Eunice Golden
Eunice Golden (born 1927) is an American feminist painter from New York City, 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. Early life, education, and political involvement. Eunice Golden's father fled Russia after a pogr In 1973, Golden joined the "Fight Censorship Group," which was organized by Anita Steckel in response to restrictions imposed on the sexually explicit works in Steckel's solo exhibition, "The Sexual Politics of Feminist Art" (1973 ), at Rockland Community College. In addition to Steckel and Golden, "Fight Censorship" included Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, Joan Glueckman, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Joan Semmel, Anne Sharpe, and Hannah Wilke. Also in 1973, Golden was a founding member of the all-women cooperative art gallery SOHO20, where her work was exhibited until 1981. Work. Golden's paintings in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the male nude as a way to explore sexuality, struggle, and desire. She later explained that her early paintings of the male anatomy were not "heretical" or "revolutionary" but "a stream of consciousness outpouring  of emotionally and sensually charged images that reflected who I was: a heterosexual woman with erotic needs and fantasies, yet struggling to redefine myself. ... In retrospect, I saw that I had unwittingly addressed, on a subliminal level, ideologies, experiences, and perceptions of a broad audience." By the mid-1970s, Golden's feminist position was necessary to understand the larger impact of her erotic work. In particular, her "Male Landscapes" addressed the "phallacy" of male power as Golden's voyeuristic role reversed the erotic gaze from the long-established notion of the male as viewer and female as sexualized object. The art  critic Peter Frank recognized the "visual power" her "Male Landscapes" as "quite compelling." 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.