Eunice Golden is an American feminist painter from New York, known for exploring sexuality using the male nude. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Westbeth Gallery, and SOHO20 Gallery, among others.
Eunice Golden's father fled Russia after a pogrom and her mother was the American-born daughter of Russian immigrants. She was raised in Brooklyn. Golden studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin before leaving school to focus on her art. She rebelled against the patriarchal views of her father and sought "to demystify the male nude and sexuality," as noted by the art historian Gail Levin. Golden's work paralleled ideas that emerged in women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1977, her Landscape #160 was included in Nothing But Nudes, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was praised in Art International by Carter Ratcliff.
In 1973, Golden began to explore performance, body-art, photography and film. Her group of films, Blue Bananas and Other Meats (1973), extends the painted Male Landscapes into performances in which the male body is covered with an assortment of foods, much like the Spring Banquet by the Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim.
In the 1980s, her work focused on portraits and satiric anthropomorphic studies. In the 1990s she completed her Swimmers series, which was centered around the closeness of mother and child.
Portrait by Bernice B. Perry
