'Not Me:' Joan Semmel's Body of Painting - Carol Shepherd

‘Not Me:’ Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting
By Richard Meyer
Excerpts from: www.joansemmel.com
…This essay aims to engage with Semmel’s feminism as an open question rather than a settled
historical matter or passé political commitment. According to the artist, “My work since the
early seventies has addressed issues of women’s sexuality and self‐image. . .The connecting
thread is one of point of view, of being inside the position of femaleness and taking possession
of it culturally.” The liberationist emphasis on women’s self‐examination and sexual autonomy
in the 1970s fueled Semmel’s pictorial accounts of “being inside the position of femaleness.”
The most incisive (and, at times, the only) writing on Semmel’s work has been that of feminist
critics, from Maryse Holder’s unforgettably titled “Another Cuntree: At Last, A Female Art
Movement” in the 1973 Off Our Backs to Arlene Raven’s bracing “Wake up Call” in the Village
Voice twenty years later, from Semmel’s own account (co‐authored with April Kingsley) of
“Sexual Imagery in Women’s Art” in Woman Artist’s News (1980) to recent exhibition catalogs
such as Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969‐1975 (2002).
Feminist writing on Semmel’s art has also, however, involved its own forms of interpretive
constraint and selective vision, its own biases and blind spots. Critics have sometimes described
the artist’s pictures as though they were self‐help manuals for “empowering women” to “regain
control of their lives” rather than carefully contrived compositions in paint. While deeply rooted
in the women’s art movement of the 1970s, Semmel’s self‐portraits cannot be reduced to an
affirmative (“I am woman, hear me roar”) politics of identity. Nor, as exhibitions such as
Personal and Political serve to remind us, can the women’s art movement.
Describing her career to date, the artist writes that “I have tried to find a contemporary
language in which I could retain my delight in the sensuality and pleasure of painting and still
confront the particulars of my own personal experience as a woman. My intention has been to
subvert the tradition of the passive female nude.” Semmel’s subversion of the traditional female
nude has been widely noted by critics, scholars, and curators since the 1970s. Her “delight in
the sensuality and pleasure of painting” has not. In what follows, I try to keep in view both the
artist’s pleasure in the act of painting and her reimagining of painting’s most erotically charged
genre…
Erotics of Liberation
… Semmel turned to figurative and, for the first time, frankly sexual imagery. Years later,
Semmel would explain the motivation for this shift in an interview with Womanart magazine:
“The reason I wanted to use an erotic element had to do with I was seeing on the newsstands.
When I came back to New York the girlie magazines, the sexploitation all over was a shocker.
Living in Spain for seven or eight years I hadn’t seen any of it. When you’ve been away from it,
it hits you very strongly. I was seeing all this stuff that for me wasn’t even sexual. It was just
hard sell. And hard sell in a way I found demeaning of women. In the past, women’s sexuality
had always been used against them. I felt very strongly that the sexual issue was crucial in terms

