Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we'll explore the career of Joan Snyder, a pioneer American painter known for highly expressive and textured works that challenge the boundaries of abstraction. Joining me, as always, is our art expert, Nicholas Robinson. I'm your host, Jeppe Curth. Let's get started. It is with Alex Rotter at 400 million.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:24

Selling here at Christie's 400 million dollars is the bid and the piece is sold. We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself, and how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls, to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Jeppe Curth: 1:28

Hi Nick, hi Jeppe, how are you doing?

Nicholas Robinson: 1:30

Very well, thank you. How are you today?

Jeppe Curth: 1:32

I'm good, I'm good. So today, Joan Snyder. And, as usual, let's begin from the beginning . Can you tell us a little bit about her background and early years.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:48

Yes, I mean, let's just give a quick summary, maybe, of what she's known for, what her reputation is founded upon. She is a painter who came to prominence at the beginning of the 1970s, known for very heavily process-driven abstract canvases, focusing mostly on the sort of narrative, emotional potential of abstraction, with particular emphasis on what she describes or what she calls female sensibility. So she's considered a feminist artist and a key protagonist of the women's art movement that developed and gained momentum at the beginning of the 1970s.

Nicholas Robinson: 2:38

Yes sorry, of course we need to start with who she is, but Park, new Jersey. So that makes her 84 going on, 85, I guess, of German and Russian Jewish extraction. That's her ethnic heritage and part of the family and community that she grew up in. She describes her childhood not enormously, in not enormously fond terms. She says that she was wracked by anxiety. Was wracked by anxiety.

Nicholas Robinson: 3:31

She describes her parents. I mean, she describes her parents in many ways, but she characterizes her father as a nice man or a warm man, but largely absent, not by neglect but really just due to the traditional gender roles, in that he was out working, he was a toy salesman. She's much more descriptive about her relationship with her mother. Her mother's father died when she was 13, and she was somewhat mature and took on a lot of responsibility towards her siblings. So this resulted in her mother, as Joan describes her, as being rather unhappy, embittered, and this is something that she kind of took out. On the children, she describes herself as having a really hard time with her mother During their childhood, which she would say was working class or lower middle class perhaps. They had no exposure to museums. She had no exposure to art as a child and she considers her childhood to have been culturally deprived. Those are her words. So her recourse to culture, to erudition, was through books, primarily biographies.

Nicholas Robinson: 4:49

She recalls she enjoyed the idea of painting as a child. She experimented with it, she set up a makeshift studio in the cellar of their house and she remembers copying magazine covers and even a specific recollection of copying a Maurice Utrillo painting. Uh, utrillo was a, uh, a painter of the school of Paris, uh, one of the few artists actually in Montmartre in the early 20th century there's actually from there and he specialized in painting these sort of impressionist, post-impressionist street scenes. Um, but she didn't pick up the hobby or the bug for painting again until she was a senior in college and when she went to study she initially began her bachelor's degree in sociology as a preparation for a career as she understood it at that time, for a job in social work. But she did do an elective course in painting and she to this day considers this painting and the reaction to this painting, which must have been done in maybe 1962, 63.

Nicholas Robinson: 6:01

It was a painting that she'd made of her brother and sister-in-law and this looked very much like a, an early 20th century expressionist painting. The, the, the, the there was a sort of a post cubist feel to the work. The the male figure had a pipe. The female figure next to the male was yeah, it was, it was very much bore the hallmarks of of this kind of style. The male was yeah, it was, it was very much bore the hallmarks of of this kind of style.

Nicholas Robinson: 6:26

And she showed it to the teacher, who immediately asked her oh, what do you think of Jawlensky? And she was surprised because she had no idea, uh, what this reference was. She had never heard of uh Jawlensky, who was a expressionist artist in Germany, uh, some, at this point, artist in Germany, at this point, some 40 years prior to this. So, anyway, this teacher showed her a book of Jawlensky and various other Germanist expressionist artists and this was a real seminal moment for her, a light bulb, eureka moment, which really made her realize that this was something that was tremendously vocationally important to her, that this was something that was tremendously vocationally important to her, that it was something that she really wanted to have brought out of herself. Um, the, the, the yawlensky works in particular, resonated with her hugely because she recognized the application of paint, the particular choice of colors, quite vibrant colors in fact it really meant a lot to her, also very specifically because of her family's ethnic heritage as well.

