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See for yourselves! If Semmel’s message was firmly in favor of such affirmation, there is also, in her more sexually explicit paintings, a measure of self-estrangement - of imagining herself outside her own body.īut in this exhibition, which originated at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, curated by Jodi Throckmorton, the emphasis - at least in the abbreviated version at the Johnson Museum, organized by Andrea Inselmann - is on the various points of view Semmel has taken on herself - and, briefly, on others too.

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On the other, women young and old were being told, as by the authors of the brand new manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, to glory in their own bodies, for fun and enlightenment. On one hand, there was Viva, a magazine in which Semmel appeared in 1974, along with other Fight Censorship members describing itself as the “world’s most sophisticated erotic magazine for women,” Viva was published by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione (Anna Wintour was its fashion editor). “I wanted it to be erotic stimuli for a woman, not just for a man,” Semmel told Samet. Nor is the purpose of such depictions uncomplicated. The internal places where much of the pleasure occurs are necessarily occluded, and the act itself, favoring the tactile, has fairly little to do with vision. The question of how best to represent sex is not easily answered pictorially. Joan Semmel, “Hot Seat” (1971), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York) Joan Semmel, “Toes to Toes” (2001), oil on canvas (photo courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York) Mostly, we see his turquoise thighs beneath her pinkish ones, her torso, and active intercourse: The painting’s focus is the point of penetration her pubis a fiery red. Using electric Kool-aid acid shades of red, purple, and green, the Sex paintings included such images as “Hot Seat” (1971), in which a woman straddles a man sitting on a toilet. For the latter, she rather boldly engaged a man who, she told Jennifer Samet in a 2018 interview, was “a bit of an exhibitionist” and “liked to have sex with people watching” other artworks drew from print images of softcore porn.

#Redhand science co series

As a member of a loose collective called Fight Censorship, founded by Anita Steckel and including such disparate artists as Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, and Hannah Wilke, Semmel launched a series of Sex and Erotic paintings. But after returning to New York in 1970, she jumped into the deep end of second-wave feminism. While there, she enjoyed a successful career as an Abstract Expressionist painter a single, vigorous painting from that period is on view. Early in her career, Semmel (who was born in the Bronx in 1932) was temporarily sidelined by illness and parenthood, and spent eight years in Spain, at first with her husband and then on her own. The exposure, and the intrusion, feel acute.ĭespite their provocations, a great deal of tenderness, and thought, is in these images. To depict yourself (and your lover) this way, from the inside out, is to make yourself enormously vulnerable. In “Touch,” intertwined limbs, a spreading breast, and a bit of hairy chest balloon across the bottom a sliver of rumpled bedsheet appears above. There is little in the way of background space - of breathable air. Reflecting the photos on which they rely, the perspective in these paintings is exaggerated: Huge torsos and thighs in the foreground dwindle toward dwarfed calves and tiny feet. As with other paintings in Semmel’s Self-Images series, which are among her best known, the artist’s prostrate, naked body and a male partner’s are depicted as if seen through her eyes, which become ours.

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ITHACA, NY - There’s something hypnotically mortifying about Joan Semmel’s “Touch” (1975), on view in her revelatory retrospective, Skin in the Game, at the Johnson Museum at Cornell University.