Bea Arthur (1991), by John Currin

Bea Arthur inspired many people, including artist John Currin. In 1991 John Currin painted "Bea Arthur Nude". I saw this painting at his solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003.

Bea Arthur Nude (1991) - cropped by myself


Did Bea Arthur ever see this painting? If so, what did Bea think of this portrait? Was she flattered?

What does it feel like to have someone you've never met paint you nude, from their imagination? And, what would it feel like to see your imaginary breasts exhibited for the world to see at the Whitney Museum?

There are many things I'd have liked to ask Bea Arthur.

John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body.

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Connecticut, where he studied painting privately with a renowned traditionally trained artist from Odessa, Ukraine, Lev Meshberg. He went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984, and received a MFA from Yale University in 1986.

In New York City in 1989 he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook, and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when political themed art works were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men and asexual divorcee's, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings. When criticized for being sexist, Currin did not deny it, but did remark that he felt that "at that time [he] didn't feel like a man and [he] didn't feel like a woman." In 1992 a subsequent exhibition focused, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s Currin's ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling "for prices in the high six figures".More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes.

He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardenand the Tate Gallery.

Currin is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife and fellow artist, Rachel Feinstein. John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, in the front row at Marc Jacobs Spring 2006 show:


from: New York Magazine

Influences: John Currin

By Karen Rosenberg
Published Nov 19, 2006

Karen Rosenberg:You famously painted a topless portrait of Bea Arthur. Were you a big fan?

John Currin:Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.

From ArtForum:

John Currin - Critical Essay

ArtForum , Sept, 2003 by David Rimanelli
Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that '70s sitcom about an uppermiddle-class do-gooder, women's libber, and suburban wit--not Arthur's later incarnation in The Golden Girls. Naked, Arthur nevertheless remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the everyday antifeminist caricature. And Currin's technique, stiff but more than adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere snide laughter. Painted in the rapidly expanding '90s context of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might collect were she part of the scene?), Bea Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the "incorrect" representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a hang over from the '80s (think "Infotainment" and all those other group shows about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.