of real liberation. So I started to work in the erotic theme, but I was very conscious of it being
erotic from a woman’s point of view, rather than from what is normally a man’s point of view.”
In the First Erotic Series (1970‐71), Semmel employed loose brushwork, expressionist colors, and
unstable contours to depict couples in the midst of heterosexual activity. In what would become
a characteristic strategy, she excluded the heads of each figure thus disallowing any traditional
sense of romantic sentiment or emotional intimacy…
Far from softening the sexual charge of her art, Semmel sought to heighten it. Preliminary to a
second series of erotic paintings, she shot photographs of a man and woman having or about to
have sex. The photographs were taken with the prior consent‐‐and, by mutual agreement,
without payment‐‐of the copulating couple and occurred over several sessions in different
locations.
…Following the sessions, Semmel selected individual photographs as sources for her Second
Erotic Series (1972‐1973), also known, unofficially, as the “fuck paintings.” In moving from
photographic source to full‐scale painting, the artist swept away every contextual detail and bit
of decor—the patterned bedspread, the nearby plants, the window‐sill—leaving only the (now)
super‐sized bodies in carnal combination. She was attempting, in her own words,
“to find an erotic language to which women could respond, one which did not reiterate the male
power positions and prevalent fetishization in conventional pornography and art. I was not
interested in simply reversing the position of male and female and in objectifying the male body
in the way that the female body has been used for so long. I did not want to romanticize the
sexual experience but to develop a language whereby a woman could express her own desires,
whatever they might be, without shame or sentimentality.”
…Semmel could not find a commercial gallery in New York willing to show the Second Erotic
Series in 1973: “I went to every dealer in town where I could get past the secretary. . .I really
tried. .and I couldn’t [convince anyone to show them].” Taking matters into her own hands, the
artist rented a space in SoHo and exhibited the works herself. Although only one canvas sold
during the run of the show, the exhibition was widely reviewed, attracting positive notices by
Lawrence Alloway in the Nation, Perrault in the Village Voice, and, most memorably, Maryse
Holder in Off Our Backs…
Painting in the First Person
In the summer of 1973, Semmel turned away from portraying other people engaged in sexual
activity and began to depict her own body. A work from that summer, Untitled (Coffee Cup),
marks the shift with surprising precision, as though the transitional moment had been captured
and made over into paint.
…Following Untitled (Coffee Cup), the artist began to paint herself naked from a first‐person
perspective “looking down” upon her own body. She did so without the aid of mirrors. Nearly as
imposing in scale as the Second Erotic Series, the early self‐portraits never include the face
because, in the absence of mirrors, the artist could not see her own visage. In the midst of
second‐wave feminism and the women’s art movement, Semmel devised an ingenious method

to “liberate” the female nude. In place of come‐hither seduction or erotic submission, she
proposed female self‐regard and embodied agency. In pictures such as Me Without Mirrors and
Foreground Hand, the nude no longer appears as an idealized fantasy, allegorical figure, or
landscape of desire but rather as the self‐apprehended body of a specific woman.
These early self‐portraits remain Semmel’s best‐known works and have been widely discussed in
the critical literature on the artist. Laura Cottingham [wrote],“Semmel’s new perspective [on the
female nude]. . .forced viewers to ‘become’ rather than objectify the image”. Critics have
embraced the self‐portraits as sites of female identification and “becoming.” And this limited
to female viewers since, as David McCarthy sees it, Semmel has “destabilized the male
voyeurism inherent in traditional paintings of the female nude by forcing the spectator to
consider the possibility of perceiving himself as an object of vision.”…
Speaking Out
…As the “looking down” series progressed, it focused more intensively exclusively on the female
nude and the male figure dropped out of the pictorial scene. According to the artist,
In the mid‐to‐late seventies, my self‐images series became very well‐known, and included
several paintings in which a male lover is also seen. Predictably, if I was asked to participate in a
group exhibition, I was usually asked for the female nude image [without a male partner]. . . I
put together a book on sexual imagery in women’s art and got a book contract and advance.
Several art critics did essays on the work. The publisher held it for two years and then told me
he couldn’t go ahead with it, because “Feminism was over.”
Semmel describes the subtle pressure enacted by two different forms of constraint: the
curatorial preference for her solo self‐‐portraits (i.e. for images of the female self
unencumbered by male sexual partnership) and the premise, already in place by the 1976, that
“feminism was over.”
Nevertheless, Semmel’s “looking down” self‐portraits of the 1970s remain her most
influential and oft‐cited paintings. In this essay, I have linked those self‐portraits to the artist’s
immediately preceding erotic series and to her commitments as both a feminist and a painter‐‐
which is not quite to say as a feminist painter. Semmel’s focus on painting herself since the
early 1970s has functioned not to exclude the world beyond the studio but to engage with it—
whether through writing, teaching, curating, editing, or activism.