When is a nude not a nude?
Can a depiction of a female nude can be a political statement? Can it be a reclamation by the female artist of the female body from the hold of the male gaze?
Joan Semmel Secret Spaces (1976)
Oil on canvas
1780 x 1760 cm
I recently went to the Capturing the Moment exhibition at Tate Modern. Great exhibition and it featured one of my all-time favourite paintings; Joan Semmels Secret Spaces. It was wonderful to see it in real life, I hadn’t appreciated how monumental it was.
All through history, the female nude has been produced almost exclusively for the male gaze. Joan Semmel in this work Secret Spaces and the series to which it belongs subverted that norm.
This work shows the naked female body from her own perspective, looking down from the position of the head of the model, engaging the audience as if the body were their own and contradicting the traditional passivity of the reclining female nude. Semmels nudes were always painted realistically, with folds and creases of flesh, sensuous in their own right - not adhering to the idealised version of the female body.
In an interview given in 2020 Semmel stated that “[women at the time] certainly weren’t supposed to make nudes, and part of that was about breaking down the canon of what the history of art gave us as the canon of high art….The nude was always made for the Male Gaze … I was deliberately distracting the nude from the male gaze to bring it into what the female saw.” (Spiegel 2020)
Semmels work at the time has to be put into context. The 70’s saw the emergence of the second wave of feminism and the realisation and acknowledgement by female artists that the representation of the female nude was being used as a way of continuing gender inequality, reducing women to objects to be looked at.
Their stance did not go unchallenged. In 1975 in the wake of the 1973 a Supreme Court judge ordered Semmels paintings be removed from the Year of the Woman exhibition. There were definitely institutional barriers to be overcome.
By using her own body and depicting it frankly, without idealisation and from her own perspective, Semmel resisted and subverted the tradition of objectification of the female body which was and is still found in both high art and pornography.
She brought a whole new language of her own to the subject matter, a language which has been expanded by contemporary artists such as Jenny Saville.
If you’d like to see Secret Spaces in the flesh, it currently forms part of the Capturing the Moment exhibition at Tate Modern which I can thoroughly recommend. It’s amazing.