Mythologies and Me

When Joan Semmel’s gallery questioned how her monumental nude self-portraits could be political, she decided to “paint [them] a diagram.” The resulting work, Mythologies and Me, scathingly illustrates the predicament of a woman seeking to understand herself while being bombarded by reductive and degrading representations of women in “high art” and popular culture alike. A painting from Semmel’s Self- Images series (1974–79) appears flanked by her parodies of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–52)—an iconic Abstract Expressionist painting criticized by feminist artists for its perceived spitefulness towards its subject matter— and a Playboy magazine spread representing the burgeoning American pornography industry’s commodification of female sexuality. The “first-person” angle of the central Self-Image painting thrusts the viewer into the perspective of the nude model—Semmel herself. Subverting the conventional distance between the (male) artist and the (female) model, Semmel noted, allowed “the body to be seen as a woman experiences herself, rather than through the reflection of the mirror or male eyes.”