Joan Semmel

b. 1932

Semmel studied at Cooper Union in New York and received a certificate. She was married and a new mother when in 1957 she spent six months in the hospital because of tuberculosis. After recovering, she enrolled at Pratt Institute and received her B.F.A. She followed her husband to Spain, but they separated after their second child was born. They were not allowed to divorce because divorce was not legal in Spain at that time. Moreover, a woman on her own was not allowed to rent an apartment unless there was a husband or a father on the lease. This began her “personal dissatisfactions” with political structures. 

For the next eight years in Spain she painted in an Abstract Expressionist style but felt sidelined in this genre since abstraction was the style of privileged white men. She then “decided to say ‘Yes, I am a women. And yes, I paint like a woman’.”

Semmel returned to New York in 1970 and worked in figuration. Her 1971 “Sex Paintings” were large-scale oil paintings of nude partners having sex. While their bodies were realistically rendered, they were painted in vivid colors of red, purple, yellow, or blue green. Sometimes the scenes veered into abstraction as the colored stains blended together. A colorist, she paints with lemon, lavender, hot pink, chartreuse, and an iridescent palette of icy blues. “I’m rather catholic with my color choices.”

Her 1972 “Erotic Series” were paintings of models who would have sex in her studio. Again the sexual scenes were realistic but the unreal hues served as a reminder of her early years of painting abstract art. She used greenish gray for the people in “Intimacy-Autonomy” and chartreuse and tangerine for the figures in her 1973 “Indian Erotic.” 

Starting in the 1980s she stopped painting men and started using herself as a model, reinventing her own nude body as she aged. Semmel has been painting herself for decades now. To paint herself, she works from photographs and thus her body is seen in parts, often without the head. Her 1978 “Sunlight” shows a view from her looking down at her own body. 

She did a series of paintings in locker rooms and gymnasiums where people were looking at themselves in mirrors. She also took pictures of herself in the mirror holding her camera. She then painted this image of herself with her camera pointing out at a viewer. In this way she pulled the viewer into the scene. Years later she used drawings from the locker room series and superimposed them over earlier sex paintings layering one image over the other. The figures seemed to be in motion as if they were moving through time.

Her 2018 “Turning” has the central figure turning away from the viewer. Her right thigh is propped on a stool; her blurred face mostly cropped out of the painting. She grips the seat with her right hand.  An electric green line stretches from her pinky to her elbow.  Her elbow resembles a cross section of a tree trunk.

In 2021, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) gave her a first retrospective, “Skin in the Game,” which covers more than six decades of her art.  It also included early abstract paintings, drawings, and collages. 

Semmel received many awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1980 and 1985. Her work is in the permanent collection of Manhattan’s Jewish Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Brooklyn Museum among others.

More here.

Feminist artist Joan Semmel paints hyper-realistic portraits of nude women and men that still shock viewers. She has been painting naked bodies for over four decades. She also paints her own nude body from her own photographs which allow her to focus on the social and psychological aspects of gender and age. Her focus on the nude brought her into conflict with  historical messages about women’s sexual passivity and women’s value as seductive lure to men. “Women are essentially chattel in so much of the history of Western art . . .That’s what I rebelled against.”