Joan Snyder is one of the strongest abstract painters working today. No other contemporary painter I can think of gets as much out of found materials (herbs, mud, nails, plastic fruit, dried flowers, silk, straw, and sticks), and none can transform personal confession into art with such heartfelt clarity and objectivity. A collagist as much as a painter, Ms. Snyder, whose retrospective opens tomorrow at the Jewish Museum, has an enormous gift for color and texture and rhythm. She gives her paintings a primitive, almost talismanic power. With velvet or raw linen, she can evoke earth, flesh, sea, and sky. She transforms her pictures into fields and bodies; nests, altars, and infernos; children’s art and pages from a diary.

In “Flesh/Art” (1973) a pattern of arcs is scattered across the cream-colored ground. Immediately, you realize that they are actually tears in the canvas; they seem at times to be goofy smiles, a woman’s genitals, lesions, and crescent moons – without any particular evocation dominating. In the lower right-hand corner, canvas threads connect one arc to another. The delicate and visceral details, like strands of a broken spider’s web, brings the forms into fragile relief.

Ms. Snyder can work large and small. The tiny “Beanfield With Music for Molly” (1984), a green field punctuated by orange circles, is as intimate as a love letter. “Oratorio” (1997), nearly 10 feet wide, is operatic in scale. The mixed-media work – a powerfully frontal grid containing a mask over zebra stripes, an enormous sunflower, nails, plastic grapes, a bleeding heart, and a large white moon – leaps off the wall with percussive force. In the 6-foot-by-8-foot “The Orchard-The Altar” (1986), strange barren trees the color of dried blood dance across a violetblack field. Like a night sky, the field is activated with a snowfall of bright white squares, as if out of a Charlie Brown Christmas.

Beauty and sadness; cruelty and lyricism; suffering and release: All go hand in hand in Ms. Snyder’s work, as if each were not possible without the other. “Cherry Fall” (1995), a white, virginal surface with a columnar, iridescent piece of silk at its center, is splattered with red – like blood on snow. In the small, elegiac “Faces” (1993), ghostly masks swim in gorgeous grays, ivies, yellows, and violets. The canvas is a twilit skin (with crimson cutting through in places) that feels stormy or softly bruised. The spray-enameled surface of “Lines and Strokes” (1969) is streaked with stacked horizontal bands of color that resemble sunsets, blushes, and wounds.

A visionary who is a strict formalist at heart, Ms. Snyder weaves her emotional outbursts into the grid – transforming feeling into color and setting her pain to rhythm. Her intuitive sense of what goes next to what, and in what amount, recalls the concise structural composure of Joseph Cornell, and her no-holds-barred expressionism is like the dance of a witch doctor.

In “And Always Searching for Beauty” (2001), an 8 1/2-foot-by-6 1/2-foot mixed-media work, circular forms activate the surface like Monet’s water lilies. They look like flowers and childish hearts. As in other works, the forms are as frontal, decorative, and straightforward as polka-dots, yet as fresh and visceral as bullet wounds. In “Perpetuo” (2004), the radiating yellow, violet, and white forms, stacked and glowing like traffic lights, are thick and liquid. A combination of papier mache, buds, seeds, and acrylic on linen, the sunburst forms resemble fried or broken eggs.

Ms. Snyder (b. 1940) is an avowed feminist and politically active artist. As the wall text points out, her work has taken on such politically charged subjects as war, September 11, AIDS, and children’s, women’s, and gay rights. Ms. Snyder has always been very open about the influences behind her art – which are often embarrassingly personal – but some of the wall text risks turning the paintings into emotional illustrations of the artist’s life.

Ms. Snyder’s best paintings are powerful not because of their subjects, but in spite of them. Her rich, commanding voice transforms politically loaded or autobiographical subjects into universal subjects: Her suffering over the Holocaust becomes suffering itself; her love of her daughter becomes love; her sadness over September 11 is a requiem that gets at all loss.

When Ms. Snyder falls short of the mark, she fails formally; it is a question not of subject but of unity. The illustrative work “Women in Camps” (1988) combines wood, wire, nails, hand scrawled text, paint, and photographs of women and children during the Holocaust. Ms. Snyder evokes barbed wire, spears, newspaper obituaries, a monument, a child’s casket, and a crown of thorns. I can sense what it is she wants from a bright yellow Star of David, painted on a woman’s chest; and yet, the photographs are too powerful in and of themselves. They hang alone like a frieze across the painting. Here, symbol overpowers image.

This show is a welcome and well-deserved retrospective. I only wish it were much larger and that the works had more room to breathe. Comprised of only 31 paintings and no drawings, it does not fully represent Ms. Snyder’s poetic range with forms and materials – the myriad ways in which she has approached the circle, the grid, and the stripe; or how she has miraculously transformed velvet.

The exhibition feels piecemeal, and is missing many important works that are representative of her oeuvre. Yet this may well be a sign of a good show: I left exhilarated but wanting so much more.

August 12 through October 23 (1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, 212-423-3232).