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A painting of predominately orange shapes on a white canvas with a grid of penciled in lines.

The painting is made up of horizontally placed blocks of paint applied by brush or sprayed on and allowed to drip over the blocks below. The grid is four columns across, and roughly six rows down. Orange dominates the right half but the whole work is interspersed with dark red, black, tan gray and green. The color blocks roughly follow the grid but often go beyond the grid lines or span two of the carefully applied rectangles varying in length and thicknesses.

Gallery Text

An American painter based in New York, Joan Snyder first became known for her “stroke paintings” in the 1970s. Summer Orange, one of these works, pointedly combines different techniques of twentieth-century abstract painting, from staining the canvas to applying pigment with spray cans. A penciled grid — the prototypical structure of modernist painting — organizes the color patches, which also exceed its regular lines. Vertical paint streaks, frozen in mid-drip, heighten the tension between order and disorder, and evoke the work of Jackson Pollock. Although by the 1970s abstract expressionism no longer dominated the New York art world, its larger-than-life progenitors continued to hold sway over younger artists. While Snyder, like the abstract expressionists, saw painting as an extension of personal experience, she also saw it as bound up with feminist struggles for equality in both political and cultural spheres. Painting allowed her to “speak visually,” as she phrased it, in a male-dominated world.

Identification and Creation

Object Number
2007.225
People
Joan Snyder, American (New Brunswick, NJ born 1940)
Title
Summer Orange
Classification
Paintings
Work Type
painting
Date
1970
Culture
American
Persistent Link
https://hvrd.art/o/323544

Location

Location
Level 1, Room 1200, Modern and Contemporary Art, Mid–century Abstraction I
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Physical Descriptions

Medium
Oil, acrylic, spray enamel and pencil on canvas
Dimensions
106.7 x 243.8 cm (42 x 96 in.)
Inscriptions and Marks
  • Signed: l.r. side of canvas, in pencil: Joan Snyder Aug 1970

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Michael Walls (GSD, Class of 1961-1963) in memory of his parents, John Alvin James Williamson Walls and Elva Mary Claire Ricciardi Walls
Copyright
© Joan Snyder
Accession Year
2007
Object Number
2007.225
Division
Modern and Contemporary Art
Contact
am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
Permissions

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Publication History

  • Carl Belz, Joan Snyder Painter: 1969 to Now, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (Waltham, 1994), p. 9, ill.
  • Hayden Herrera, Joan Snyder, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (New York, 2005), pp. 64-65, fig. 65
  • Greg Stone, Artful Business: 50 Lessons from Creative Geniuses (Boston, 2016), p. 34, ill. (color)
  • Barry Schwabsky, "Painting the roses red: Joan Snyder's searcing canvases cast her as an uncompromising creator both in and out of control", Art In America (New York, 2024), Vol. 112, No. 2, pp. 88-95, p. 93, ill. (color)

Exhibition History

  • Re-View: S118 European & American Art since 1900, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, 09/13/2008 - 04/09/2011
  • 32Q: 1200 Mid-Century Abstraction I (Painterly Abstraction), Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 01/01/2050

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Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu