JOAN SEMMEL WAS defiant from the start, not the sort to go with the flow even as a young girl. “I was never very good at taking direction at what to do,” she observes wryly when I visit her one early fall day in the capacious yet cozy Spring Street loft in SoHo where she has lived and worked since 1970. “My mother used to say she didn’t know where I came from, that they must have mixed up babies in the hospital.”
This attitude might account for her taking on the primal and provocative subject matter that would make her reputation: ourselves, naked. In the early 1970s, Semmel started making large-scale oil paintings of nude partners having sex, their bodies rendered in vivid Neo-expressionist colors like red, purple, yellow and an acid or bluish green that gives off a spectral glow. The perspective in the works is subjective, close-up and deliberately skewed, requiring a concentrated effort on the part of the viewer to compose the limbs, buttocks, breasts, vaginas and penises into recognizable images of men and women. These paintings would eventually be followed by ones documenting Semmel’s own nude body as it’s aged over the decades.
The almost pornographic yet matter-of-fact graphicness that marks Semmel’s work might be taken for granted today (the work of Lisa Yuskavage, Marilyn Minter and Angela Dufresne comes to mind), but was jolting when Semmel was starting out. And even now, her paintings retain their ability to shock or put off viewers, including women. When I showed a few of Semmel’s self-portraits to a friend of mine, her main response was one of disgust, and images of Semmel’s work have been censored by Instagram for their nudity. The artist’s provocative intentions are unrelated to sensationalism in and of itself, though; rather, they derive from her wish to go up against historical messages, whether coming from the art world or pop culture, about women’s sexual passivity and perceived value as seductive lure to men. “Women are essentially chattel in so much of the history of Western art,” Semmel observes. “That’s what I rebelled against.”
Semmel, who turned 89 on Oct. 19, has finally been given her first retrospective, “Skin in the Game,” which covers more than six decades and will stay up through April 3 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. In addition to her realist nudes, it includes early abstract paintings, drawings and collages. As Semmel attests, she has always had a “back and forth” with abstraction, aiming to use abstract and realist elements together. She adds that she never wanted to conform to any particular style and has never considered herself a realist. “I found those distinctions spurious,” she declares.
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