Hugh Auchincloss Steers

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American painter whose work, primarily figurative painting, is featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum. He painted in a style that mixed dreamlike allegory with Expressionist-tinged realism and incorporated art history references. In the 1990s, his work increasingly dealt with AIDS and many of his paintings showed male figures alone nearly nude or clothed in women's attire. Steers also depicted pairs of men bathing, dressing each other, and embracing. In his final works, he painted a self-portrait of a man dressed in a white hospital gown with white high heels. The figure is shown entering the lives of other characters as both an avenging and a guardian angel. Steers was the son of noted parents, Nina Gore Auchincloss and Newton Steers. In 1974, his parents divorced and later that same year, his mother married her second husband, Michael Straight. Steers was openly gay and died of AIDS related complications on 1 March 1995 in New York City at the age of 32. Link to Wikipedia biography