In Her Prismatic Paintings, Joan Semmel Builds Feminist Worlds
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York/©Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Joan Semmel’s 1974 painting Intimacy-Autonomy shows a man and a woman lying naked in bed side-by-side, presumably post-coital. They’re realistically rendered, though their skin is a grayish green that should feel sickly but doesn’t. Instead, improbably, the figures feel sexy. The blue wall at the end of their foreshortened bodies makes the edge of their peach blanket look like a horizon, the breasts and knees like mountains. The painting is larger than life, bold and assertive, yet also tremendously tender.
In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and her medium, painting, were both taboo for feminist artists. The former was too risky at a time when women were asking not to be objectified. The latter was too commodifiable, and too burdened by centuries of patriarchal convention and bourgeois trappings to be useful as a tool for the feminist struggle. But Semmel didn’t care.
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“I loved painting. It’s as simple as that,” she said this past October, sitting on a couch in Alexander Gray Gallery, where an enchanting 4-foot-square self-portrait, In The Pink (2004), hovered above her. Looking back at age 91, she recalled her defiance. “To give it up because someone told me it was dead seemed stupid.”
It was a bout of serious illness, in 1957, that first emboldened Semmel to disregard the expectations of others. That year, she spent six months in the hospital with tuberculosis—a traumatic experience, especially given that she was a new mother. And yet, suddenly she found herself free from the daily pressures of family. She read a book a day, and reflected on what exactly she wanted to do with her life, with newfound urgency.
Before getting sick, she had gotten a certificate from Cooper Union (the New York art school did not yet grant degrees). After recovering, she was determined to go back to school and get her BFA, so she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Soon after graduating, she followed her husband to Spain, where he’d just gotten a job as a civil engineer, but not long after their second child was born, they split. Divorce was not yet legal in Spain, and a woman was forbidden from renting her own apartment without a husband or father on the lease. She started to see and feel the ways her “personal dissatisfactions stemmed from political structures.”
It was then that Semmel decided to stop caring what society expected her to do as a woman, and with that, she started to feel freer as a painter too. While in Spain for the next eight years, she worked mostly in the Abstract Expressionist vein that many of the New York painters of her generation had been schooled in. But like so many feminist artists of the era who started out in abstraction—Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig, Joan Brown, Judy Chicago—she soon grew frustrated, and felt sidelined within a genre that was supposed to be “universal” but in reality kept privileging white men. At first, she said, she didn’t want to be called a woman artist. But soon, she found that her “way to resist” would be to embrace her identity. “I decided to say ‘Yes, I am a woman. And yes, I paint like a woman.’”
BY THE TIME SEMMEL RETURNED to New York in 1970, she was working in figuration. Women were the protagonists of her paintings. She wanted her work to help “change the way women understood themselves and understood sexuality,” and she didn’t see how she could do that through abstraction. “I didn’t see how anyone could deal with those issues without painting the body,” she said. Still, abstraction had its role in her work. Her “Sex Paintings” (1971) offer glimpses of bodies engaged in erotic acts, the scenes teetering into abstraction: brightly colored blobby stains threaten to bleed together but remain discrete. There are glimpses of bodily contours, but most details are left to the imagination.
After the “Sex Paintings” came the series widely considered her most important, the “Erotic Series” (1972), paintings of models who would have sex in her studio. Intimacy-Autonomy belongs to that group of paintings, all of them sexual scenes rendered realistically and lovingly, but in unexpected colors, and with unusual compositions that betray Semmel’s background in abstraction.
Those paintings, which today are in high demand, couldn’t find a dealer to show them at the time. “Nobody would touch them,” Semmel said. It’s a surprising story, and yet, one all too familiar for women artists. Undeterred, she took matters into her own hands. Using her savings, she rented a storefront in SoHo and then came in every day to be her own gallery attendant. This meant she got to watch all the visitors’ reactions, whether it was the critic for the Village Voice, who loved them, or “working people coming in on their lunchbreak”—SoHo was still a factory district at the time. “People were shocked,” she told me. Still, she was uncompromising and determined. “I had something to say,” she said assuredly.
Semmel’s message was that “women needed to acknowledge their own sexuality, acknowledge their own desire, and not always deny it, not always be passive.” Historically, the nude was a genre that catered to male pleasure, and taught women acceptable ways to express their sexuality. Semmel wanted to center a woman’s pleasure.
Examples of erotic art by women a generation before Semmel are couched in enough metaphors to give them plausible deniability: Georgia O’Keeffe insisted her flowers were not vulvas. For years, Louise Bourgeois described herself as “inhibited,” saying any erotic connotations in her work were “unconscious.” But Semmel was painting in a New York that was home to Studio 54 and Times Square sex clubs, in a mediascape now saturated with pornography. Subtlety wouldn’t do. She distinguished her work from centerfolds by using unusual hues—greenish gray for the figures in Intimacy-Autonomy, chartreuse and tangerine for those in Indian Erotic (1973)—because “I was so afraid of being called a pornographer. I was insisting it was art.” Half a century later, her “Erotic Series” still feels unusually tender for sex scenes, testifying to the ongoing necessity of her message.
AFTER FINISHING THE “EROTIC SERIES” Semmel started painting herself. Starting in the 1980s, as she neared 50, the men in her canvas disappeared—though she insists these works are not self-portraits. Rather, she started using herself as a model because she “wanted to avoid the objectification issue.” She also “didn’t want to speak for other women. I was speaking from my own experience.”
