It must truly warm the cockles of Jed Perl's heart to see Joan Snyder listed among this year's bunch of MacArthur Foundation prizewinners. And for Snyder, this award falls under the category of just deserts.
By the 90s, Snyder felt so snubbed by the art world that she was eventually led to write about it. In a 1992 essay she titled, "It Wasn't Neo to Us", she complained about the early 90s emergence of so-called Neo-Expressionists, young bucks like David Salle and Julian Schnabel who were greeted by the art world as the revitalizing, restorative figures who would save painting. But we're still here and we've been here all along, Snyder was saying. Since the 70s, she (and several peers, mostly women) had never strayed from an expressionist program, but the critics and curators had nevertheless left them behind, only to fawn over more of the same when it was done by men in a more masculine fashion and with less success.
Typical. This time around, the powers that be recognized the oversight, and she's begun to receive her due. Following a critically regarded retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 2005 comes half a million dollars to close out the decade. Schnabel has that kind of coin many times over, no doubt, but no one's calling him a genius. Way to play the long game, Snyder.
Joan Snyder, And Always Searching for Beauty, 2001.
On a side note, I love the MacArthur Foundation prizes. It's so affirming to read about progress, and to see parity across all the fields of human endeavor: the robotics researcher standing shoulder to shoulder with the soprano, everyone wearing laurel crowns, humanitas ascendant.
UPDATE: "Way to punch above your weight," says ModKix, referring to the Danforth Museum of Art's Katharine French, who organized the Joan Snyder show that graced the Jewish Museum.
Posted by Kriston at September 25, 2007 9:16 AM