We are not very accepting of our bodies, even when they are young and firm. As we age, the accumulations of life, the looseness of the skin, can be haunting. Joan Semmel, who lives in New York City, is that brave soul who looks without blinking—and the body she’s been looking at is her own. This show at the Jewish Museum places 16 paintings from Semmel’s 60-year career alongside nearly 50 modern and contemporary pieces that she selected from the Museum’s holdings (among them, works by Ida Applebroog, Marc Chagall, Nan Goldin, Alice Neel, Nancy Spero, and Man Ray). “In the past, I think, art always dealt with idealization,” Semmel said in 2013, “the idealization of the individual in the portrait, the idealization of the body, the whole idealization of the sexual image. One of the reasons that I decided to use myself was I wanted it to be a specific body, a specific person, that is not idealized, so that the culture absorbs people as they are, not as they would like them to be.” —Laura Jacobs