Western art is saturated with the female nude as filtered through a male point of view. From the Venus de Milo to Titian’s sumptuous redheads, from Courbet’s voluptuous frolickers to Manet’s subversive starers-back, they are welded into our consciousness, our pop culture: female as object. She’s alluring, demeaned, confrontational, sometimes exalted—always objectified.
But what happens when you look at the female form “through the object’s eye?”
“Through the Object’s Eye” is the title of one of many striking canvases on display in “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh,” the artist’s new retrospective at The Jewish Museum in New York City. It’s a remarkable assemblage of canvases that curator Rebecca Shaykin gathered in collaboration with the artist herself, who’s in her 90s. Wandering among them, you are immersed in Semmel’s career-long repudiation of the male gaze, both subtle and explicit, and beyond that, a frank exploration of the female form that feels urgent right now, a celebration in the dark.
Semmel’s nudes, mostly of herself, are varied in color, boldness and line. Her techniques and interests have evolved—ranging from garish and abstract to softer lines and gentler palettes (including the masterpiece “Sunlight”, owned by the Jewish Museum). Yet despite their differences, her stunning figures are never arranged to entice or titillate. The exhibit (which carries a content warning at its entrance and is meant to evoke a downtown gallery) ranges from the bold, explicitly sexual paintings of an earlier era into a boldly political triptych, with mixed material, in which a naturalistic self-portrait is juxtaposed with an imitation de Kooning distortion of a woman on one side, a Playboy image on the other.
Semmel’s decades of self-images, at rest and in motion, make up the bulk of the show. “She’s reclaiming sexual authority and agency—and, god forbid, pleasure!” Shaykin told me as we walked through the gallery. Feminist art, Shaykin noted, is not a stylistic movement but an ideological one—so the category is united not by form but by content. This becomes clear as within the Semmel exhibit lies another one, nested, a show within a show of Semmel’s particular picks from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection. This includes the expected figures, but also other pieces by her Jewish feminist peers, who tackled conformity and hegemony with more abstract or conceptual styles; Semmel herself trained as an abstract expressionist before moving back to figurative work. (For an understanding of feminist art as movement linked by content, not style, see the very different approach of Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Lilith’s Winter 2025-2026 issue).
Semmel’s later portraits, including the monumental “Skin in the Game,” above, feel particularly moving at this moment. If to walk into a museum is to confront the male gaze, to walk down any street in any major city these days to witness a bizarre marketplace of body improvement options: Pilates and lash lifts, IV therapy, botox, laser facials, waxing and off-label Ozempic—the pursuit of smoothness, thinness, wrinkle-free existence in the name of “health” and “self-improvement.”
Feminist voices protesting this state of affairs are few and when people do speak up, it is notable. Yet the massive displays of flesh in the Semmel survey makes a nice contrast with this annoyingly persistent aspect of patriarchal culture. We get old. We droop. We can still move through the world, with dynamism.
When Semmel began her project of reimagining the nude, Shaykin notes, “ideas about the male gaze were just coalescing.” A book publisher told Semmel feminism was already over, decades ago, rejecting her project. But the Trump era has reminded us that our movement is far from irrelevant. How wonderful that Semmel gets to witness multiple generations wander beneath her paintings and quietly shut out the male gaze.
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