At 93, Joan Semmel Continues to Assert the Female Gaze

In 1973, when no gallery in New York would show her vivid paintings of bodies in various configurations of sex, Joan Semmel created her own space. She poured her savings into renting a unit on 141 Prince Street, called it a gallery and mounted her first solo show in the city. “I believed in the work, and I wanted it to be seen,” she said in a recent conversation at the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” (on through May 31 and one of our picks for must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil paintings across five decades that engage with nudity and sexuality on a woman’s terms. Each work is unabashed in its frankness and its proportions. The largest, Skin in the Game (2019), is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall. It’s as if Semmel always paints as far as her arm can reach.

Semmel was born in the Bronx in 1932, and her studio is located in SoHo. In the ’60s, however, she spent seven years as an abstract expressionist in Madrid, with solo shows that traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though Francoist Spain was more conservative than America—marriage could not be legally dissolved, and the newspaper would announce a Catholic saint of the day—she enjoyed some degree of freedom there as a foreigner. In 1970, Semmel was back in New York as a single mother of two. She had left because of her husband’s work; now she had returned to divorce him.

In those days, the sexploitation of women in magazines and pornography to satisfy male fantasies was rampant. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972), “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Semmel was shocked at how lopsided the sexual revolution was, and she longed for equal participation. Thus followed her erotic paintings, which retain an abstract expressionist palette that gives her subjects an otherworldly glow of pink, orange or green.

Painting naked women—from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) to Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes (1961–73)—has long been the province and prerogative of men. Semmel’s depictions of sex defied the taboo against women broaching the topic, and she sought to correct the power imbalance, sometimes in literal ways. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), a couple takes turns to be on top. In Intimacy-Autonomy (1974), lovers lounge side by side, neither dominating the other.

Then came her iconic series of “self-images”: paintings of her body from her perspective, often wearing nothing but a signature turquoise ring. These aren’t “self-portraits,” Semmel insists, since she is unconcerned with producing likeness, capturing character or conferring status. Rather, her self-images are a direct assault on the male gaze—by asserting her own. One is titled Through the Object’s Eye (1975). Another, Sunlight from 1978, shows her tenderly caressing her calf and sole, untethered from male validation.

In the triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), she sandwiches a self-image between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1952). In the former, the female figure is sexualized by the commercial media; in the latter, it is disfigured by a pre-eminent contemporary artist. Semmel’s response is to insert her viewpoint and desecrate the two great cultural forces, sticking lace and feathers onto the Playmate and attaching a nursing nipple to the abstracted monstrosity.

As an artist and a curator, Semmel was among the second-wave feminists who resisted censorship and objectification. This places her earlier paintings in the company of landmark works such as Carolee Schneemann’s short film Fuses (1967), Betty Tompkins’ Fuck Paintings (1969–74), Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book (1975) and Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979) with its vulva-inspired plates, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum.

Over the decades, Semmel’s self-nudes began to take on a new dimension and question our impulse to hide or dismiss aging bodies. It’s remarkable that Skin in the Game (2019), in full Technicolor glory, is her largest work to date. Rather than shrink from the canvas, Semmel continues to push back on prevailing prejudices. Her work today is as confrontational as ever, asking us: What arouses you? What disgusts you? And, most importantly, why?

Baring it all in full view of the public is confronting, too, for the artist. In Parade (2023), Semmel’s naked body seems to shy away from observation. Alice Neel took five years to complete a nude self-portrait in 1980, at the age of 80. “The reason my cheeks got so pink,” she said, “was that it was so hard for me to paint that I almost killed myself painting it.” Similarly, Semmel admitted in a 2016 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “It shakes me up a little sometimes, putting that out there. But it’s what I chose to do, so I have to go through with it.” And so the art must go on. “My work has been dedicated to empowering 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 through May 31, 2026.

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