The Female Artist as Nude: The Body, Sex, and Aging in the Work of Joan Semmel

When painter Joan Semmel’s dealer asked how her nudes could possibly be considered political, she told him she would make him a “diagram.” Mythologies and Me (1976) is a large three-paneled painting in which one of her own self-image nudes is flanked by a Playboy pinup and a faux Willem de Kooning “Woman”-- the female artist is caught amidst stereotypes of women constantly circulating and consumed on all levels of culture. Since the early 1970s, Semmel (b. 1932) has challenged the objectification of women’s bodies in art and popular culture as part of the broader feminist project of claiming rights to female agency and expression. She revamps the long-established genres of the nude and the self-portrait to reimagine the experience of the body from a woman’s point of view, while her conspicuous use of viewing devices (the camera and the mirror) explore the constructed nature of that vision. Her current series of nude self-images as a woman in her 80s confronts the invisibility of aging in a society that fetishizes youth. This paper examines Semmel’s use of the artist’s body, through different life stages, to protest cultural paradigms of the female body, sex, and aging.