On a July afternoon, Joan Semmel and I met at her home in the Springs, on the East End of Long Island. She asks what I’d like to drink, and I tell her I’ll have what she’s having. “Well. Beer is what I like to drink in the middle of the day,” she says as she opens two Coronas, and starts to talk, without reservation or hesitation. Semmel is direct and cool; she knows what she’s about. Nothing — not her conversational manner, the décor of her home and studio, or the paintings — is over-adorned or romanticized. It’s as if all that energy is channeled into the paint itself, where she focuses on the nature of touch: the touch of skin and the touch of color.
Semmel is an icon of feminist art; young people often remember seeing her work in introductory art history classes. But in recent years her pioneering work has been “rediscovered” in an art world that historically dismissed much figurative, realist painting. In the 1970s she made her Erotic Series of paintings; her Locker Room and Mannequin series followed.
Semmel’s constant subject has been the “self-nude” — depicting her own body as she has aged, with a direct gaze that seems to lack vanity or the impulse to beautify. In her “Overlay” paintings, she doubled a realist image of the nude with gestural brush drawings of the same figure. The color and point-of-view of Semmel’s painting is compelling and odd and seductive. Figures are rendered in a realist hand but painted in sometimes lurid, sometimes ghostly oranges, gray-blues, greens, and yellows. Bodies become dune-scapes as the viewer is positioned in the artist’s perspective, looking down at herself.
Born in 1932 in New York City, Joan Semmel studied at the Cooper Union and received a BFA and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Her work was shown by Mitchell Algus Gallery in the 1990s and 2000s. She was the subject of museum exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, New York (2013); the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, Columbus, Ohio (2008); and The Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ (2000), among others. Her work was also included in exhibitions such as Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2015); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Me, Myself, Naked at the Paula Modersohn Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany (2004). She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University. Her work is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York, where she will show new work in 2019.
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