In the late 60’s women had begun to talk, meet and organize. We were not being recognized or taken seriously, no matter the type or style of artwork we were attempting at the time. I remember calling male painters ‘the boys’, and I did that for years, because women were excluded from any dialogue at the time. Perhaps this is what allowed me to go my own way, to discover my own language, and to work so independently, just because I felt so excluded.” 

(Feminist Art Statement, The Brooklyn Museum, 2007),

In Ah, Sunflower, Snyder weaves in elements of what has traditionally fallen under the gathering and crafting nature of “women’s work” in her materials – with cloth, berries, seeds, herbs – calls to early domesticity, homemaking, growing. Forms are built up from the canvas with papier-mâché and aggressive brushstrokes, the messages they bear sometimes partisan and sometimes deeply intimate.

The title Ah, Sunflower is itself derived from the work of a Romantic: the poet William Blake. Here, he writes about how sunflowers relentlessly follow the sun through the sky each day, posed as a lifelong aching longing or a meditation on time. Long resonating with artists and writers alike (such as Allan Ginsberg, for which it was a personal favorite), the poem reads as follows:

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travellers journey is done. 

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 

Arise from their graves and aspire, 

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

(Songs of Experience, 1974) 

Ah, Sunflower is an excellent example of the dichotomy of narrative intimacy and larger-than-life expression that Snyder’s work portrays; the painting towers next to the onlooker, the life-size sunflowers almost blurred as they surround words from Blake’s poem; familiar and strange in the tenderness it conveys.