Bea Arthur topless painting sells for nearly $2M
By NATALIE O'NEILL
Last Updated: 10:16 PM, May 15, 2013
Posted: 10:14 PM, May 15, 2013
John Currin -- "Bea Arthur Naked," oil on canvas, Painted in 1991.
It’s Golden Girls gone wild!
A topless painting of actress Bea Arthur — famous for her role as Dorothy on the TV show “Golden Girls” — sold for nearly $2 million at a Christie’s auction in Manhattan tonight.
Artist John Currin’s controversial “Bea Arthur Naked” — which depicts the elderly star with a blank expression and bare sagging breasts — was purchased by an anonymous bidder over the phone for $1.9 million.
Currin, a painter who lives in Brooklyn, is known for campy works featuring women in provocative positions.
Some his portraits feature scantily clad woman, others are more dignified such as Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer.
But the bare-breasted Bea Arthur piece, which the former “Maude” actress never actually sat for, was derided as misogynist by critics when it came out.
Some writers even urged art lovers to boycott Currin’s shows in the early 90s. But his work is now widely acclaimed and hangs in museums such as the Whitney.
A Christie’s spokesman called the painting “visually lasting.”
“It’s historically significant — it’s radical to sexualize someone people think of as asexual,” spokesman Koji Inoue said.
He added, “The painting has a visual toughness to it — but it’s also fun.”
“Bea Arthur Naked” first stirred controversy in 1991, when critics blasted it for being sexist and misogynistic.
Others argued it was actually a feminist statement about confidence and age.
The New Yorker described the series that includes the portrait as “acrid fantasy portraits of menopausal women.”
Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary art sale also featured paintings by Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein at 20 Rockefeller Center in Midtown.