Eunice Golden, whose bold paintings of male nudes challenged ideas about feminism, art and sexuality — although, like many of her peers, she was not recognized as a pioneer until her later years — died on April 3 at her home in East Hampton, N.Y., a week before a retrospective of her early work opened at the Duane Thomas gallery in TriBeCa. She was 98.
Her death was announced by her longtime partner, Walter Weissman.
When Ms. Golden started painting in the 1960s, she was a suburban housewife and mother of two, and she chose the male nude as her subject. There was tension in her marriage, she was frustrated with the political system, and, as she wrote years later in an essay for the feminist journal Heresies, she took her concerns into the studio.
She wanted imagery, she said, that would allow her to explore what she was feeling as a woman and as an artist. At the time, many feminist artists were focusing on the body, but mostly on their own bodies, in an effort to reclaim the female nude after centuries of interpretation by male artists.
Ms. Golden’s early work was singular, even among artists exploring the male anatomy.
Alice Neel had been painting male nudes for decades — her 1933 portrait of Joe Gould, the eccentric Greenwich Village character and author made famous by Joseph Mitchell, depicted him as a manic devil with three penises. Sylvia Sleigh, a contemporary of Ms. Golden’s, was getting noticed for her nude portraits of her friends, notably her painting of a group of amiable-looking hipsters very much of their 1970s moment.
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But Ms. Golden’s nudes were not portraits. She focused on genitals and limbs, rendering them as landscapes — as male topographies — using strong, gestural brushwork in her paintings or firm charcoal lines in her drawings.
Her penises were almost always erect. When the critic Harold Rosenberg of The New Yorker asked her why, she told him, “I don’t tell my models how to pose.” But instinct often took over, and Ms. Golden recalled drawing “fast and furious to capture the moment.”
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