(cache)Subverting the Nude | Regina Marler | The New York Review of Books

In 1970, after living abroad for over seven years, the New York painter Joan Semmel returned to the city, rented a loft in Soho, and, within months, substantially remade herself as an artist. It was as if she had picked up a different passport on her flight home. As an abstract expressionist in the 1950s and 1960s, her concerns had been mostly formal, but the new paintings would be political, figurative, erotic, and female-centered. They would end up “subverting the whole genre of the nude,” as she succinctly put it in a 2013 interview.

Born in 1932, the eldest child of a working-class family in the Bronx, Semmel has said that she was allowed to study art in part because she was a girl and not expected to need to earn her living. She attended the High School of Music and Art, then trained as an abstract expressionist at Cooper Union (older fellow students included Alex Katz and Audrey Flack). She later completed her BFA at Pratt. “You had to be making abstraction at the time,” Semmel has said, although she didn’t resent its monopoly in the 1950s: “It was wonderful. It was such freedom.” The intense, saturated color in much of her work is a legacy of abstraction. She remains devoted to the long sweep of a brush and to the kind of monumental scale that arose in Action Painting.

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“Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” is at the Jewish Museum, New York, through May 31. Additional recent paintings can be seen in “Joan Semmel: Continuities,” at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, through May 30, and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, through June 27, with a catalog published by the galleries.