Our Critics Have Your February Guide to Art on the Upper East Side

 

To the left, upon entering the gallery, three paintings from the 1970s show Joan Semmel holding the sexual revolution to its word. As the women’s movement sought to level the playing field, she rotated the picture plane to deal with the horizontal space of sex and self-observation, presenting the POV of the reclining nude. The canvas that takes pride of place on the first wall in Semmel’s abbreviated survey “In the Flesh” at the Jewish Museum, demonstrates her breakthrough gesture—the reversal or collapse of the patriarchal art-historical artist-model divide—very directly. Through the Object’s Eye, 1975, as it’s titled, is a radically foreshortened view of Semmel’s own body, cropped, from the collar bone down. The composition can be seen as a lush and nervy turning-of-the-tables, with something like Courbet’s Origin of the World, 1866, in mind. Not quite as nervy, perhaps, as the pair of electrifying “fuck paintings” (the artist’s other term for her “Erotic Series”) that completes the trio: each of these floats an entangled couple, viewed as though standing at the foot of the bed, in an etheric field of color. I love the yellow one especially.

Ten of the 16 paintings on view are from this blazing early period, but the others show Semmel’s fiery rigor vis à vis the nude (her own unclothed body in various positions) undimmed throughout the subsequent decades. Her approach expands, and the emphasis of her critique—her dazzling challenge to what a woman should do, be, look at, look like—shifts over time as her body changes. The four-panel, panoramic Skin in the Game, 2019, features a layered, time lapse-effect procession of figures at the center; on either end, Semmel reprises the evergreen trick of Object’s Eye, with its receding diagonal composition, but with a much older body as her model. (The artist is now 93.)