Nicholas Robinson: 7:31

So up to this point she had not been formally interested or trained in any way, but really understood, began to understand the potential of art as a mode of highly personal expression, potential of art as a mode of highly personal expression. And then, in the master's degree that she took, she went to study at Rutgers, which is a university in New Jersey, and she actually did some studying under the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, who at this time was making these very sort of hard edged gray boxes essentially. But this highly reductivective, very sort of ascetic aesthetic was not for her. Um, she also felt quite some degree of repudiation for color field painting, abstract expressionism and, of course, the sort of prevailing sort of minimalism that I had mentioned. Um, she considered all of them somewhat male dominated disciplines that you you know, had come to define cultural production. But she really wanted to make painting a very personal vehicle for her own expressions. As she said, I wanted more in painting, not less.

Nicholas Robinson: 8:37

And she describes herself in graduate school sort of training herself as an artist. She said I remember giving myself assignments Now you're going to make a painting with one figure. Now you're going to put two figures in a painting. I would give myself assignments and then I would do them. Now you're going to forget all about the figure stuff and just think about color. Now you're going to worry about the drawing. So this is what I did. This wasn't coming from any teacher. I was just educating myself, since most of my colleagues or fellow students had been to art school. So this was her very kind of proactive attitude towards learning the tools of painting, or at least taking the tools of painting. That could be meaningful, um, for her thank you, nick.

Jeppe Curth: 9:21

Um, you explain a little bit where she come from, but could you try to explain a little bit more about the paintings, how they look like that develop a notable career they kind of hit upon something, an idea, a signature aesthetic, some particular innovation that distinguishes them from other artists.

Nicholas Robinson: 9:53

Um, and this is no different for her, she started in the early 1960s. Um, she, in the early sixties she made some, some farm and landscape paintings and some still lives that she, you know, found somewhat technically um, uh, proficient but unremarkable, uh, in, in, in, in most ways, uh. But then, come the later sixties, she began to make paintings that were formulated much more sort of conceptually by these notions of female sensibility. The female body and the female figure became much more a sort of a central focus of these paintings. And she will say that it took her six years to make what she would describe as a good painting. So she was practicing from the early 60s to the late 60s until she developed what she considered a certain level of competence in her work. But the thing that most sort of made her reputation in the very beginning of the 1970s and she'd been sort of working on these paintings and evolving them since perhaps 1969, but in 1970, 71, these paintings called the Stroke Paintings really brought her quite a meteoric success. She garnered a lot of attention for these works and became very in demand as an artist quite quickly as a result of them and these paintings I suppose I suppose you could say that they are they're paintings that made the process of painting and paint itself as a subject and process became a very important thing.

Nicholas Robinson: 11:35

In the 1970s there was a whole movement, if you will, that came to be known as process art, and this is highly relevant to understanding her work. And by process art I mean the process of making a painting, the sequence of events that goes into making a picture, and that would be the gathering, the sorting of all of the different constituent parts that go into a painting, the different actions and proceedings making the drawing, layering it. It all became very much part of a work, how a work was perceived and understood, and process artists very much consider the sequence of activities to make a painting or a work of art as integral to that expression. So, basically, the idea is that process art defends the idea that the process of creating the work of art is an art piece all by itself, irrespective of the final outcome. Almost so she would also describe herself as a process artist. She says I was interested in process and I wanted to show the raw canvas, I wanted to show the gesso, I wanted to show lines, I wanted to show the first layer of paint. I wanted to be able to see all those things in one painting so somebody could look at a painting and you could actually see the anatomy of that painting, of how it evolved. And that's really key to her the anatomy of a painting, which is all the different parts that become assembled and layered to make that painting. So this is a key part of these Strogg paintings that made her reputation.

