At 93, Joan Semmel Is As Honest As Ever

Joan Semmel
Sunlight, 1978
Oil on canvas, 60 x 96 in. (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York

text by Emma Grimes

Uptown at the Jewish Museum, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh provides a survey of 16 works, spanning from 1971 to 2023, that tell the rich and compelling story of Semmel’s artistic evolution. And further downtown at Alexander Gray Associates, Continuities presents recent works, painted within the last two years, from the same pioneering artist. Together, these concurrent shows spark timely questions about womanhood, self-image, and transformation.

The Jewish Museum’s show begins with works from Semmel’s Erotic Series—from the early 1970s—that depict heterosexual couples having sex. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), the first painting shows a woman, rendered in a yellow-orange hue, straddling a reclined man. The second image, as the title suggests, flips their positions. Nearby, Erotic Yellow (1973) shows a couple laying down, intertwined. The woman’s body is painted in cherry pink; the man in dark, olive green. The bodies appear as if inserted onto the canvas from somewhere else, and the colorful backdrops can almost feel sterile. The scenes are recognizable and undoubtedly of real life, but they’re also luminously artificial and constructed, as if these figures are on a sound stage, posing. 

 

Joan Semmel
Erotic Yellow, 1973
Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

 

Semmel positions the woman as an equal partner. It is obvious, and might be taken for granted by young viewers today, that she has desire, is acting on that desire. What might resonate more for contemporary observers has less to do with Semmel’s representation of a reciprocal heterosexual dynamic, but more with how Semmel is shown to inhabit her own body. Given the recent resurgence and glorification of skinniness on social media, the proliferation of GLP-1s, and the normalization of plastic surgery, Semmel’s offering—that one can be at ease with one’s body, no modification needed—is perhaps more radical today than before.

Following these are Semmel’s self-portraits, also from the ‘70s. Each one is painted from the perspective of looking down. Due to the natural closeness between one’s own eye and body, the limbs and curves appear striking on the large canvasses. Works like Intimacy-Autonomy (1974) recall the spectacular, natural beauty of a Georgia O’Keefe landscape. 

The positioning also forces you into her own subjectivity. It reminds me, perhaps bizarrely, of Joan Didion’s description of writing as a hostile act. When an interviewer asked her to expand on this, Didion said: “It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture.” 

Semmel’s self-portraits, in a similar vein, are coercing the viewer to see things from her angle. And while every work of art must come from an individual point of view, rarely does the coercion itself become visible. In her self-portraits though, she makes you see from her own gaze while also making that very effort evident.

 

Joan Semmel’s Portrait: Joan Semmel, 2019.
Photo: Erica Lansner

 

In the middle of this show is a collection of other works from various artists and time periods that Semmel curated to be considered alongside her work. There are two pieces from Joyce Kozloff and Judith Bernstein respectively. There’s a sculpture from Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel’s portrait of Meyer Schapiro, Arnold Newman photographs of Louise Nevelson and Martha Graham, just to name a few. Then there are three curious variations of works referencing Adam and Eve: God’s Curse by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1896-1902), Eve Eating the Forbidden Fruit and Handing it to Adam by Philip Galle (16th century), and Adam and Eve by Max Weber (1911-1916). There are too many to consider each in-depth, but they provide a fresh lens to consider Semmel’s work.

 

Max Weber
Adam and Eve, 1911–16
Oil on canvas, 22 x 17 in. (55.9 x 43.2 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York, gift of Leonard and Phyllis Greenberg, 2014-26

 

The exhibit concludes with five nude self-portraits from this century, which is the subject of the entire show at Alexander Gray Associates. That exhibit, named Continuities, consists of around a dozen of these paintings, all made within the last two years. 

Before entering the main exhibition room, one encounters a confrontational gaze from Semmel herself. In this self-portrait, she rests leisurely in a chair with her head tilted upwards faintly, as if she is asking something from you. The painting is titled Here I Am (2025). On second thought, it’s as though she is demanding something of you, specifically that you meet her gaze, that you look her in the eye before turning towards her body.

Among these paintings, one will quickly notice that Semmel seems to have moved on from that ambitious, subjective perspective found in her earlier works. There is a single painting, titled Shadow Heart (2024), that’s from her head looking down, except the one significant difference is that Semmel’s hand covers her lower stomach and groin. If what made her earlier nudes remarkable was their unabashed representations of the self and body—so forceful that they were transformed into imperatives to look (from her eyes) and acknowledge—then these works are tragic indications that one cannot hold onto such self-assurance forever. 

