When I look at a painting by Joan Snyder, I find that I’m immediately in the midst of things, and I enjoy letting the hurly-burly get to me. Snyder’s impastoed paint and scrawled words and collaged found objects aren’t ends but means, the means to express her belief that in art too much may be just enough. In Snyder’s work too-muchness is a value, a principle. When Snyder presents what amounts to an artist’s version of everything the world contains, she means to evoke sensations of confusion, exhilaration, catharsis. This is an Expressionist vision, but even if certain of Snyder’s works are about wallowing in feeling, she herself keeps a remarkably clear head. In the small retrospective of Snyder’s work that was at the Allentown Art Museum in the fall and early winter, Snyder came through as the thinking person’s Expressionist. It is the pictorial control that she exerts that allows a viewer to let go.

Sarah Anne McNear, the Associate Curator at the Allentown Art Museum, called this thematic mid-career retrospective “Works with Paper.” (Snyder is fifty-three.) Among the fifty-eight works included were a couple of big paintings and many smaller works, the majority of them on paper. Snyder frequently includes collage elements in her pictures, among them pieces of paper, and this was a part of what McNear was alluding to in the show’s perhaps too catchy title. The show offered a process-oriented approach to Snyder’s work. There is the process of collaging elements together. And