Joan Semmel

Joan Semmel (born October 19, 1932) is an American feminist painter and professor emeritus in painting. She is best known for her large-scale naturalistic nude self portraits as seen from her perspective looking down.

Education and political involvement Semmel was born in New York City. She grew up in the Bronx and began her artistic training at Cooper Union, where she studied under Nicholas Marsicano. She went on to study with Morris Kantor

She spent seven and a half years in Spain (1963–1970), where her work, "gradually developed from broad gestural and spatially referenced painting to compositions of a somewhat surreal figure/ground composition...(her) highly saturated brilliant color separated (her) paintings from the leading Spanish artists whose work was darker, grayer and Goyaesque." Semmel returned to New York City in 1970 and earned an MFA from the Pratt Institute in 1972. Upon returning to New York in 1970, Semmel was shocked by the number of sexualized images of women she saw on American newsstands. She began to paint in a figurative style, and incorporated the erotic themes for which she is known today.

In New York, Semmel became involved in the feminist movement and feminist art groups devoted to gender equality in the art world. She has been a member of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, During a 2015 panel discussion titled "Painting and the Legacy of Feminism" at Maccarone Gallery, Semmel stated "I would like to get away from the basic declaration of why there are no great women artists. There are great women artists. There are many great women artists. And we shouldn't still be talking about why there are no great women artists. If there aren’t great celebrated women artists, that's because we have not been celebrating them, but not because they are not there."

As of 2013, Semmel is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Work About major themes in her work, Semmel states, "While my work developed through series, the connecting thread across decades is a single perspective: being inside the experience of femaleness and taking possession of it culturally." Semmel recognizes that women have been tainted not by the fact of their nudity within paintings, but rather from the fact of the male viewer who interprets them as nothing but naked. Semmel has been quoted saying, “I am always asked the question about my feelings of being publicly naked, and I always answer: It isn't me, it's the painting.”

By making most of the individuals in her paintings anonymous and keeping their faces hidden Semmel is asking the viewer to consider the whole concept of nudity opposed to being naked. This focuses the work on sexual connection itself and the nature of sexual interaction in general rather than the relating of two specific individuals.

Self-portraits

During the summer of 1973, while teaching at the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore, Semmel began painting what she calls “the idea of myself as I experience myself, my own view of myself.”

Semmel on Feminist Art In 1976 Feminist Artists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven sent Joan Semmel an invitation to respond to the question, "What is Feminist Art". In her letter, she defines feminist art as, "art which in some way, however varied, validates the female experience. In this society that experience is still very different than males. The validation of female experience in this culture is a primary feminist goal and any art which does so is, for me, Feminist Art." She also describes Feminist Art as being more relevant, as more women seek to define themselves. She describes a struggle of being a feminist activist but not wanting that to define one's art; that art should neither be described as "male" or "female". Her letter is now housed in the Woman's Building records in Los Angeles.

Return to the figure (1970–1978) On her return to New York from Spain in 1970, she turned from abstraction towards figuration, producing works which responded to her involvement with the burgeoning women's movement. A staunch advocate for women's rights, Semmel attended meetings at the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee and joined artists including Judy Chicago (born 1939), Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015), Nancy Spero (1926–2009) and Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), who had all begun to use the female body in their work. Joan was quoted on the topic; "My return to the figure in 1970, from an Abstract Expressionist background, was prompted by a need to work from a more personal viewpoint, and was charged by my then-emerging consciousness as a feminist."

Echoing Images (1979–81) Semmel describes this series, which was exhibited at Lerner Heller Gallery: "the main compositional figure is repeated twice: once in a realist style and a second much larger highly expressionistic version. They are almost like internal and external views of the self that combine a perceptual image with the ambition and striving of the emotive ego."

Locker Room series (late 1980s) Beginning with Mirror Mirror (1988), Semmel depicts the camera as a "device to frame and question issues of perception and representation." Semmel took photographs in women's locker rooms, using the mirror and the camera "as strategies to destabilize the point of view (who is looking at whom) and to engage the viewer as a participant. "My paintings revealed a body at a more advanced age, and showed me aggressively pointing the camera at the viewer."

Mannequins (1996–2001) Inspired by old mannequins she found on the street, Semmel worked with these "idealized versions of the female body...as alter egos to explore the isolation and anomie of objectification and fetishization."

Heads (2007–2013) Semmel's Heads (2007–13) feature self-portraits of the artist. Unlike her previous self-images, in these works she paints just her face. Intimate in scale and rendered in a variety of styles, these paintings adopt both the realism of her earlier With Camera works (2001–06), as well as the blurring of Shifting Images compositions (2006–13). In an interview, Semmel elaborated on her decision to begin to paint the Heads. “The way I started doing the heads was by taking those pictures in the mirror, and even though I didn’t usually use the heads I got it in the mirror because I’d hold the camera at waist level. Not always, but sometimes, so I got the face. Then I would take the heads off that picture – I didn’t shoot for the head, but I like the head that I got.”

Transparencies (2014–ongoing) Joan Semmel continues to meditate on the aging female physique. Recalling Semmel's 1990s Overlays series, many of these works feature silhouettes of her body superimposed over realistic renderings of her form. Interacting with one another, these dual images create what the artist describes as “dialogues … [which] entice the viewer to engage.” At the same time, through layered compositions that suggest movement and the passage of time, these paintings advance Semmel's decades-long engagement with chronicling her aging body.

Ongoing Semmel has continued to paint nude self-portraits in the 2000s and 2010s. These self-portraits employ a different perspective, one seen in a mirror and including the camera and the reflection of its flash. In 2021 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts held a retrospective entitled Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game. Semmel's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The Jewish Museum, New York, exhibited her work in their 2025 exhibition, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh.

Museum collections Semmel's works are found in museum collections including: the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; the Jewish Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2007), National Academician of the National Academy Museum, New York (2014) Distinguished Alumnus Award, Cooper Union (1985),

Personal life Semmel lives and works in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City.