Nicholas Robinson: 13:21

These paintings were founded on the grid, the grid, of course, being a key modernist construct and a legacy of the development of geometric abstraction from the middle of the century. These stroke paintings became part of her interpretation of abstraction. Of course, not being especially partial to colour-field painting or abstract expressionist paintings, her paintings evolved so that she could abandon those kinds of structures for making a painting. So these paintings, they have a semblance of a sort of a grid, a layout, a skeleton framework for the painting that is set onto the canvas surface. And then there are these bright bars of color arranged in somewhat ordered sequences on the surface, and when you look at these brushstrokes and you see the sort of attention that is in these individual strokes you can see that they kind of relate to some of her interest in some of the other artists that influenced her. She was interested in the work of Van Gogh, particularly by his palette and his brushstrokes, and she has spoken of even consciously trying to break down his work and then sort of recreate it in her own way. Also the work of Cezanne. For the same reasons she will reference Pollock. Pollock not in a formal sense but in a sense that he kind of set an example as to what it was to free oneself of all the preceding rules or conventions of making a painting.

Nicholas Robinson: 15:23

Hans Hoffman, who was a European emigre in the US in the 1940s. He was a very important art teacher and a sort of a key conduit for the sort of switch from kind of European modernism to New York becoming the center of modernism at this time. So she was taking all of these influences and she was very deliberately trying to invent her own language. It was an abstract language for herself, which became a vocabulary of color, of line, of the shape of these brushstrokes and then of the sort of impasto and various encrustations, various binding materials or aggregates that she put into the paint in order to make these kind of accumulated textures on the surface, so that of course describes a bit what they look like.

Nicholas Robinson: 16:02

So when she developed these paintings she had many sketchbooks. She's always been a very avid sketcher, keeping these little notebooks where she makes drawings, where she annotates these drawings as further thoughts come to her, notes about other parts that she, other things she can add to the painting, notes about the color, the specific meanings of color, and she would describe her drawings as being the the really the foundation of her practice. She will make lots of drawings and then she will kind of revisit them and as the drawings have developed and her comfort with these drawings has also developed, when she feels that she fully understands what the drawing is and what it can be, then she's ready to maybe make a painting from is and what it can be, then she's ready to maybe make a painting from that. And this could be you know, this could take a year until she she actually makes a painting that is extrapolated from from from these sketchbooks.

Jeppe Curth: 16:56

Okay. So it seems to me that her work cannot be read properly unless we understand the conceptual info, and her views on feminism and female sensibility are taken into account. Would you say that?

Nicholas Robinson: 17:09

I mean it's a key. It's a key, a key part of of her work and it's a key part of how she understands her work and it's a key part of how she describes her work and how her word is is read. Her work is read um. In the early 1970s there was a big sort of development in sort of a women's art movement. I mean, there are quite a lot of other important feminist artists of the period Judy Chicago, linda Benglis, pat Steer, louise Fishman, harriet Corman there's many all of whom have achieved quite significant reputations, even artists like Anna Mendieta, whose works incorporate the body and ideas of the body related to the earth in certain ways. So there's lots of strands of this type of thinking that became prevalent at this time and as she developed, her works became more and more explicitly referential to what she described as the female sensibility. So, after she had made the stroke paintings, the later part of the 70s experienced a much more complex development of symbols, of the written word, of language incorporated into the to the paintings, and all of these elements were part of her idea of expressing feminism, of female sensibility, and a lot of the materials also had specific connotations that would. That would contribute to this, to this sense, and this materiality actually is is key to this sense, and this materiality actually is is key. Um, we've obviously talked about the uh, about what they look like and a bit about how they're made, the relationship to process, the use of drawing the grid, the way she builds them up, um. But. But what's also important is is what they're actually made of. Um, and many of the materials that she would utilize are materials that she considered also had specific feminist connotations.

Nicholas Robinson: 19:24

So, even though she had been building up the surface even from the late 1960s, as the paintings became more evolved and developed, the accumulated matter on the surface also became more sophisticated, as she utilised more and more diverse materials to communicate these kinds of things, and she was adding things to the surface, mixing in with the paint, adhering with the paint, uh, things like wallpaper, scraps of fabric, rayon, plastic, flowers, glitter, sparkles, um lentil, seeds, um other form of organic matter, um straw, and a lot of this stuff was sort of held together, uh, or had the appearance of being held together by thread, um molding paste, gel, various other media to sort of held together, or had the appearance of being held together by thread, molding paste, gel, various other media to sort of bind it all together. So she was, as the paintings developed through the 70s, and she was creating this more developed language of motifs, more about which we can say more in a moment. She was. She was also using the materials that she felt were very relevant to um to depict these, these, these motifs, um. So so this is a key way of understanding her perception, her understanding of a female sensibility and a feminist art.

