The Brooklyn Rail

In the midst of the feminist movement in New York City in the 1970s, Joan Semmel began working both with models and photographs she took of her own body to overturn art historical conventions for representing the female form. Using cropping and birds-eye view perspective, Semmel created nudes that are unidealized, intimate, and sensual. In the Flesh features sixteen paintings from the early 1970s through 2023 alongside nearly fifty modern and contemporary works which Semmel selected from the Jewish Museum’s collection for their relevancy to her practice.

The show opens with vividly-colored paintings of couples mid-coitus, including Erotic Yellow (1973), Indian Erotic (1973), and Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), created from life drawings. Combining Abstract Expressionist colorfields in eggplant and lemon yellow with figurative realism, the compositions are jarring, forcing the viewer to question why representations of sexual pleasure from a woman’s perspective make us feel uncomfortable. When museums and galleries initially refused to show these early works because of their explicit sexuality, Semmel responded by independently mounting her first New York solo show in a SoHo loft.

The intentionally sparse aesthetic of the exhibition, which embraces the gallery as one continuous space, evokes the raw, airy atmosphere in which the paintings were initially displayed. The recreation of the white-box aesthetic also alludes to mid-century art world power structures and aesthetic codes, shaped by the machismo of the Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist movements, which Semmel challenged at the outset of her career. In a 2018 interview with art historian Jennifer Samet, she recalled that painting the nude was radical for a female artist at the time because “painting in itself was male dominated. If you were a feminist, you were supposed to make collaborative work, and work derived from women’s labor. I never bought into that. I loved to paint, and I wasn’t about to give it up.”

In the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), Semmel satirically deconstructs the effect of the male gaze on the representation of the female form. The center panel is a self-study of the artist’s body from above. She presents herself on her side, so that her arm is draped over her bare torso and her hand is in the foreground. Semmel forces us into the position of subject, seeing her hand as if it is our own. The side panels offer critiques of the nude as seen in popular culture and modernist painting. The left-hand panel is a copy of a Playboy pin-up image to which Semmel added feathers and on the right is a pastiche of Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman I (1950–52) with a fake rubber nipple. This was the only time in her career that Semmel appropriated imagery or employed collage, using found objects to mock the lewd objectification of female anatomy.

Throughout the 1970s, Semmel honed her self-portraits, often working with a monochromatic palette and dramatic chiaroscuro in paintings such as Sunlight (1978), Horizon with Hands (1976), and Through the Object’s Eye (1975). As in Mythologies and Me, the placement of the hands and the body emphasizes touch, so that the viewer is embodied in the figure. In Sunlight, Semmel’s right hand cradles her foot, in Horizon with Hands the fingers rest on the hip, and in Through the Object’s Eye hands scrape the thighs. These contemplative paintings denote a woman’s experience of her own body rather than how she is seen by others.

Semmel’s recent uplifting self-portraits focus on the mature body in motion. Transitions (2012) and Skin in the Game (2019) are composed of superimposed images of herself in a variety of poses. Evoking an Eadweard Muybridge photographic study, Transitions traces her movement from seated, to reclined, to standing. In the mural-sized Skin in the Game, she reappraises her use of bright colors, juxtaposing plum, yellow, and peach hues and places six studies of her body in a sequence of expressive positions that evokes Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910). Her largest painting to date, it is a rebuke of our obsession with the youth, particularly for women’s bodies, which are frequently digitally or physically manipulated to conceal signs of aging.

One exhibition wall presents Semmel’s curatorial selections from the museum’s collection. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and drawings are hung salon-style without labels. The installation, conceived by Semmel in collaboration with curator Rebecca Shaykin, resembles a reference board in the artist’s studio, offering a window into her influences and creative process. One revealing grouping situates a Raphael Soyer nude, Bruce Davidson’s 1959 photograph of a teenage girl smoking, and an Arnold Newman photograph of Martha Graham, which presents the icon of modern dance as a formidable abstract form through the use of a black cloak. The trio teases several themes in Semmel’s work, including the evolution of the nude in modern American painting, rebellion, and the representation of women artists. Semmel also selected photographs of Berenice Abbott, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Nevelson, each in their own way female pioneers of twentieth-century art.

Semmel’s last major museum presentation in New York City was at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2013 and exclusively featured paintings from the 2000s. It’s been decades since some of the paintings on view at the Jewish Museum were shown in New York, and In the Flesh offers a rare chance to experience them together. A one-room exhibition, this mini-retrospective encourages spending extended time with each painting, proving that dozens or hundreds of objects are not always necessary for a reappraisal of an artist’s work.