Joan Semmel
Shadowed Heart, 2024
Oil on canvas 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Joan Semmel
Skin in the Game, 2019
Oil on canvas, 4 panels: each 96 x 72 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

The language in some reviews of Semmel’s latest work is striking—well, striking, but not surprising. I mean the reviews that laud Semmel’s “courage” for revealing her 93-year-old body. “Shame is nowhere to be found,” one extolled. These reviews, needless to say, maintain the bottom-line idea that she should be—we’re expecting her to be—ashamed of her body. If nothing else, this is a curious assumption to make given her previous work. 

That being said, there is something undeniably self-conscious about Semmel’s recent works. One can see this shift in a few ways. First, the gaze is made external. We are usually looking at her in these paintings, not with. Secondly, her body is not nearly as relaxed as before. She stands in front of a mirror, looking at herself. She is posing. She even covers up parts of her body in a few.

Joan Semmel
Blue Space, 2025
Oil on canvas 601/ 8x 721/8 in (152.7 x 183.2cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Compare any of these recent self-portraits at Alexander Gray with her earlier work. Take Sunlight (1978) as an example. In this work, she looks down on her soft pale body. A hand rests over her thigh, the other caresses the back of her foot. A finger on this hand presses down onto one of her toes, a subtle but meaningful detail that turns a body into a person with feelings, preferences, impulses. Her brown hair twirls over her left breast. The sunlit body sits on a white blanket. In the corner of the canvas’s left side are small splotches of grass, offering a narrative clue: she is outside—perhaps in a garden—appearing to enjoy the day’s warm sunlight. Wherever this person is, one also wants to be.

The painting, from a technical standpoint, is sublime (one does not want to look away), but what has always persisted for me, after one must look away, is this woman’s embodied presence. It is an attunement both with life outside and the life within. She is more than just unashamed of her body; she actually seems innocent of the knowledge that she ever had to be—like Eve, of course. And this mode of being cannot coexist with self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is precisely what worms its way into Semmel’s more recent self-portraits. Iris Marion-Young would describe this phenomenon as a woman seeing herself as another thing in the world, and therefore, she “remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities.” It is this distance that becomes present in these recent works where Semmel’s hands cover her face or where she watches herself mediated through the mirror reflection. What nevertheless remains astonishing is how Semmel—ever, yet alone for so long—created work unveiling her own body that simultaneously denied anyone the ability to turn her into an object. Where that sounds like a contradiction, it somehow never was. 

This shift might provide an answer as to why Semmel chose multiple works depicting the story of Adam and Eve to be viewed alongside her exhibit. Tragically, one can’t stay in the garden forever.

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh is on view through May 31 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York. Continuities is on view through May 30 at Alexander Gray Associates, 384 Broadway, New York.

Helene Schjerfbeck’s Long-Awaited Debut Arrives @ The Met

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
The Tapestry (1914-1916)
Oil on canvas
35 1/4 × 36 1/4 in. (89.5 × 92 cm)
Photo: Per Myrehed

 


text by Emma Grimes


The ongoing Seeing Silence exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers an impressive exploration of one of the 20th century’s greatest, and long-overlooked, Modernist painters, Helene Schjerfbeck. The sprawling show gathers more than fifty works by the Finnish artist, spanning from 1880 to 1945, just a year before her death at the age of 83. It marks an astonishing debut—Schjerfbeck’s work has never before been examined so thoroughly by a major US museum. While she has long been admired by Nordic countries, her oeuvre has only recently begun to draw broader international recognition.

Schjerfbeck was born in 1862 to an affluent family in Helsinki. Bedridden for weeks as a toddler following a tumble down the stairs, her father encouraged the four-year-old to begin drawing. While details of her childhood are limited, her biographers have largely characterized it as “lonely and bleak.” By eleven years old, she was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School—her exceptional talent earned her free tuition—and quickly advanced through the coursework. Schjerfbeck, who was itching to visit Paris, was finally awarded government funds in 1880 to travel abroad.