Nicholas Robinson: 20:56

In fact, there was a very important curator and critic called Lucy Lippard, and in 1976, she posed a question to a number of artists participating in a key exhibition called what is Feminist Art, a key exhibition called what is Feminist Art, and Snyder actually replied with a long list about what female sensibility consisted of, and she said that it is layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong building, putting together many elements red, pink, black, earth, feeling in the colors, the sun, the moon, roots, skins, walls, streams, puzzles, questions, questions.

Nicholas Robinson: 21:58

So, of course, this gives a very free form, stream of consciousness, answer to how she considered a female sensibility.

Nicholas Robinson: 22:04

So the motifs then that she would depict, with all of these diverse materials also substantiated this idea? She would. I mean, there's many different recurring motifs in her paintings, some of which are very common ones include roses, breasts and other women's bodies or parts of women's bodies ponds, oceans, blossoms, songs, cherry trees, moons, pumpkins. So she's pushing the formal possibilities of painting by kind of breaking down and reconstituting abstraction, but she's also developing a kind of a complex materiality through this additive process of collage materials, and then she's got this very personal vocabulary of all of these motifs. So the kind of the holistic result is really a very rigorous sort of interrogation of abstraction, abstract painting, but it's very specifically underpinned by this feminist outlook. She's sort of centering these things on the essence of feelings, of a female body, to carve out a new terrain in painting, and this terrain consists of this highly poetic body of work that is really trying above all to assert the place of feeling and female subjectivity in abstraction.

Jeppe Curth: 23:46

Okay, nick, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about her market. Let's start by looking a little bit about her profile and, as an artist, um, what kind of profile does she have in the art market?

Nicholas Robinson: 24:01

or well, she has a, she has a significant standing, um, because she's a pioneer, because she's, you know, had a significant career based on, and there are several other bodies of work. I mean, she made these stroke paintings, but by perhaps 74, 75, she was becoming, she was becoming bored with these paintings. They came very easily to her, she felt that she was, they were becoming sort of repetitious to her. They were, you know, they were like each painting was like a sort of improvised jazz tune and she wanted something that would take her focus. It would take her much longer to make a painting, something that she could really develop over an extended period. So she made a group of paintings that consisted of square blocks, of colour for the most part, whereby the coloured squares were sort of filling in the grid. She made a group of paintings called the Symphony Paintings. Now, this speaks to her.

Nicholas Robinson: 25:00

I didn't mention it before, but another key element of her painting, of her painting practice, is the influence of music. The Symphony Paintings, of course, somewhat self-explicably, assert this fundamental influence of music. She's constantly playing music. It could be early 1970s, um, uh, philip Glass, now, of course, the eminent composer he was, uh, he was getting by by working as a plumber, and he was actually a plumber in her apartment on one occasion. Um, anyway, um. So music is, is, is a constant part of her, her, her part of her working practice. The emotions in the melodies, the sort of evocations of the titles Sometimes titles of pieces of music become titles of her paintings the feeling of music, the narrative of music, the manner in which the feeling unfolds in a piece of music. Also, the music's ability to encapsulate joy, sorrow, comedy. The music's ability to encapsulate joy, sorrow, comedy, you know, the resolution of a story that she's very, you know, um, very clear about, as, as also being, being being important to her in her, in her painting. Um, so she, she will also make some of these symphony paintings whereby you can almost read them like a musical score. The brush strokes go very clearly from left to right. You know, there's a certain rhythmic melody in paint that is inscribed on the surface, that travels from the upper left of the painting to the upper right of the painting, which contains the sort of, you know, the conclusion, or the coda, or whatever she would describe it as. So then, that's another body of work.

Nicholas Robinson: 26:58

She started to find all the attention. You ask about her sort of place in the market. She, she, she. She started to, to, to become a bit overwhelmed by the amount of attention that she received and in the mid 70s she sort of she didn't check out, but she needed to get some space. She moved to the the country, to a farm in Pennsylvania. She then started making what are now described as the field paintings, which are sort of landscapes, some sort of barns, houses. You know there's a lot of works that look rather different to these other bodies of works that I've described, but this is a very sort of a discrete set of works within her overall output.

