Joan Semmel "In the Flesh" at the Jewish Museum

 Joan Semmel, 2019, by Taylor Miller
 

By JAN GARDEN CASTRO December 20th, 2025

Joan Semmel, a Jewish woman artist, is taking on the Manosphere, the Tate brothers, and male chauvinist views about women by making art featuring empowered nude female bodies seen from their female viewpoints. At The Jewish Museum, curator Rebecca Shaykin has focused not on the artist’s diverse works but on sixteen extra-large signature portraits of nudes sometimes engaging in sex and nude paintings of Semmel’s body that she doesn’t call self-portraits. Instead, she says these oil paintings convey the artist’s perspective. Many of her subjects are headless and lying down so that the viewers see the subjects from the same perspective as if they were the prone person or persons.

“In order to be a good painter, you need also to have a kind of intellectual understanding of how you frame your picture, why you’re doing it, what you’re looking for, how it relates to other work. All of those things come into play when you’re making a painting,” Joan Semmel told ArtForum on February 22, 2024.

Semmel’s portraits of her own body range from the times in the 1970s when she was in her forties to “Parade,” 2023, a nude of the artist and her shadow done when she was ninety. Now ninety-three, Semmel told a large audience of mostly Jewish women at The Jewish Museum that her works are “through the object’s eye rather than the reflective view of what a man would see.”

JOAN SEMMEL Sunlight, 1978, Oil on canvasThe Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Fine Arts Acquisition Fund60 x 96 in.(152.4 x 243.8 cm)
 

“Sunlight,” 1978; “Indian Erotic,” 1973; “Red Line,” 2018; and “Skin in the Game,” 2019 are four examples of Semmel’s ability to express many points using oil on canvas. “Sunlight” shows the artist’s nude body; a hand with a ring rests on the bottom of her foot, and sunlight seems to come in from a source in front of the curving body. The pose is natural and relaxed; it’s how we all want to feel. Light plays on the body, the tendrils of hair, and her relaxed breasts. “Indian Erotic” uses mauve, yellow, and orange hues to heighten a scene in which the woman’s hands make bold gestures as her body wraps around her partner’s. She is both giving and receiving pleasure. Semmel’s December 11 talk explained her striking color palette simply, “I never recovered from being an abstract expressionist.”  

JOAN SEMMEL, Parade, 2023, Oil on canvas, Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York72 x 60 in.(182.9 x 152.4 cm)
 

“Red Line” shows a headless woman with gray hair dusting her shoulders in a semi-squat. Half of her body is in a dark red shadow and a red line goes down the forward leg and up an elbow resting on that leg. The figure seems to have her head turned toward “the future” or toward something. The abstract curves and lines of the body seem strong. The title seems to have more than one meaning. “Skin in the Game” is a four-panel art work with Semmel’s body, aged late 70s, in many positions and colors as the background hues also shift. This seems to be about aging since the artist shows us belly folds, one darkened arm, and positions that partly shield her from the viewer—even as she shows us her most vulnerable sides.

 Semmel grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, studied art in a gifted program in High School and then at Cooper Union, and was a successful abstract artist in Spain between 1963-70 where she was “la americana.”

When she relocated to Soho as a divorced mother with two children, the scene was different. A sexual revolution was going on, and she identified with the early feminist and Art Workers’ Coalition movements. Back then, women took extreme positions opposing and supporting equal rights for women. In 1972, St. Louis lawyer-to-be Phyllis Stewart Schlafly founded the Eagle Forum to oppose equal rights for women. In 1974, Linda Benglis placed a full-color nude photo of herself sporting a giant erect penis in ArtForum, and five of its six women editors resigned calling the ad “an object of extreme vulgarity.”

In the context of the times and up to today, Semmel’s position of creating art to empower women to control their own bodies and sexual identity seems reasonable, yet she had to hire a gallery on Prince Street to have her first show. Her nude art became part of art history in subsequent decades. In 1977, Semmel curated “Consciousness and Content,” a show featuring contemporary artists at the Brooklyn Museum as Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris were curating their landmark four-city exhibit “Women Artists: 1550-1950.” Nochlin and Semmel never met, but 1976-77 was a breakout year for increasing international recognition of women artists.

Inside these sixteen paintings is a separate wall with 42 works from the Museum’s collection selected by Semmel. These works, in a range of media and styles, often comment on male or female personas, some nude, over time.  

“Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” empowers all viewers and offers bold paintings that speak to all eras. In the context of The Jewish Museum, it also nods to women’s roles and rights in a sacred partnership. In some households and communities, women do not have the personal rights that Semmel stands up for.  

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh   

The Jewish Museum

12 December 2025-31 May 2026

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh   

The Jewish Museum

12 December 2025-31 May 2026