Painting nudes: an age-old problem

During the run of the Alice Neel exhibition at Barbican in 2023, I tried to inspire an older female relative to accompany me to the show. I told her about Neel’s political activism, her maternal grief, her zingy New York portraits. All was going well until I described the exhibition’s opening display: a nude self-portrait painted by the artist when she was 80 years old. My relative – circling 80 herself – was horrified: ‘Nobody wants to see that!’

 

A couple of months ago, I repeated this story to Joan Semmel. We were sitting in her apartment in New York’s SoHo, surrounded by paintings from across her long career. Semmel had just turned 93 and her studio walls were busy with works in progress – paintings of nude female bodies, for which she had used herself as the model. They showed the body monumental, crammed tightly into the space of the picture so that limbs, torso and breasts framed apertures to the darkness beyond. Semmel’s colours are bright, acerbic – hot red and purple light carves its way across painted skin – betraying a joy in intense pigment that dates back to her days as an Abstract Expressionist. The liquidity of her paint gives the flesh a melting quality: this is soft stuff, gravity bound. Semmel works from photographs of herself but doesn’t consider most of these paintings self-portraits – she instead describes the figures as female icons, power images for women.