Seeing Silence begins right after this period. The alluring portrait, Youth (1882), depicts a nude young man from the waist up. His pale skin emanates with the simple faultlessness of youth, while his muscular contour is painted with an equal measure of softness and precision. Behind the figure is a golden background, and Schjerfbeck’s restrained palette has the effect of intensifying each color. Every tone feels concentrated, as if the pigment had been distilled to its purest form. 

An early self-portrait from the decade demonstrates a similarly controlled and forceful use of color. Schjerfbeck gazes past the canvas as strands of yellow hair spill over her forehead. Her hair nearly dissolves into the dark, golden-brown background, making her pale face, pink cheeks, and grey-blue eyes appear like a spotlight on a stage. And though her facial features are sweet and delicate, they never conceal a deep-rooted solemnity.

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait (1884-1885)
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 × 16 1/8 in. (50 × 41 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Henri Tuomi

 

By far the most intriguing work from this decade is The Door (1884), which depicts a flat, black door inside an unidentifiable room. Schjerfbeck painted this scene from a chapel in Brittany, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the scene. Strokes of light glint from beneath the dark doorway, and a nearby archway disappears into the wall. At twenty-two years old, her technical prowess had already been proven. What else was there to do but flirt with form and representation?

In the following gallery, the paintings leap forward in time. One of the many figure paintings on view, Maria (1906), depicts a woman turned away from the viewer, absorbed with a book in her lap. A bright splash of luminous blue paint represents her dress. The edges of her head appear lightly illuminated, as though catching rays from a distant light source. Yet even though light appears to fall across her face, there’s no implied world beyond the canvas. This painting, like many of Schjerfbeck’s works, refuses to allude to anything outside its own boundaries.

Schjerfbeck’s sitters are purified of excess, eliminating nearly all specificity. A stroke of grey suggests her elbow. A round-ish shape of paint represents her dress. Schjerfbeck offers the barest details while still maintaining the recognizable structure of a figure. But this painting contains a curious exception among her oeuvre. In the upper right corner, the artist has painted the sitter’s name: “MARIA”. For an artist so committed to ambiguity, it’s an oddly specific gesture.

The third gallery contains several of Schjerfbeck’s still lifes and landscapes, and it offers perhaps the most compelling opportunity to observe the evolution of her aesthetic. In her 1892 work Blue Anemones in a Chip Basket, delicate purple flowers rest in a finely rendered wooden basket. The blossoms are soft, lifelike, and precise. Compare these flowers with the apples Schjerfbeck would paint fifty-two years later in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944).

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944)
Oil on canvas
14 3/16 × 19 11/16 in. (36 × 50 cm)
Photo: Rauno Träskelin / Didrichsen Art Museum

 

In this later painting (painted at 82 years old), the apples appear less like the recognizable fruit and more like a sequence of rounded, brightly colored forms. Oblong shapes in mint green, raspberry pink, yellow, and black represent the fruit. Beneath them lies a horizontal block of layered color—splotches of lavender, blue, and green that blend and overlap. The artwork’s museum label says that the blackened apples are likely symbols of Europe, painted amid the devastation of World War II. Yet this was also, interestingly, painted two years before her death. And seen alongside the self-portraits from this same period, one might wonder whether the rotting apple functions as another kind of self-image.

The final gallery gathers multiple of these self-portraits across Schjerfbeck’s life, and it’s an extraordinary room to walk through. One moves chronologically through the space, beginning with the bright-eyed, naturalistic images and ending with stark, skeletal depictions that recall the disquieting distortion of Munch’s The Scream. Any resemblance to an elderly woman is coincidental. She doesn’t seem interested anymore in painting the face that gazes back in the mirror, but is profiling decay. Her eyes are empty holes; her mouth is in a perpetual, gaping “O”. They rattle and disturb.

 
 

The exhibit seems to invite viewers to read these works as windows into Schjerfbeck’s self-perception and relationship with mortality, which is undeniably an instinctive and compelling way to approach them. Yet framed primarily as psychological documents, one might miss the ways in which these works present a culmination of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong investigation into form. In this final gallery, her face becomes just another object of fascination for her artistic endeavor. What if these self-portraits aren’t simply treated as autobiographical confessions, but are also viewed as the logical endpoint for Schjerfbeck’s perpetual formal exploration of the medium?

