Nicole Eisenman at the Tipping Point

In the basement of an old museum, the artist Nicole Eisenman grabbed a cordless hacksaw and started demolishing the past.

It was a scorching morning in June and Eisenman was excavating a mischievous mural sealed for decades behind a wall of the former Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, where it had caused such a sensation at the 1995 Biennial. It was a panoramic, Boschian vision of the museum’s destruction, where everything from Hopper paintings to Warhol prints had been crushed, and the institution’s president left unconscious. Only Eisenman’s artwork, “Exploded Whitney,” was left standing at ground zero.

Nicole Eisenman’s “Exploding Whitney,” a mural seen at the 1995 Whitney Biennial. At center, bottom, is a self-portrait of the artist dying, an allusion to the artist’s past struggles with addiction.Credit…Nicole Eisenman, via the Whitney Museum of American Art; Photo by Geoffrey Clements

Now Eisenman was methodically reducing the chaotic mural to rubble, but there was another scene of destruction that most art historians have overlooked in the retelling of how Eisenman became one of the most important painters of Generation X. Splayed across the foot of the 30-foot-wide painting is a self-portrait of the artist dying, an allusion to Eisenman’s past struggles with heroin addiction.

Eisenman — who is 59, gender fluid and often uses they/them pronouns — kept these struggles with drugs a secret from the public for nearly three decades — most of their art career — but is now ready to reveal that they created the mural at one of their lowest points, during a sleepless week at the beginning of drug treatment. Look closely above and to the right: It’s a portrait of the doctor, Ann Bordwine Beeder, who the artist said provided lifesaving care.