Joan Snyder’s Painterly Abstractions Are Neither Coy Nor Evasive

On my way to take a last long look at “ComeClose,” Joan Snyder’s exhibition this past winter at Canada gallery in New York, I happened to stop in at a nearby gallery where I saw a show by a young painter whose work beguiled but left me frustrated with its too-coy interplay between abstract and figurative elements. At Snyder’s show, the feeling led me to reflect on something that had not previously occurred to me in the nearly 40 years I’ve spent looking at her work