In 1970, after living abroad for over seven years, the New York painter Joan Semmel returned to the city, rented a loft in Soho, and, within months, substantially remade herself as an artist. It was as if she had picked up a different passport on her flight home. As an abstract expressionist in the 1950s and 1960s, her concerns had been mostly formal, but the new paintings would be political, figurative, erotic, and female-centered. They would end up “subverting the whole genre of the nude,” as she succinctly put it in a 2013 interview.

Born in 1932, the eldest child of a working-class family in the Bronx, Semmel has said that she was allowed to study art in part because she was a girl and not expected to need to earn her living. She attended the High School of Music and Art, then trained as an abstract expressionist at Cooper Union (older fellow students included Alex Katz and Audrey Flack). She later completed her BFA at Pratt. “You had to be making abstraction at the time,” Semmel has said, although she didn’t resent its monopoly in the 1950s: “It was wonderful. It was such freedom.” The intense, saturated color in much of her work is a legacy of abstraction. She remains devoted to the long sweep of a brush and to the kind of monumental scale that arose in Action Painting.

Although Semmel stopped painting for several years after her marriage in 1952, she picked it up again after the birth of her first child. A six-month stay in a tuberculosis ward helped clarify that she wanted an identity of her own, not only that of a wife and mother. Missing the company of other artists, she enrolled in classes with Morris Kantor at the Art Students League. As she told the art historian Gail Levin in an oral history for the Smithsonian Institution: “He looked at my work, and he said, ‘You’re a very good artist. A very good artist. But you’ll make babies.’” Almost every American woman artist who came up in the postwar years has a similar story: put-downs that became humorous anecdotes if the artist was able to ignore them and keep working. Judy Chicago remembered a critic remarking, “You know, Judy, you have to decide whether you’re going to be a woman or an artist.”

“In the Flesh,” an exhilarating solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum that brings together sixteen works from Semmel’s long career, begins not long after the artist’s return to New York. The earliest painting in the show, Flip-Flop Diptych—a gestural treatment of a couple trading the “top” position during intercourse—dates from 1971. “I had no money, two children, and thirty-five really big paintings,” Semmel recalls. She had been living in Madrid with her young family while her husband was posted to a job there, and had successfully exhibited her abstract works in Europe and South America, but the repressive laws and attitudes of Franco’s Spain (somewhat relaxed for her as an American) had made a feminist of her; she also wanted a divorce, unobtainable in that Catholic country.

Once back home, she became deeply involved in the women’s movement and the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, fighting censorship and picketing the Whitney for a larger share of wall space, long before the Guerrilla Girls. Several of Semmel’s activist friends and colleagues, among them Judith Bernstein, Hannah Wilke, Joyce Kozloff, and Nancy Spero, are included in a show within the show at the Jewish Museum: Semmel chose about fifty pieces from the permanent collection, all of which spark some sense of connection for her, to hang on a wall that bisects the gallery.

With the sexual liberation that Semmel and her fellow artists welcomed came an alienating flood of graphic imagery, largely by and for men, especially after the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Stanley v. Georgia that the First Amendment does not allow the state to criminalize the private possession of pornography. This was the era of Deep Throat (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and what’s been called “The Pubic Wars” between Playboy and Penthouse, in which the magazines competed to see how revealing their nude photographs could get without triggering obscenity laws. “I personally couldn’t respond to it in any way except by being negative,” Semmel recalled. Carolee Schneemann similarly described the need for an alternative sexual imagery in her essay “The Obscene Body/Politic,” a discussion of her own often-censored films and performances: “I had never seen any erotica or pornography that approached what lived sexuality felt like.” Semmel decided that “feminism really needed to begin in the bedroom.” Could she create art that acknowledged female desire and sexual agency without shame?

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The essential Joan Semmel painting—the kind a designer might choose for a gift shop tote—would likely be one of her powerful self-nudes, especially a work like Sunlight (1978), with the figure pulled close to the picture plane and presented neck down, from the model/artist’s point of view. “The connecting thread across decades,” Semmel has explained, “is a single perspective: being inside the experience of femaleness and taking possession of it culturally.” But if it were possible to condense the political and aesthetic impact of her art to a few square inches of oil on canvas, the emblematic passage might be the female hand near the center right of Erotic Yellow (1973), a large painting from her Erotic Series (1972–1973). An earlier series, the looser and more gestural Sex Paintings (1970–1971)—among them Flip-Flop Diptych—had been based on large magic marker action drawings of live models having sex. (Someone in her circle knew an exhibitionist, who would bring a female partner with him to perform in front of a group of women artists.) But Semmel, needing more detail, began working from photographs of these sessions.

