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Lot Essay
Born in London, Snead led a life of spontaneous nomadic travel which informed her enduring fascination with translating her surrounding into dreamlike landscapes. In the mid-1930s, Snead studied painting under the French abstractionist Amédée Ozenfant, where she met and fostered a lifelong friendship with Leonora Carrington. Although not consciously a member of any artistic group, it was through this relationship that Snead met the Surrealists who fled to New York in the years of the Second World War. Their three-dimensional otherworldly spaces attracted her more than the abstract canvases of the emerging expressionists around her, though the latter exerted a quiet yet enduring influence on her work, emerging as small suggestions of abstractions mixed into fantastical worlds. It was her travels to the American Southwest, witnessing the terrestrial, semi-desert landscapes of places like New Mexico and Taos, which inspired the surrealist vision of Ritual.
The 1950s saw Snead take an extended hiatus from oil painting, with her focus shifting to translating her Surrealist sensibility into the medium of photography, capturing the scenery and cultures she encountered in her travels through the Middle East and in her period living in India. Returning to painting while settling in New York towards the last years of her life, Snead’s experience translated to sparse, organic landscapes treated in rich tones which recall the native art and architecture she witnessed. The present work, painted in 1992, is a variation of a 1940s painting which was stolen during one of her sojourns. Far from being for an exact copy, it is a vivid reimagining using brilliant and more striking colours than those from her post-war period, now perhaps illuminated by Snead's time in India. The sharp contours of her figures are softened into smooth yet sculpted totemic female figures which sprout arms that outstretch into a reverent dance. A red figure commands the foreground, like an enigmatic deity, erupting into clouds of grey at its head and emblematic of the earth’s spectacular phenomena which enchanted Snead throughout her years of exploration.
The 1950s saw Snead take an extended hiatus from oil painting, with her focus shifting to translating her Surrealist sensibility into the medium of photography, capturing the scenery and cultures she encountered in her travels through the Middle East and in her period living in India. Returning to painting while settling in New York towards the last years of her life, Snead’s experience translated to sparse, organic landscapes treated in rich tones which recall the native art and architecture she witnessed. The present work, painted in 1992, is a variation of a 1940s painting which was stolen during one of her sojourns. Far from being for an exact copy, it is a vivid reimagining using brilliant and more striking colours than those from her post-war period, now perhaps illuminated by Snead's time in India. The sharp contours of her figures are softened into smooth yet sculpted totemic female figures which sprout arms that outstretch into a reverent dance. A red figure commands the foreground, like an enigmatic deity, erupting into clouds of grey at its head and emblematic of the earth’s spectacular phenomena which enchanted Snead throughout her years of exploration.