Joan Semmel

April, 2020

Marta Gnyp: How are you doing in the corona time? Has the quarantine changed your normal way of working?

Joan Semmel: It’s a very difficult time. Emotionally it’s surreal. Everything is so strange because the streets are empty and it’s a kind of suspended time and space; a lot of the stores have boarded up. When I go down to get some air, it feels like you’re walking through a de Chirico painting. The building is sort of caving in on you; the lights and everything is totally surreal.

MG: Especially in New York that has been hit very severely.

JS: It’s the worst here, I think. How are things where you are?

MG: Berlin is probably the best place to live in at this moment. The lockdown was moderate, we were asked to stay at home, but we were allowed to walk on the street by two; I could jog in the park, I could walk everywhere and work alone in my office. The numbers have been good in Germany. People have been disciplined and it’s getting better. The shops and galleries could reopen last week. There’s hope that there will be no second wave, but nobody knows really.

JS: It seems like there will be a second wave, and people are getting very restless. New York is a big city. It’s crowded. There are people now at the park where they shouldn’t be. Everybody’s worried about the economy. People have lost jobs. It’s just really kind of apocalyptic time.

MG: What about your work? As a painter you are probably used to work in isolation and in solitude.

JS: I’ve always liked that isolation. I like being in the studio alone, putting on my music and tuning out the rest of the world, so it hasn’t affected me emotionally as much as it bothers some people. It’s just the monotony of it: that every day is like the next, nothing changes. You’re in this space without any connections. There’s nothing good to look forward to. You feel like this is an endless kind of cycle of having to pull the work out of your head. There’s no outside stimulation. Going on the net and the television and all that, I find it turns me on; the news is very upsetting. But I’m working – not as much as I usually do because it’s hard to get motivated in this kind of an environment – but we don’t have choices.

MG: Art is being offered massively online now and this is also very surreal because you need to experience art in flesh, at least I can say that’s how it works for me. Of course, we have to work online because there aren’t many other options left now, but artworks start to look exchangeable.

JS: It’s really not the same thing. It’s a very different kind of experience in every way; the scale, the change of scale and the surface, just the glaring lights of the screen. There’s no relationship with the object that you’re seeing; you can’t get into the contemplation of space that you need to see a work of art. The only good thing about it is that it has probably killed the whole idea of the art fair permanently, because people can’t go to that kind of a crowded space. From my point of view as an artist, that’s a great relief. Maybe now we’ll be able to just take a walk in the street and go from gallery to gallery experiencing art in a different setting.

MG: I wonder how this will work out. This year is lost to art fairs, but suppose we will have a vaccine anytime soon, I think everything would go back to previous art market situation. But, let us start talking about your fantastic life as an artist and let’s start from the very beginning. You were born in a Jewish immigrant family, a third or second generation?

JS: Second generation. My mother actually came to the country as a child, but they were part of the whole Eastern-European immigration in the early 20th century.

MG: From which country did your mother come?

JS: I guess it would be Poland at this time. At the time it was still Austria-Hungary.

MG: Did you speak English at home?

JS: Yes, we all spoke only English. The only time my parents spoke another language was when they didn’t want the children to understand it, but otherwise it was always English. It was not a two-language home.

MG: The immigration and Jewishness was never a subject that played a role of importance in your art.

JS: No, it never was. I was educated as an American and my parents were totally Americanized. They spoke the language perfectly, and they were not religious, so never dominated my life in any way.

MG: I read that you were talented in a junior school then you went to the Cooper Union.

JS: At the High School of Music and Art, which was the lower grade, I guess comparable to your secondary school, and then Cooper Union. They were both free schools and they were art schools.

MG: Which means that, from the very beginning, you were interested in art.

JS: Yeah, I was. I was directed at a relatively young age into art because I was considered talented.

MG: Then you did what young women at that time did: you married someone, and you got a child.

JS: Yes. I married at nineteen and my daughter was born when I was twenty-three. At that time, I had not painted for a couple of years. I also had an illness; I was hospitalized with the tuberculosis and spent six months in a hospital. I had a major surgery.

MG: Did this illness change the course of your life?

JS: Yes. That was a very important experience, which supposedly was a tragedy, but in a way, it gave me a point in life to think of what I wanted to do with my life rather than just going along. After that, I went back to painting, and started to become an artist.

MG: Interesting. So, one of the conclusions of what you wanted to do in your life was that you really wanted to be an artist?

JS: To be an artist, yes. I don’t think I would have verbalized it that way, but I knew I needed to do something that was for myself, to follow my own needs, and not only be at the service of the family.

MG: How did you start this transformation?

