In 1973, when no gallery in New York would show her explicit paintings of bodies in various sexual configurations, Joan Semmel created her own space. He used the money he had saved by renting a unit at 141 Prince Street, called it a gallery and put on his first solo exhibition in the city. “I believed in this work, and I wanted it to be seen,” he said in a recent interview at the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” (through May 31 and one of our selections of must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil paintings spanning the fifties that address nudity and sexuality in female terms. Each worker is unashamed in their frankness and equality. The greatest, Skin in the Game (2019), it is 24 meters wide and 8 feet long. It’s as if Semmel always paints up to his arm’s length.
Semmel was born in the Bronx in 1932, and his studio is located in SoHo. However, in the ’60s, he spent seven years as a soloist in Madrid, with solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Although Francoist Spain was more conservative than America—marriage could not be dissolved by law, and the newspaper would proclaim the Catholic saint of the day—he enjoyed a degree of freedom there as a foreigner. By 1970, Semmel had returned to New York as a single mother of two. She had gone because of her husband’s work; now he was back to divorce.
In those days, the sexual exploitation of women in magazines and pornography to satisfy men’s dreams was rampant. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972), “Men look at women. Women look at themselves.” Semmel was shocked at how bad the sexual revolution was, and he wished to participate equally. His sensual paintings followed, maintaining an abstract expressionist palette that gave his subjects a pink, orange or green world light.
Painting nude women—from Sandro Botticelli Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to Gustave Courbet The Origin of the World (1866) to Tom Wesselmann Great American Nudes (1961–73)—has long been the province and prerogative of men. Semmel’s depictions of sex contradicted the women’s disagreements on the subject, and he sought to redress power imbalances, sometimes in literal ways. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), the couple alternates to be on top. In Intimacy-Independence (1974), lovers are always together, they can dominate each other.
Then came his iconic series of “self portraits”: sketches of his body from his perspective, often wearing nothing but his signature turquoise ring. These are not “self portraits,” Semmel insists, as he is not concerned with producing a likeness, capturing a character or providing a setting. Instead, her self-portraits are a direct attack on the male face—by revealing her own. One has a title With the Eye of the Item (1975). Other, Sunshine from 1978, it shows her stroking one of her calves, unbound by male confirmation.
In the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), sandwiched a self-portrait between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1952). In the first period, the female figure is sexualized by commercial sources; finally, it is interrupted by a prominent contemporary artist. Semmel’s answer is to insert his vision and contaminate two great cultural forces, attaching lace and feathers to the Playmate and attaching a nipple to invisible flesh.
As an artist and curator, Semmel was among the women of the second wave who resisted censorship and opposition. This puts his earlier paintings in the company of historic works such as Carolee Schneemann’s short film Fuses (1967), Betty Tompkins Fuck drawings (1969-74), by Tee Corinne Cunt Coloring Book (1975) and featuring Judy Chicago Dinner Party (1979) and its vulva-inspired plates, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum.
Over the decades, Semmel’s nudity began to take on a new dimension and questioned our impulse to hide or banish aging bodies. That’s incredible Skin in the Game (2019), in full Technicolor glory, is his greatest work to date. Rather than shrinking from the canvas, Semmel continues to retreat from existing prejudices. His work today is as controversial as ever, he asks us: What excites you? What disgusts you? And, most importantly, why?
Revealing everything publicly is up to the artist. In The Parade (2023), Semmel’s naked body seems to escape scrutiny. Alice Neel took five years to complete the nude portrait in 1980, at the age of 80. “The reason my cheeks are so pink,” she said, “is that it was so hard for me to paint them that I almost killed myself painting them. Similarly, Semmel admitted in a 2016 interview with Brooklyn Rail, “It makes me a little nervous sometimes, to put it that way. But that’s what I chose to do, so I have to go through it.” And so art must go on. “My work is meant to empower women,” she said recently. “And in order to empower women, I had to empower myself first.”
“Joan Semmel: In the flesh” is on view at the Jewish Museum until May 31, 2026.
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