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.

When I asked Gouzer about that record price, he explained that although there were not many exhibitions of Semmel’s work and few auction sales, she was a painter many other artists admired. And it isn’t just her painting that makes her inspirational. Her uncompromising independence and insistence on women’s subjectivity in art have also made her a role model.

Gouzer, always plugging his business, said the sale was an example of Fair Warning’s conviction-based business model. But he also pointed to dealer Ales Ortuzar, who sold a 1975 Semmel work, Through the Object’s Eye, to a collector just a few months ago, on the opening day of Art Basel Paris. The painting, which had a $1 million asking price, is now on loan to the museum for the show. Always bullish, Gouzer said the main problem with Semmel’s market is that the collectors who own her work just don’t want to sell it—at any price, really. And the show at the Jewish Museum illustrates why.

I knew little about Semmel or her work prior to making the trip to upper Fifth Avenue. In the Flesh charts the artist’s career through 16 paintings she made from 1971 to 2023—all of which are nudes. In many ways, 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. You will recognize this view from the now-ubiquitous Instagram selfie angle that produces an image almost halfway between subjectivity and objectification.

Before she started painting from this perspective, Semmel created graphic depictions of sex, aiming to break the taboo surrounding women’s sexuality and combat the objectifying nature of that art history staple, the nude. Over time, her work turned into a meditation on self-image and then on aging, another formerly taboo topic.

The show also includes 42 works from the Jewish Museum’s own collection, chosen by Semmel to highlight other female artists—like Joan Snyder, Nancy Spero, and Hannah Wilke—who were prominent during “the height of the women’s movement” in the 1970s. They’re also there to provide nudes different from her own work, presenting models that “appear profoundly uncomfortable and powerless.” Those nudes hail from artists as disparate as James Tissot, Max Weber, Larry Rivers, Jack Levine, Jules Pascin, and Raphael Soyer.

Semmel’s independence is a recurring theme of the exhibition and some of the materials created to support it. In an interview with Rebecca Shaykin, the Jewish Museum’s curator of contemporary art, Semmel recalls growing up in a Jewish neighborhood just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx—“a shtetl, essentially”—where everyone knew everybody’s business. It was “intrusive, with little room for an individual who wanted to be different,” she told Shaykin. “Those things made you learn how to resist, how to make your own place and insist on it.”

It wasn’t until Semmel went to the High School of Music & Art, and then to Cooper Union (in the era of Alex Katz and Audrey Flack), that she was exposed to people from different parts of the city with intellectual backgrounds and interests. She was indoctrinated into abstract expressionism, and later moved to Spain with her husband and young children. Being a foreign woman who painted in an avant garde style served Semmel well in Madrid, where she launched her career as an artist and showed at the city’s best gallery.

Everything changed when she returned to New York several years later, to get a divorce and start over. In SoHo, she found a group of politically active women artists and critics who supported each other’s work—even if getting it shown was nearly impossible. Semmel recounts how, despite the praise these women got from male critics, the men who ran museums and galleries were mainly indifferent to them. If a female artist wasn’t attractive, she was ignored. If she was, it was assumed that whoever made the introduction was sleeping with her.

In New York, Semmel’s work turned from abstract to figurative, even photorealistic, and it was graphically sexual. As she told Shaykin of that time period: “Well, I was interested in sex. I was 30 years old and free from an onerous marriage. It seemed important. Everything in New York was open and free.” Yet the circumstances were somewhat different for women, even during the sexual revolution. “I realized that many women of my generation still believed that sex was shameful, and that it was never free,” she said. “It always had a cost.” Whatever the tensions around loosening sexual mores, Semmel was able to find couples to model for her and other artists looking to depict sex, she said. “They were exhibitionists, essentially.”

Through the Object’s Eye (1975) at Joan Semmel: In the Flesh, the Jewish Museum, New York. Photo: Kris Graves/Courtesy of the Jewish Museum

But if Semmel had moved to New York in search of sexual freedom, she instead found commercialization that offered “women’s bodies for sale.” In her most graphic works, the viewer only sees the bodies of her couples, no faces or heads. And those bodies are painted in colors that heighten but also distance the reality of what is being shown. Much of this work from the first half of the 1970s, including the show opener, Through the Object’s Eye, attempts to reclaim subjectivity for women in sex. A little later, Mythologies and Me, from 1976, makes the point as starkly as possible.

Semmel painted the work in response to a gallery owner who did not understand how her nudes could be seen as political. Her rebuttal was to paint “a diagram”—a triptych centered on a nude image of herself from the now-familiar perspective of her own gaze. On either side are appropriated images: On the left, a painting of a nude image from Playboy embellished with feathers; on the right, a repainting of a work from Willem de Kooning’s famous Woman series, adding a faucet head as a nipple.

From there, Semmel began to paint herself more, creating Sunlight, which comes from the Jewish Museum’s own collection, and other works that depict her body from her own perspective. “I was never interested in a likeness. I was interested in creating an iconic figure rather than a presentation of myself,” she told Shaykin. “I used myself as a model, as you might use any model who is a stranger. I didn’t want to objectify anybody else.”

Semmel took a 20-year hiatus from using herself as a model, from the 1980s until the turn of the 21st century. When she returned to the subject of her own body, sexuality was no longer the theme that gave her work a frisson of boundary breaking. Aging was. She was ahead of the discourse again, and her new subject felt more powerful to her than sexuality. She also felt less vulnerable “than I ever did as a young woman,” she said. “I had the power of my profession now.”

If you get a chance, go see the show for yourself. It’s up until May. Otherwise, come back tomorrow to the Inner Circle, where I have an interview with Heritage C.E.O. Steve Ivy. Sign up here if you’re not a member yet.

Until Friday,
M