Eunice Golden, a pioneering feminist artist, writer, and lecturer who over six decades created aggressively visceral images of male sexuality from a woman’s perspective, died last Thursday at her East Hampton residence and studio after a short illness. She was 98.
In a 2007 feature in The Star, Ms. Golden was described as painting in motion, “climbing up and down a ladder perched in front of a painting-in-progress. She and her art seem to defy gravity. The movement finds its way onto the canvas — the thrumming energy of the line, bold colors that appear to pulse, shapes and swirling strokes.”
The late Russian-American painter Ilya Bolotowsky, one of the leading abstract painters of the 20th century, likened Ms. Golden’s work to that of James Joyce “because of her free, flowing, and intuitive style,” The Star wrote. “Like Joyce’s, Ms. Golden’s work reflects a human sexuality depicted frankly and realistically, and there is also that ineffable Joycean stream of consciousness, as if she were inviting the viewer into an uncensored conversation, a dialogue without convention or boundaries.”
Much of her art was influenced by the South Fork’s natural environment, which she first experienced from her Gerard Drive cottage and Louse Point Beach in Springs, where she swam and basked in the ambient light with the artist Saul Steinberg and the writer and critic Harold Rosenberg in the early 1970s.
“Her first studio space on the East End, in the early 1970s, was the Parsons Blacksmith Shop in Springs, not far from where Jackson Pollock had lived,” The Star wrote in 2007. “She would often see Willem de Kooning cycling down the road.” It was there, in 1972, that she executed her seminal “Landscape #160,” which was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Nothing but Nudes” exhibition in 1977 and in Guild Hall’s 2002 show “Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969-1975.”
Ms. Golden had solo shows at the Elaine Benson and Clayton-Liberatore Galleries in Bridgehampton and the Prism Gallery in Port Jefferson, and her work was in group shows at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton and Ashawagh Hall in Springs, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Stamford Museum, the Indianapolis and Taft Museums, and numerous museums in Europe.
Her works are in the permanent collections of Guild Hall, the John Horseman Foundation, the Hudson River Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., now known as the New Mexico Museum of Art.
At present Ms. Golden’s work is exhibited at the Eric Firestone Gallery in Manhattan, and a solo show opens tomorrow at the Duane Thomas Gallery at 137 West Broadway in Manhattan.
On the latter gallery’s Facebook page, a message posted on Friday called Ms. Golden “a pioneering feminist artist renowned for her exploration of the male figure and gender through art” who “challenged societal norms by depicting the male nude from a female perspective.”
“Golden was an active participant in the feminist art movement,” the post continued. “In 1971, she joined the Ad Hoc Committee, advocating for gender equality in the art world. Two years later she became a member of the women’s cooperative gallery Soho 20, providing a platform for female artists to showcase their work.”
Eunice Golden was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 18, 1927, to Samuel Wiener and the former Jean Gurtov. She grew up there and studied art at Brooklyn College and the State University’s Empire State College in Manhattan. In the 2007 feature in The Star, she recalled married life in the late 1950s in a middle-class Westchester County suburb. Feeling trapped, she divorced, started teaching in the New York City school system, and “began to draw and paint works that shocked, thrilled, mystified, stirred, rankled, and stimulated.”
Ms. Golden is survived by her husband, the artist and photographer Walter Weissman; her daughter, Robin Golden; a granddaughter, Kierstyn Gates, and her husband, Justin Gates, and a great-grandson, Dane Marshall Gates. A son, Carl Goldenberg, died before her.
A service was held on Saturday at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, followed by burial at Green River Cemetery in Springs.
