“In the Flesh,” Joan Semmel’s tightly curated retrospective at the Jewish Museum, focuses on two of her most powerful groupings of work. The first features a selection of mostly Photorealistic paintings made during the 1970s—images that have influenced generations of figurative artists such as Clarity Haynes and Jenny Saville—that render sex and intimacy from an unequivocally female perspective. The second presents canvases executed between 2002 and 2023 that courageously depict the now ninety-three-year-old Semmel’s nude body. Shame is nowhere to be found in this show: Wrinkled skin sags and folds as fingers explore virtually every crack and crevice of the human anatomy. The artist’s pictures are by turns erotic, ecstatic, raw, and tender.
Around age forty, Semmel returned to New York after seven successful years as an abstract painter in Spain. The move from an ultra-Catholic and repressive country to New York’s artist-filled SoHo at the height of the sexual revolution coincided with her embrace of figuration in the early ’70s. Having trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the ’50s, Semmel had to teach herself representational techniques, so she ended up devising a wide variety of unconventional approaches that didn’t hew to any form of strict academicism. Breaking from those methods gave the artist a kind of freedom to make mistakes: In the early works, flat grounds don’t always jibe with passages of careful scumbling; and Semmel often mixes opaque white paint into glazed layers on the figures, making for awkward shifts between translucent and chalky skin.
