ABSTRACT
"Sexualism," to use a more accurate term than "Eroticism," is exciting. It is new and it is a movement. Women can crash into the art world, into the general consciousness, with this work. It could be their work one would be seeing, and reading about without having it referred to as "women's art," as Impressionism was not alluded to as "French" art. Silvianna Goldsmith's beautiful and romantic Orpheus Underground depicts rape from a woman's angle of vision, and renders female orgasm as a bursting forth of pomegranate seeds-blood jewels-from the cunt. If blood is mythic for Juanita McNeely, it is the sexual act which is so for Joan Semmel, who does large paintings of monumental female-male couples, interlocked in sexual connection in a flat, limitless space. Sitting woman, as tall as five Chryslers if she stood, holds up a platter, waitresslike, on which a small female figure rebounds from a somersault.