Nicholas Robinson: 27:33

And she was achieving tremendous recognition during this entire period. She was included in the Whitney Biennials of 1973 and 1981. She participated in the Corcoran Biennial of 1975. During the course of her working life she's been a MacArthur Fellow, she's been a Guggenheim Fellow and she's been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, pretty much all of the public prizes, the eminent prizes that it is possible to be awarded as an artist in the United States. So she's had a successful and long career, but not at the very sort of.

Nicholas Robinson: 28:17

I mean, the gallery world nowadays is very different to the, to the gallery world that it used to be, the gallery world consisted of much smaller, uh sort of entities that weren't very corporate, the. They were founded and run by figures that were, you know, they weren't money people so much, they were more avant-garde people. They were really sort of artist-led artist run, certainly informed by an artistic sensibility, and her first gallery in the 70s was was showing at the bike at gallery, and this was founded by klaus kurtis, who's a sort of a legendary figure in the new york art world, and this gallery actually itself occupied the former space of the of the green gallery. So you know this was a very iconic venue for, for, for people to see and to buy art. And in this period this gallery showed Bryce Marden, chuck Close, dorothea Rockburn, david novoross, paul mohenson, um linda benglis actually worked there as a secretary. Um mary boone worked there as a secretary before launching her own successful gallery a few years later that decade. Um, so this was her first gallery in in new york. That really helped to set the foundation for her career amongst highly respected peers and, of course, somewhere that the collecting community were well-versed in visiting to sort of identify what was new and exciting in artistic output that she showed with Paley and Lowe Gallery. That was one of the founders. There was Jeffrey Paley, the son of William Paley, who was the founder of CBS and a legendary collector, along with his wife, babe Paley, in the 60s they had 60s and 70s they had one of the greatest art collections of the 20th century.

Nicholas Robinson: 30:10

She went on to show with Hamilton Gallery, which was a very nice gallery on 57th Street and one of the first to show Louise Bourgeois in earnest. She showed with Herschel and Adler, which of course has been a very venerable New York gallery for many years. So she's, you know, she has a history of this high level of representation. She's never really had a like a blue chip gallery, and by that I mean, you know, like a really absolute top elite echelon gallery, you know, everyone knows the Gagosians, the Hauser and Wurst, the Zwirners of this world, but now, by today's Ropak, he represents her work in Europe and Asia and shares the representation of her in North America, I guess, with Canada as a collaborative relationship which is a pretty nice, a nice gallery. So so she's been a figure who everyone has known a lot about. In fact, prior to this, this relationship with Ropak, she showed with Franklin Parrish, who is a tremendous gallerist in New York city with a sort of a very discerning and unerring eye for interesting things. So, anyway, she's, she's, she's never been far from.

Nicholas Robinson: 31:38

You know the sort of artistic public consciousness and her, you know her work is in every museum of standing going. I mean it's in the Art Institute of Chicago, brooklyn, dallas, museum of Art, guggenheim, you know the Met, the Met Museum of Fine Arts, boston, moma, new York. I mean there's not a single museum that's worth its salt that does not have her work San Francisco, moma, the Tate, you know the list is the Whitney, of course, the list is endless. So her achievements, her accomplishments are completely unimpeachable. Accomplishments are completely unimpeachable. Um, but now, because she has these achievements and because she has a gallery that has, well, that has the sort of power, the market power, the and the sort of taste arbitration that they can leverage, uh, it looks very much like, and you might say is expected, that her status and and and you can use that word in all kinds of contexts reputational status, market status, likely, all of the above um will, will, will be on the rise and in fact has been noticeably for the last 12 to 18 months already thanks, nick.

Jeppe Curth: 32:50

Um, my next question was which kind of gallery is representing her? But but I guess you already told us there was Rope Hack and Canada, correct? Yes, that is correct. What is her primary prices?

