The Art of the Golden Girls

What would happen if Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia met the Girls Gone Wild cameras in a dark alley? Forty artists have an idea.

By Peter Gilstrap
Published: Dec 01, 2007

Of all the strange and astounding sights one expects to see on Hollywood Boulevard, the breasts of Bea Arthur are not one of them. Or is that two of them? Yet here they are, exhibited in a frank portrait of a somewhat coy-cum-stern Arthur wearing only an Isadora Duncan-style scarf, gracing a wall in the aptly named World of Wonder gallery for all of Tinsel Town to see.
The image is but one of many such pieces in the Golden Gals Gone Wild show, a collection of some 40 works by a band of Los Angeles artists devoted to glorifying, yes, TV’s Golden Girls.

In case you somehow missed the NBC sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1992, the girls (or “gals” in this case, due to legal reasons) that have inspired such creativity are Betty White, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Ms. Arthur, a quartet representing roughly 300 years of combined girlish talent.

goldengirls Curated by self-proclaimed Los Angeles journalist, glamour girl and glass eater Lenora Claire—who counts P.T. Barnum and William Castle among her influences—on closing night, the show is a hard thing to miss, even amid the frenetic Saturday night hustle on the boulevard.

The gallery’s showroom windows display a life sized naked image of a be-diapered Estelle Getty, breasts obscured by a thin sign reading REAL GRANNIES. A gold painted walker stands beside her, its own silent paean to aging. Around her, stuffed, misshapen heads of the Girls the size of medicine balls hang, staring blankly.

On the sidewalk in front of the gallery, mingling on the inlaid sidewalk stars of Jack Benny, Norm Crosby and Smilin’ Ed McConnell are various hipsters, a gaggle of punk/goth/suicide girl types sucking on cigarettes. A fellow apparently on the outside of a few drinks yells his pitch to blind-sided passersby: “Come in! Free art! Free booze!” The curious enter while camera toting tourists and mini-skirted Paris look-a-likes pretend to ignore him and scuttle by. “What, nothing?!” he sputters. “Idiots!”

It’s their loss. Inside the place is covered with a staggering array of the Golden Girls as you’ve never seen them before, art varying in style and medium that would have Robert Hughes either gagging or gushing. It’s hard to say.

The majority of the pieces imagine the women in a variety of revealing sexual poses that, depending on your taste, can come off as obvious and simple to hilarious and bold.

goldengirl Getty in the raw, legs spread, reclining on a massive hot dog. An exquisite portrait of a grinning, dimpled White, immaculate in quasi Nazi, body-hugging S&M garb. Arthur reborn as Medusa. A series of advert-style paintings of each Girl proffering a soda can bearing the label “Estrogen.” McClanahan with a lopsided grin, splayed out in a Confederate flag bikini.

And there, hobnobbing with art fans, is Lenora Claire herself, a towering woman with hair in a shade of day-glo-carrot-meets-blood that can’t be found in nature, skin white as milk and a calling card of a chest that is encouraged grandly by a leopard print bustier. She’s ready to explain the seemingly sensationalistic aesthetic behind the show, one that has brought coverage from the likes of NPR, the New York Times and TMZ.com.

“I appreciate the camp sensibility,” she says, “taking something familiar and removing it from its element. That’s one level people get to goof on, but there’s definitely a much deeper purpose to the show. It’s ironic, beautiful, erotic, all of the above. Living in L.A. as a woman you’re constantly around ageism, but why should it be so scary to people? I’ve always believed that art should be reactionary, you should have an opinion on it, you should think and you should feel, and that’s what brought about the show.”

goldengirl Beyond that, the catalyst was Claire’s eBay purchase of the topless Arthur painting by Angeleno Chris Zimmerman; the bidding war cost her $110. She hung it above her bed, where it engendered a “massive reaction.” The curator contacted artists she’d worked with. The guidelines? “I just said Golden Gals Gone Wild, whatever that means to you.”

For contributing artist VK7—a name the East L.A. native took to avoid being “judged as a woman or a Latina”—that meant “honoring older women.” “Most of America thinks to be sexy you have to be young, skinny and have a drug problem, but there are a lot of lovely women in their golden years that are very sexy,” she says.

VK7 grew up with the TV show, watching it with her grandmother, and brought in two portraits of Arthur and White in character, transfigured as a new wave vixen and a saint, respectively.

Having bid L.A. adieu, the Golden Gals show head out on the road, with Phoenix and New York as likely hosts, perhaps Tokyo, according to Claire. There’s talk of a book deal. Pieces are selling, artists are creating additions.

As for reaction from the four Girls themselves, now immortalized in a fashion they probably never dreamed, well, “I’ve invited the ladies,” says Claire, “but I never heard a word.”