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Sex & The Single Artist

A career-spanning new exhibit of Joan Semmel captures an artist challenging conventional nudes, addressing women’s liberation, and making her own depictions of sexuality, aging, and herself.

Joan Semmel
In many ways, Joan Semmel’s reimagining of female subjectivity is the core of her contribution to art history. Some of the images will seem strangely familiar, because they are painted from the perspective of a woman’s eyes, occasionally Semmel’s, peering down at her own body. Photo: Taylor Miller/Courtesy of the Jewish Museum
Marion Maneker
January 13, 2026

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Löic Gouzer, the founder of Fair Warning, was out sledding with his young son in Switzerland when I called him yesterday. But when we eventually connected, he was surprised to hear that the Jewish Museum had recently opened In the Flesh, a show dedicated to the 93-year-old Joan Semmel, whose work had been sold on Gouzer’s auction platform. I had first encountered Semmel’s work about a year ago, when Fair Warning sold one of her distinctive paintings from the 1970s—an erotic scene of intertwined bodies depicted in vivid but unnatural colors—for $400,000. That was more than twice the previous high paid at auction for one of Semmel’s works, in 2018.