JS: I went to Pratt Institute. In New York at that time, the Cooper Union, which was a three-year program, didn’t offer what is a degree at that point; they just gave a certificate. I wanted to get the degree so that I could possibly teach. I had gone a year and a half to Pratt, got the first degree and after that, I went to Spain with my then-husband where I stayed for seven and a half years.

MG: When you were in New York I understood that you were painting abstraction. Did you have any connection to the abstract New York School group?

JS: I did not because I was just a little bit late in terms of the age to be part of that group. When I went to school, I didn’t know anybody in the art world. It was very provincial, I lived in the Bronx and I had no contact with the people in Manhattan. Then when I came back from Spain, I actually started connecting with the whole art world kind of environment.

MG: How did you come to abstraction?

JS: At Cooper Union. Some of the instructors where deeply involved in the AbEx experiment at that point. My whole education at Cooper Union was very much involved in the whole philosophy of Abstract Expressionism, of the gestural art, the expressivity of it and so on.

MG: With the AbEx American specialization you became successful in Spain.

JS: True. I showed at the best gallery there in Madrid. I have traveled to South America with a big show of thirty-five paintings to the Museum of Plastic Arts in Montevideo in Uruguay, from there it went to the Bonino gallery in Buenos Aires, and I was also scheduled to do something in Brazil, but I opted out of that because I was advised that it would be difficult to get my work back out.

MG: You had a career as a woman artist.

JS: Yes, I was a novelty. Being an American woman making art was a sheer novelty. It gave me an identity immediately. I didn’t get lost in the crowd, so to speak. It meant that I had visibility and respect, but I wasn’t part of their network system. I was friends with Spanish artists. A lot of them came by when I was leaving to give me a party, so it was a good experience all around for me, but I was always an outsider.

MG: Did you like to paint abstract?

JS: Oh yeah, I loved to. I think that’s who I was. Abstraction was where I placed myself and that was the way I worked. I didn’t think that I could do anything else, or that I should do anything else. When I came back to New York, I had a real problem of relating to the kind of work that was being done here at that time. It was no longer Abstract Expressionism, but what they called Color Field painting. I really couldn’t relate to that at all. I also became very passionately involved in the political situation of women in the art world and in the world in general.

MG: One more question about abstraction: have you ever considered to go back to abstraction?

JS: I play with it. I utilize it in my work, I think abstractly and conceptualize a painting in the way I’d put a mark down. All of those things come to me instinctively through the way I always worked as an abstract artist. I don’t separate the two things in my mind. I never felt myself a figurative artist or a realist artist, the two classifications where I could fit. I never experienced my work as figurative; I never thought about being representational as being important, but I thought about the figure as an object – as an icon rather than as representation of any reality.

MG: Perhaps this is why your paintings are so powerful, because it’s really about the color, about the form and about the image as such.

JS: That’s how I thought about it. The reason that I came to work that way, was because I wanted the work to relate to what my passion was at that time, which was to change the way things were for women like me.

MG: Now we come to the limits of abstraction that actually can never really carry a message.

JS: They couldn’t carry any messages at all, but I never wanted the work to be pedantic or propagandistic. I never wanted to be telling you what you have to do. Who knows? It wasn’t even a narrative. It carried a message, but not in that traditional way.

MG: I understand. What had changed you? You were a successful abstract painter, then you went back to New York and became determined to fight for the women’s case and connected with feminist groups.

JS: Well, first with the political groups in general; there was a whole group called the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York. I met a lot of the artists there, many of whom I had not known before. There were all kinds of discussions and panels and talks about all kinds of things very deeply connected to the political movements of the time. The reasons for the connection to the women’s movement were much more personal. That had to do with my own struggles as a woman, freeing myself from the necessities conforming to the woman’s role socially. At that time – don’t forget this was 1970s – things were still difficult for women. You can’t imagine the difference between how it was then and how it is now.

MG: I cannot.

JS: It was different in every way: professionally and personally, in family, in work relationships and political relationships. I had to rethink my relationship to myself and to the world in order to become an artist in that environment because it was so constrictive for women.

MG: New York is known today as a very liberal city and so it’s really difficult to imagine that it was so oppressive to women.

JS: Well, I think it was oppressive. First of all, from your background in terms of what the expectations of your family were and how you internalized that. Then, it was restrictive in the art world in terms of what a woman artist was expected, or I should say, was not expected to be. You were not expected to be certain things. You were not expected to be ambitious. You were not expected to be called a genius. You were not expected to even be confident. You were expected to be a sort of camp follower and serve the man and the art world in various ways, both sexually and physically. There were very few women who were able to break through that.

All images courtest the artist and Alexander Gray Associates and Artists Rights Society.

Photo: Emiliano Granado

Read the full interview in the book.