Untitled, 1974

Oil, acrylic, wax, gauze, and tape on canvas
© Joan Snyder. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Like a number of Snyder’s works of the same year, Untitled has a two-part composition. Separating the canvas into two distinct halves, a vertical border at the center divides loosely painted horizontal lines of varying colors and thicknesses, on the left, from a checkerboard of irregularly sized squares and rectangles filled in with relatively solid colors, on the right. Snyder used the grid in this way as a sectioning device to differentiate contrasting approaches to the application of paint within the same work. Providing a fundamental order and a kind of anchor, or resolution, to the instability of fluid brushwork elsewhere, these solid gridded sections—termed “resolves” by the artist—work to regulate ideas and explorations in paint.