Erotic Yellow seamlessly combines crisp naturalistic modeling with candy-bright expressionist colors (except for the vibrating earth tones of the male figure) and monumental scale. Its lovers lie heaped on each other. At the apex of a triangle formed by their entangled legs, the female figure’s right hand conveys a firm and tender upward pressure on her partner’s testes: the nexus of male power and vulnerability. The gesture suggests the care we take—or should take—of each other, the control and reciprocity of good sex, the sense that we can safely relax into another’s touch. “I’ve got you,” the hand says. Or is it, with a hint of mischief: “Gotcha.” 

For years, no gallery would exhibit Semmel’s sexually explicit work. She rented a space on Prince Street in 1973 to show the Erotic Series herself, and then turned to a new body of work, the self-nudes, that would eventually make her name. These are well-represented in the show by, among other examples, the related paintings Sunlight and Night Light (1978)—hypnotically appealing images for those with a weakness for photoreal clarity and the complex treatment of flesh. Semmel chose to model for herself in order not to idealize or objectify another woman. The viewer of Sunlight looks down at a strongly-lit seated female figure as if looking down at their own nude body. A section of her long brown hair falls forward over her left breast, casting shadows over the right breast and torso and onto her thigh. The vantage point is so familiar that it may take a moment to register Semmel’s reversal of our conventional view—here, the figure’s legs are at the top of the canvas.

When she did find a dealer, Richard Lerner of the Lerner-Heller Gallery, he had difficulty seeing her nudes as political art. This is hard to believe, given that works like Semmel’s Intimacy-Autonomy (1974) clearly explore parity and self-determination in male-female relationships. Two lovers lie relaxed beside each other, as if sleeping after sex, but their bodies maintain a sliver of distance, a kind of cordon sanitaire. (Compare, by way of contrast, the entwined partners in Touch, painted the following year.) But Semmel told Lerner, “I’ll paint you a diagram.”

Hence the three-panel Mythologies and Me (1976), a primer on the male gaze and its discontents. The left panel presents the kind of overinflated female nude seen in Playboy—made even more frivolous with collaged feathers—and the right panel parodies Willem de Kooning’s grimacing, huge-breasted Woman I (1950–1952).  “I was showing precisely how the way the culture gave us an identity as women was so corrupt that it was almost impossible to become ourselves,” Semmel told Levin. These depressing options (commodification and/or brute sexual schematization) flank a larger central image, one of Semmel’s hyperreal self-nudes. Her reclining figure is positioned at an angle that brings the viewer into her first-person perspective. Although the figure’s breasts are foregrounded, filling a third of the canvas, the dark diagonal slash of her right forearm draws equal attention, its tiny hairs backlit.

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“In the Flesh” also includes recent work, such as Skin in the Game (2019), a twenty-four-foot-long painting with six overlapping depictions of Semmel in her late eighties. While some photographers seem to strip for their own cameras at the merest suggestion, nude self-portrayal is fairly uncommon among painters. Notable examples include Lucien Freud’s Painter Working, Reflection (1993), Celia Paul’s Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2022)—her reenvisioning of Freud’s 1980–1981 nude painting of her, Naked Girl with Egg—and Alice Neel’s self-portrait at eighty years old. The artist’s age is not incidental to these paintings. “All my life I wanted to do a nude self-portrait,” Neel (a friend of Semmel’s) explained, “but I put it off until now—when people would accuse me of insanity rather than vanity.”

Semmel was a young forty-one when she created her first self-nudes; her work was not just about reclaiming the nude from the male gaze (and the male painting tradition) but also about flesh, about carnality. Even a bent elbow can be erotic in that context. As she aged—and chose to continue depicting her own body—her project inevitably altered: “I wanted always that sense not of beautification but a sense of acceptance of the realities of what being human was about.”

Although a few of Semmel’s series are not represented in “In the Flesh,” viewers can track her body’s passage through time as they circle the gallery. Her work is still honest but is now described by critics as “ruthless,” a term no one applied to the generous breasts and smooth skin of her earlier self-nudes. Some of these paintings can be strangely moving, such as Red Line (2018), a matter-of-fact depiction of a folded torso and legs, one garish stripe down the figure’s shin, like a line of fire. Arrestingly, two of the recent series—Shifting Image (2006–2013) and Transparencies (2014–present)—often include the figure’s head, abandoning the illusion of a shared perspective between viewer and model/artist. We are not invited to identify with these female figures of eighty, eighty-five, ninety years old, who seem unable to straighten their backs. Perhaps Semmel herself does not quite recognize them and is trying to reconcile that interesting old woman with her youthful inner self.

For weeks I had wanted to compare Semmel’s paintings to a color photograph, long familiar to me, that I could picture in my mind’s eye: a female nude by a female artist, cropped very tightly, so that the curves and folds of the figure’s belly read like hills and fissures in a sand-swept landscape. The first-person point of view and the inventive composition reminded me powerfully of Semmel’s work, but the title and artist eluded me. Something British, I thought. My search terms yielded nothing. Finally, by chance, I happened on the long-sought “photograph” on the Tate Gallery website. It was Joan Semmel’s 1976 painting Secret Spaces.