Nicholas Robinson: 33:01

I mean, we could talk a little bit about that and then also afterwards look into her auctions Her large paintings, and by that I mean two and a half, three metres, 10, 12 feet across, I believe and this has been subject to some change in the recent past around $250,000. But it's not very long ago that you could get the same thing for $140,000, $150,000. And it used to be that you could buy a more modest size painting, let's say a meter, meter, 20, whatever, for 60, 70, maybe 80 thousand dollars. Now the same thing is more like 140, 50 thousand dollars. So they've gone up a lot in the recent past in terms of the primary market prices that galleries are are saying this is, this is, this is what this should cost.

Nicholas Robinson: 33:55

Now there is a. It would cost a lot more to buy a, a sort of a seminal, iconic stroke painting from the early 1970s, um, but I don't know of any such works that you know would be available, um, many of them are in institutions, um, so that's the sort of range for her prices. I mean, there are some works on paper. There are some sort of prints that she makes she's a very prolific printmaker some of which are quite unique, with sort of accretions of pulped paper and so on, very much again linked to this sort of materiality. So there's a few different access points, but that's the basic price structure for her primary market.

Jeppe Curth: 34:37

Okay, could you maybe explain a little bit how such a radical change can in such a short time in her prices?

Nicholas Robinson: 34:45

Well, I think it's a few things you know. I mean, the market is always looking for new and interesting things, and when you look at the price habitually, as we do, as many people in the industry do, you understand that you know there's a sliding scale, a spectrum of prices that one can find things for. And these days, you know it used to be that, you know something sort of entry level was like four or $5,000 and something expensive was a hundred thousand dollars. Now an entry level was like four or $5,000 and something expensive was a hundred thousand dollars. Now an entry level thing is more like $25,000 and something you know getting there is like $800,000.

Nicholas Robinson: 35:30

Um, anyway, what happens is that is that the industry generally is always looking for new things, and and and it's looking for new things in two ways it's looking for emerging things that are exciting, and new and original things that are developments in art that people have not seen before, and it's also looking to promote and rediscover interesting, iconic, seminal things that are underappreciated.

Nicholas Robinson: 35:58

And when you look at major paintings by an artist with the credentials that Joan Snyder has, then it's not too much of a stretch to say, you know, $100,000 for this, $120,000 for this is not a lot of money. Now, of course it is a lot of money, but relative to what you could buy with that money elsewhere in the market, you can see quite easily that it's well-priced, it's competitive, it's affordable. It has, you know, a compelling narrative in terms of its contribution to art history. It has, you know, unbelievable like quality. It has all kinds of innovative, radical components. They they're beautiful, they're sumptuous paintings. I mean, they're not to everyone's taste, but they're important milestones, they're important documents, and so, of course, when people understand this and it's not difficult to understand in the case of jones nider then of course they people also understand there's opportunity there as well.

Jeppe Curth: 36:58

And of course, people also understand there's an opportunity there as well. Thanks, Nick. Her auction record was set in November 2023 at $498,000. It was a large-scale work. I think it was 153 by 293 centimeters right. Yeah, what is your take on?

Nicholas Robinson: 37:16

that. I think it's indicative of everything that we've been describing on that. I think it's indicative of everything that we've been describing Painting. Had it been sold perhaps 18 months prior to that, privately and not with a big sort of fanfare of auction, but just within the sort of normal gallery ecosystem, it perhaps would have sold for $180,000, $200,000. You can rewind back a little bit further three, five years prior to that and perhaps it was maybe $120,000, $150,000 painting. It's an important historic painting by an important artist, but that was the price point because it was in a sort of a certain stasis in the market rather than achieving the attention that this auction and other things that were happening were bringing.

Nicholas Robinson: 38:12

Now, obviously that's a pretty healthy sum of money. It's quite a lot of money, but in the context of important artists of that generation who achieved important things, it could be argued that it is not a large sum of money. As an example, the record price for a work by Linda Benglis is a million dollars. One could also arguably say that that is not as high as perhaps it could be given her contribution. That's a discussion for another day. Perhaps it could be given her contribution, that's a discussion for another day. But other artists of her generation with probably, objectively speaking, no better credentials, have also achieved prices that far outstrip her record price. A record for Susan Rothenberg's paintings is $2 million. The record price for a Pat Steer painting is $2.3 million. Even the record for an Anna Mendieta work is is $800,000.