In this sense, her face is an equally privileged subject as the rotting apples in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) or the figure reading in Maria. The mirror is another surface upon which she can continue her inquiry into form. These late self-portraits aren’t only universal meditations on aging and death, but they are the conclusions to a brilliant, life-long investigation of reduction, and here they meet their most radical—and terminal—point.

Seeing Silence is on view through April 5 at The Met, New York.

Read Our Interview of Heather Agyepong on the Eve of the Centre for British Photography's Inaugural Exhibition →

 
Photograph by Heather Agyepong depicting woman in dress.

The Body Remembers, Le Cake-Walk, Wish You Were Here, 2020 © Heather Agyepong

 

On Thursday 26 January The Centre for British Photography will open for the first time. Founded by the gallerist and philanthropist, James Hyman, the charitable organization will present free, self-generated exhibitions as well as those led by independent curators and organizations championing the work of British photographers. 

Hyman explains: “We hope that through this initial showcase to make a home for British photography we can, in the long run, develop an independent centre that is self-sustaining with a dedicated National Collection and public program.”

There will be two leading exhibitions, organized in partnership with Fast Forward Photography. Headstrong: Women and Empowerment celebrates photographers based in Britain who have made work concerned with how they are represented, what they are dealing with in their everyday lives and what it means to embrace diversities that challenge the conservative order of a patriarchal society. And, Images of the English at Home takes the viewer on a journey from the street, up the front steps, and into the private spaces of the living room, kitchen and bedroom before sending them out into the back garden. 

Alongside the exhibitions, The Centre will spotlight five British photographers as part of an In Focus display; Natasha Caruana, Jo Spence, Andrew Bruce, Anna Fox and Heather Agyepong. 

Autre’s London editor-at-large, Lara Monro, spoke with the multidisciplinary artist, Heather Agyepong, to discuss her body of work, Wish You Were Here. Commissioned by The Hyman Collection in 2019, the series explores the work of Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who challenged the rigid and problematic narratives of Black performers. Read more.

Dennis Osadebe Looks To Heritage For Answers To The Future In MODERN MAGIC @ König London

With the starting point of the influence of Black culture, the works of Dennis Osadebe’s MODERN MAGIC present themselves like a theatre filled with visual challenges and rich experimentation. Viewers are given a front-row seat to an unfolding show as Osadebe’s painted characters take on the role of performers captured amid moments of magic; their masks symbolic of divine protection. Abstracted architectural spaces are lit by variegated sources, along with exaggerated shadows, and heightened perspective, to create an atmosphere of a dreamlike stage. Drawing from a wellspring of metaphysical, Surrealist, and Renaissance painting, Osadebe conjures a realm where viewers can only question the location of the powers that be.

Lavish cultural motifs reflect Osadebe’s fascination with craftsmanship. References to the Magic 8 Ball are found throughout the paintings and act as a point of focus for Osadebe’s first-ever conceptually guided sculptural installation, with objects employed as vessels aimed at preservation. These include the traditional Nigerian fan — a ubiquitous, accessible object, necessary for everyday life — highlighted by a pristine, symbolic framing that celebrates its cultural significance. This one motif is exemplary for Osadebe’s take on preservation, which looks to heritage for answers to the future, consciously speaking of Blackness and its pivotal role in shaping contemporary culture.

Osadebe’s radical approach to self-portraiture manifests his philosophical basis for contemporary Nigerian art, fusing Western techniques and indigenous traditions to construct a new paradigm for the evolution of art. As said by prolific Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu, “It is setting the clock back to expect that the art form of Africa today must resemble that of yesterday otherwise the former will not reflect the African image.”

MODERN MAGIC is on view though July 16 @ König London 259-269 Old Marylebone Road

Goodbye Playboy: Finnish Photographer Iiu Susiraja Talks About Bullying Herself With The Camera →

 
 

Iiu Susiraja isn’t simply challenging the modus operandi of how we understand and perceive beauty. The photographer, born near Turku, Finland, is a private performance artist, a secret exhibitionist using her body as a versatile dress form to experiment with everyday props, like ladles, vases, plungers and other flotsam of the mundane. In one image, Susiraja lays in bed with a whole raw chicken resting on a silver platter, creating a sort of quotidian surreality. Ghebaly Gallery presented the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, which included her strange autoerotic still lifes and video work. The following interview was published in our Fall Winter 2018 issue, featuring a selection of the artist’s diffident self-portraits. Read more