In 1973, when no gallery in New York would present her vivid work of our bodies in numerous configurations of intercourse, Joan Semmel created her personal house. She poured her financial savings into renting a unit on 141 Prince Road, known as it a gallery and mounted her first solo present within the metropolis. “I believed within the work, and I wished it to be seen,” she mentioned in a latest dialog on the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: Within the Flesh” (on by means of Might 31 and considered one of our picks for must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil work throughout 5 a long time that have interaction with nudity and sexuality on a lady’s phrases. Every work is unabashed in its frankness and its proportions. The most important, Pores and skin within the Recreation (2019), is 24 ft extensive and eight ft tall. It’s as if Semmel all the time paints so far as her arm can attain.
Semmel was born within the Bronx in 1932, and her studio is situated in SoHo. Within the ’60s, nevertheless, she spent seven years as an summary expressionist in Madrid, with solo reveals that traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Although Francoist Spain was extra conservative than America—marriage couldn’t be legally dissolved, and the newspaper would announce a Catholic saint of the day—she loved a point of freedom there as a foreigner. In 1970, Semmel was again in New York as a single mom of two. She had left due to her husband’s work; now she had returned to divorce him.
In these days, the sexploitation of girls in magazines and pornography to fulfill male fantasies was rampant. As John Berger wrote in Methods of Seeing (1972), “Males have a look at ladies. Girls watch themselves being checked out.” Semmel was shocked at how lopsided the sexual revolution was, and she or he longed for equal participation. Thus adopted her erotic work, which retain an summary expressionist palette that offers her topics an otherworldly glow of pink, orange or inexperienced.
Portray bare ladies—from Sandro Botticelli’s The Delivery of Venus (c. 1485) to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) to Tom Wesselmann’s Nice American Nudes (1961–73)—has lengthy been the province and prerogative of males. Semmel’s depictions of intercourse defied the taboo towards ladies broaching the subject, and she or he sought to right the ability imbalance, typically in literal methods. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), a pair takes turns to be on prime. In Intimacy-Autonomy (1974), lovers lounge aspect by aspect, neither dominating the opposite.
Then got here her iconic sequence of “self-images”: work of her physique from her perspective, typically carrying nothing however a signature turquoise ring. These aren’t “self-portraits,” Semmel insists, since she is unconcerned with producing likeness, capturing character or conferring standing. Reasonably, her self-images are a direct assault on the male gaze—by asserting her personal. One is titled By way of the Object’s Eye (1975). One other, Daylight from 1978, reveals her tenderly caressing her calf and sole, untethered from male validation.
Within the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), she sandwiches a self-image between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and Willem de Kooning’s Lady I (1952). Within the former, the feminine determine is sexualized by the industrial media; within the latter, it’s disfigured by a pre-eminent up to date artist. Semmel’s response is to insert her viewpoint and desecrate the 2 nice cultural forces, sticking lace and feathers onto the Playmate and attaching a nursing nipple to the abstracted monstrosity.
As an artist and a curator, Semmel was among the many second-wave feminists who resisted censorship and objectification. This locations her earlier work within the firm of landmark works similar to Carolee Schneemann’s quick movie Fuses (1967), Betty Tompkins’ Fuck Work (1969–74), Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Ebook (1975) and Judy Chicago’s set up The Dinner Occasion (1979) with its vulva-inspired plates, now on everlasting show on the Brooklyn Museum.
Over the a long time, Semmel’s self-nudes started to tackle a brand new dimension and query our impulse to cover or dismiss getting older our bodies. It’s exceptional that Pores and skin within the Recreation (2019), in full Technicolor glory, is her largest work so far. Reasonably than shrink from the canvas, Semmel continues to push again on prevailing prejudices. Her work right this moment is as confrontational as ever, asking us: What arouses you? What disgusts you? And, most significantly, why?
Baring all of it in full view of the general public is confronting, too, for the artist. In Parade (2023), Semmel’s bare physique appears to draw back from statement. Alice Neel took 5 years to finish a nude self-portrait in 1980, on the age of 80. “The explanation my cheeks acquired so pink,” she mentioned, “was that it was so arduous for me to color that I nearly killed myself portray it.” Equally, Semmel admitted in a 2016 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “It shakes me up a bit of typically, placing that on the market. But it surely’s what I selected to do, so I’ve to undergo with it.” And so the artwork should go on. “My work has been devoted to empowering ladies,” she mentioned not too long ago. “And with a purpose to empower ladies, I needed to empower myself first.”
“Joan Semmel: Within the Flesh” is on view on the Jewish Museum by means of Might 31, 2026.
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