To paint her own body, Semmel often works from photographs. For this reason, the bodies in these paintings are often seen from the vantage of the figure herself, head cut off. In Sunlight (1978) and in Spaced Out (2019), the view is looking down at a body the way the artist looks at herself. She takes care to make this perspective unmistakable. In her series “With Camera,” the image reflects the camera in a mirror, which means it’s also pointed at the viewer. In each case, she’s making sure you know you’re seeing the artist through her own eyes.
Semmel has been painting herself for decades now. She knows that all too often, images of women are taken to signify women in general, not a specific human being. Depicting the same woman again and again, she doesn’t let her viewers make that mistake. Her subject is a constant, but her style is ever-changing. “It was always about making painting interesting to me,” she said. She has continued to combine expressionism and realism, figuration and abstraction in infinite configurations.
As a colorist, Semmel is skilled enough to dispense with any signature palette: “I’m rather catholic with my color choices,” she explained. “I’ll try one [palette] for a while and work through it, and then I get bored.” Her latest show, “Against the Wall,” which was on view last fall at Alexander Gray in New York, was full of lemons and lavenders, hot pink and chartreuse. Meanwhile, paintings like The Unchosen and Transformations (both 2011) feature an iridescent palette dominated by icy blues. In lieu of reliable hues, then, her hallmark is a delicate balance of unlikely combinations.
Another hallmark of her paintings is her doubling of figures. When a few works from the “Erotic Series” sat around in her studio unsold for a couple decades, she eventually painted new, looser figures right on top of them for a series called “Overlays” (1992–96). Sometimes, she echoed the figures she had painted decades before. Sometimes, she layered newer ghostly ones over them. “I was never interested in depicting a narrative or telling a story,” she said of this doubling effect. “I wanted the image to feel like an icon, but an icon that isn’t static, that doesn’t stay still.”
WHAT SETS SEMMEL’S WORK APART from that of other feminist artists is the way her paintings are acts of world-building. When she started out, most of her peers—Hannah Wilke, Judy Chicago—were making work protesting patriarchy, work that makes clear what the artist is against, rather than what she s for. Semmel told me she wanted to make work that was “not pedantic to the audience,” that was “not a “journalistic diatribe. I wanted you to experience the art object, not to just have it talking at you.”
Semmel’s version of feminist art is also striking for the way it makes you feel, not just think. This she often achieved by delicately balancing opposites: man and woman, intimacy and autonomy, and more often than not, reds and greens. These opposites feel neither in tension nor resolved: instead, they simply coexist.
But Semmel’s most crucial contribution to feminist art might be the way she finds strength in vulnerability—“Vulnerability cannot be denied, and should not be denied,” she stressed—and it is easiest to see that embrace of vulnerability in the arresting self-portraits she has painted as she has aged: the images of her graying hair and wrinkling body have been regularly praised as brave in the way they refuse a life in the shadows, into which so many aging women are thrust. (Look no further than the recent Sex and the City reboot for proof of our culture’s deep discomfort with aging women: the show made every effort to hide the protagonists’ wrinkles, sags, and grays even as it attempted to be “woke.”) Semmel said she “never thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to work on aging now.’ It’s just that my body changed.”
“If we’re lucky,” she added, “we get to age.”
Sometimes, however, these paintings garner praise that verges on objectification. In 2011 New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote of a show of Semmel’s: “With her unlined face and only slightly pendulous, full-figured body, she appears, at 78, a figure of remarkably undiminished erotic appeal.” This kind of response is exactly why feminist critics feared the nude was not a viable political strategy: in 1976 critic Lucy Lippard complainedthat the most iconic works of feminist body art still centered women who were conventionally attractive. But in Semmel’s work, pleasure is unspoiled by power.
Then there are the loyal Semmel fans who engaged with her work long before its recent leap to popularity alongside the current trend for figuration. In 1999 artist Robert Gober curated a group show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York that featured two paintings from the “Erotic Series,” alongside work by seemingly unlike artists including Cady Noland and Anni Albers. At that time, Semmel’s work, like that of many other figurative painters, was far less visible than it is today. Looking back at that show, Gober said he thought Semmel’s paintings “were powerful and unique, canonical but oddly ignored” and that he felt “they should be seen by another generation and fresh eyes.” Quietly championing women and queer artists for decades now, Gober also included the paintings in his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marking Semmel’s MoMA debut.
Figurative painting has since become the splashiest artistic movement of this century, especially those works representing and memorializing the experiences of long-marginalized groups. These days, Semmel’s work is seen as trailblazing by younger figurative painters like Jenna Gribbon, a New York artist who paints intimate scenes of herself and her wife. “Joan Semmel is a giant,” Gribbon told me just after meeting the artist for the first time, at the opening for a show—“Making Their Mark” at the Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation—that included them both. “Her work is very generous and very powerful. My work is obviously indebted to her.”
Over the past decade, figurative painting has become almost too popular, catnip for a speculative art market. I asked Semmel what it was like to watch the tide turn so dramatically: in her day, she was practically peerless. She reflected that “before the ’80s,” artists hardly imagined receiving “fame and money” from their work. But soon enough, “the incentive for people to enter the field changed.” As for Semmel, she did it “with or without acknowledgment. Making art is a compulsion.”
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