Nicholas Robinson: 39:11

So you can see that Joan Snyder's record price, whilst it constitutes a lot of money, it's perhaps not a lot of money when viewed through the lens of all the other things that one could buy by other artists that are comparable. I mean, she's 84 years old, she's still working. You know when artists have been doing, you know, variations on a theme for many years and of course they would argue that their work evolves and everything else. But when you you see a Joan Snyder painting, you recognize it as a Jones Snyder painting. It's of course. You know there's some consistency there. You know there's a very obvious tendency for the market, for the world, to sort of start to take this for granted a bit and look to the next sort of bright new thing. Um, people are revisiting that idea now and seeing value where previously they did not recognize as such.

Jeppe Curth: 40:05

Was it 84, right 84?

Nicholas Robinson: 40:06

years old. She was born in 1940. So, yeah, she'll be 85 this year at some point, 85 this year. I don't know when her birthday is, that's okay.

Jeppe Curth: 40:17

But how do you see the future for her?

Nicholas Robinson: 40:19

Well, I think that the future is bringing a level of recognition that has a little bit been taken for granted, as I say to me having, you know, call me a sort of a cynical old soul in this industry. You know, you think of certain artists and of course every generation, every movement is defined by a certain group of artists that were responsible for shaping that period and defining what that period became known for. Those are the artists that write the books. Those are the books. You know. Those are the artists that have the chapters in the books, that make the headlines. You know, joan Snyder is one of. The is one of these artists. And these artists, you know, you can go through every decade and look at every movement and the top protagonists of each of these. You know they're million dollar or multi-million dollar artists, I mean you know. So from that you can draw your own conclusion. So my feeling is, if you have a clear understanding of the art history and you kind of draw from that, you can identify pretty much all the artists who have not achieved that price point that the way the market functions, they will achieve that price point. That the way the market functions, they will achieve that price point. So to me the future is okay.

Nicholas Robinson: 41:43

The record for her now is like $478,000, whatever it is. But what will happen now is that somebody who has, you know, a painting from 1974 or 1972, you know they will understand, probably, that you know there's a certain opportunity in that the auction houses will understand that it's in their interests to find such a thing, put it into the first 10 lots of an evening sale, if they can source such an item. Um, and you know, instead of making 478 000, it will make you know, 1.2 million dollars and then, or whatever, and then you'll have this sort of filter down effect for all the different periods of her work, all the different types of her work, and there'll become a hierarchy within that that is, you know, has different prices attached to it. So that's the future. That is the future. Well, maybe that's the future. That typically is what the future looks like for this kind of situation um nick for anybody looking to delve more into her works and career.

Jeppe Curth: 42:49

Um. What would you recommend them to do?

Nicholas Robinson: 42:53

there's a. There's some great resources. I mean she's such a sort of a, a darling of the new york and north American kind of museum and intelligentsia world. So there's a lot of really interesting material you can find. You just have to sort of hunt around. There's many lectures she was a prolific lecturer. Quite a few of these. You can find archival footage of where she's speaking about her own work, her own development. Her own website is tremendous in that it has a completely comprehensive catalog of everything pretty much that she's ever made. So you can go through the menu and see these different blocks of years and you can go into those years and you can see sequentially the work that she's made. So there's an incredible visual resource to sort of understand the progression of her work and her, her various sort of iterations of her styles. That's fantastic. Um Ropak's website is great.

Nicholas Robinson: 43:58

Um has a nice interview with her brief sort of. There's a show that that actually they have now a very comprehensive exhibition at their London gallery which is a fantastic survey show of her work going even from the 1960s all the way to the present day. So that's very comprehensive. Um. There's a a really wonderful interview with her Um. You can listen to a snippet of it, but the transcript is is available, uh, the archives of American arts online, um, which is which is part of the Smithsonian Um. So there's, you know, yeah, as much information as one could possibly digest, um, if digest, if you look for it.

Jeppe Curth: 44:43

Thank you, Nick. I think I don't have more questions. Do you have anything to add?

Nicholas Robinson: 44:49

I think that covers it all as far as I'm concerned, at least as far as the objectives for this podcast are concerned.

Jeppe Curth: 44:57

Thank you, so thank you, nick. Thank you very much. Podcast are concerned, thank you. So thank you, nick, thank you very much. If you have any questions to us, please contact us at info at nordicartpartnerscom, and hope to see you back or have you back for the next episode. Bye.