Contributed by David Carrier / Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art opens with a surprising juxtaposition of two drawings. One portrays Rubens’ handsome little son, the other Dürer’s aged mother. Of the latter Gombrich says: “His truthful study of careworn old age may give us a shock which makes us turn away from it – and yet, if we fight against our first repugnance we may be richly rewarded, for Dürer’s drawing in its tremendous sincerity is a great work.” Gombrich was, to be sure, a concepthttps://twocoatsofpaint.com/2026/05/joan-semmels-simple-truth.htmlually conservative art historian. But this declaration is a perfect introduction to the once iconoclastic Joan Semmel’s “In the Flesh,” now on view at the Jewish Museum.
After starting out an Abstract Expressionist, Semmel (born 1932) turned to doing unclichéd images of female nudes. “I used myself as a model,” she has said, “as you might use any model who is a stranger. I didn’t want to objectify anybody else.” The 16 large paintings in the show offer a welcome survey, selectively spanning her long career. We are accustomed to seeing nudes as viewed from some distance. But what happens, she asks, if a painter assumes a very close vantage, as in Through the Object’s Eye, looking at a woman’s body from the position of her head? In Sunlight (1978), a similarly confrontational sunlit female, leg bent so that the sole of her foot touches her hand, fills the space. Then, in a marvelously disarming triptych, Mythologies and Me, she depicts three figures – one in the style of pornography on the left, one like Willem de Kooning’s female nudes on the right, and a realistic figure in the center. In Transitions (2012), five images of a nude figure make it turn before us.
