“Earthly Paradise” is now on view at Van Doren Waxter
November 13 2024 - January 10 2025
“It is my fate as a painter that I am perennially caught between opposing forces: Beginning - ending, finish - complete, flat + deep, formed + forming (made + unmade)”
Watch Rosemarie Beck's granddaughter and RBF Collection Manager, Doria Hughes, perform Greek myths and guide viewers on a narrative analysis of works currently showing in "Myths Retold: Paintings by Rosemarie Beck", now on view at UNH Durham's Museum of Art. Many never-before-seen artworks from the RBF Collection are also included in this video performance!
Beck's determination to keep "everything moving to and through everything" enabled her to orchestrate large and spatially complex compositions while keeping a vitality of stroke and play of light rippling over the entire surface. In this way she has become one of the few painters of recent years to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous. Martica Sawin in "Never Form, But Forming" (2001)
Now Available from Soberscove Press: ROSEMARIE BECK: LETTERS TO A YOUNG PAINTER AND OTHER WRITINGS
Edited by Eric Sutphin
Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career. In addition to her five decades of visual work, Beck left behind volumes of letters, journals, and essays on art—ranging from formal analysis of the canon, her own work, and the works of her peers to Letters to a Young Painter, an epistolary lecture project.
In the writings gathered here, Beck approaches her subjects in the same manner as she would have approached a complex narrative painting: through a richly textured combination of literary allusion, metaphor, direct observation, and autobiography. Rosemarie Beck: Letters to a Young Painter and Other Writings brings together a selection of Beck’s writings for the first time, situating her distinctive voice within the milieu of mid-century artist-writers.
Follow The Rosemarie Beck Foundation on Instagram @rosemarie.beck.foundation
!["One day [Guston] presented his little daughter to us early Halloween morning before he was to drive her to the school party. The evening before had been riotously spent inventing a witch’s costume consisting of a marvelously illuminated s](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/597015ec37c58150516cddef/1509464136797-KSE73K9C9IN2GK4YJM8Z/image-asset.jpeg)
![“[Beck’s] massive rhythmic forms and the gouged-out alcoves of her amorous intellectual interiors seemed rich and powerful-rich in associations but powerfully present in themselves. She spoke of wholes against parts, of building and movin](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/597015ec37c58150516cddef/1507085269309-M8CFUSCX05MWDCMJ6ROK/image-asset.jpeg)
*All images © The Rosemarie Beck Foundation