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.
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.”
The work was multithemed. Ms. Golden was investigating her own sexual experiences and fantasies. She was protesting the age-old bias against women being allowed to depict male nudes. And she was using the idea of a literal male landscape as a proxy for what she felt was a barrage of phallic imagery in everything from architecture to advertising.
Her penises were often enormous. “Study for a Flag” (1974) is six feet tall and fills the canvas, though it tilts, like the Tower of Pisa, hinting at its fall. (To show its scale, Mr. Weissman, a photographer, took a photo of Ms. Golden, who was 5-foot-3, standing next to it.)
When that work was not chosen for “Sons and Others: How Women See Men,” a 1975 show at the Queens Museum of work by female artists whose subjects were men, Ms. Golden was furious. She was told, “It doesn’t fit the theme.”
Male museum curators and gallerists frequently turned her away, typically with lewd comments. Some felt personally cowed by the subject. “How could I measure up to that?” was a typical response.
Male critics were also dismissive. In 1971, Ms. Golden was one of 10 artists living at Westbeth, the new artists’ housing in Manhattan’s West Village, who put on a show of their work. Hilton Kramer of The New York Times singled out Ms. Golden in his review.
“There is nothing at all quiet about the paintings and drawings of Eunice Golden, the only woman in the show,” he wrote. “Her principal image is the phallus, which is depicted with an obsessive insistence. Unfortunately, the level of draftsmanship is art‐school academic, and the painting is simply inept.”
Even Ms. Neel once challenged her, saying, as Mr. Weissman recalled, “‘Eunice, why are you doing these kinds of paintings?’ And Eunice replied, ‘Someone has to.’”
Eunice Wiener was born on Feb. 18, 1927, in Brooklyn to Jean (Gurtov) Wiener and Samuel Wiener, who owned a metal machine company in Lower Manhattan. She grew up in the Manhattan Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, studied psychology for a year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and married Jack Goldenberg, an auctioneer and sculptor, when she was 19. Years later, she returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree from Empire State University in Manhattan in 1978 and a master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in 1980.
She and Mr. Goldenberg settled in Scarsdale, N.Y., where they had two children. She began painting, shortening her name to Golden because Goldenberg, she said, was too long a signature to fit on a canvas. Theirs was a bohemian household in a sea of suburban sameness, said Robin Golden, Ms. Golden’s daughter (who also shortened her surname).
In 1969, Ms. Golden divorced her husband and headed to New York City, eventually moving into Westbeth. Besides her paintings and drawings, she made photographs of male and female nudes that she had painted with geometric shapes or wrapped in cellophane. She spoofed motion-studies photos with a depiction of a penis in various stages of arousal. And in 1973, she made a short film, “Blue Bananas and Other Meats,” which shows a woman’s hands decorating a penis with a cornucopia of food, including chocolate syrup and bananas — something of a homage to a Meret Oppenheim performance piece from 1959, except that Oppenheim served her feast on a woman.
It would take a women’s cooperative to regularly show her work. Ms. Golden was an original member of Soho20, which opened on Spring Street in 1973. Other members included Ms. Sleigh as well as Joan Glueckman and Mary Ann Gillies, who jointly founded the gallery.
“She spoke of feeling censored at all moments of her life,” said Aliza Edelman, who curated a show of Ms. Golden’s recent work, richly colored paintings that look like giant and otherworldly plant life, at the Sapar gallery in TriBeCa in 2020. “She really did consider censorship as a rape of the mind and the soul, and she fought an uphill battle for most of her life and career. Yet she was confident and fearless, and felt like she deserved to have a place in history.”
In addition to Mr. Weissman and her daughter, Ms. Golden is survived by a granddaughter and a great-grandson. Her son, Carl Goldenberg, died in 1995.
In 2003, the Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea organized a retrospective of Ms. Golden’s work, one of a series of exhibitions Mr. Algus presented that year of overlooked and unsung feminist artists working in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Holland Cotter, in his review for The Times, noted that the show conveyed “a sense of the political anger, antic humor and conceptual experimentation that characterized the tangy first wave of the women’s movement.”
“Ms. Golden’s 1970s paintings are of particular interest,” he added. “Some prefigure the work by younger artists now, as in the case of a tall, scroll-like biomorphic piece that suggests a proto-Carroll Dunham. Others perform exploratory surgery on artists from Courbet to Magritte. Still others, like the three-panel ‘Triptych for the Bicentennial’ (1975), with its half-abstract merging of bodies and maps, prove how quiet and beautiful political art can be.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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