Rosemarie Beck: Paintings
1965 - 2001
New York Studio School
8 West 8th Street, New York
Tel. 212.673.6466
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
Rosemarie Beck Antigone
Before Creon 1991
oil on linen, 60 x 52 inches
Courtesy the Estate of Rosemarie Beck
Rosemarie Beck died in New York in July, 2003. This posthumous exhibition
is the final stop on a tour that originated at Wright State University,
Dayton, Ohio, in 2002. It is her first in Manhattan in fifteen years.
Since the closing of the Ingber Gallery in 1989, Beck's work has been
difficult to find. She seems to have made little effort to exhibit outside
the academic circuit. Gratitude is due the Studio School for hosting
this original and long overdue show.
Beck's early history as a
painter is askance of today's norm, with its emphasis on university
art departments. A graduate of Oberlin college with a B.A. in art history,
Beck's formal training was idiosyncratic. Her primary shaping influences
were life-drawing sessions at the Art Students' League and commentaries
from Robert Motherwell, in whose studio she worked as a young mother
and fledgling painter. Add to this friendship with Philip Guston and
Bradley Walker Tomlin, her neighbors in Woodstock. It was an auspicious,
liberating beginning,
I fell in love with her painting
when I first saw it. Such beautiful crystalline color! That hearty,
confident brush stroke that never fussed, never second-guessed or sweetened
itself. She drew with the brush, putting paint down and leaving it there,
as if in celebration of William Morris Hunt's dictum: "Draw firm
and be jolly!" She worked her way around her forms with vibrant,
delicately modulated color notes--a lesson learned from Cezanne. Her
dynamic, buttery touch was a conscious bow to the shimmering abstractions
of Philip Guston in the 50's. Ultimately, it became a signature mark
that brought a dancing, syncopated quality to her surfaces that continues
to enchant.
Rosemarie Beck Studio
with Lovers 1965-66
oil on linen, 50 x 60 inches
Seeing her paintings again,
after a long lapse of years, my first response was precisely what it
had been when I was a young painter. In sheer physical terms, her work
is as ravishing as ever. On other levels, I find myself-quite to my
own surprise-ambivalent. Yes, of course, you can go home again. But
when you get there, things are different.
Her many references to other
paintings distracted me this time. Sorting out the quotations became
a task in itself that siphoned attention away from what the paintings
achieve on their own. Artifice ought to be transparent, directing focus
away from itself in order to emphasize a larger purpose. But many of
Beck's referents seemed less like aids to invention than substitutes
for it. For example, which dead Christ-we have a choice-provided the
model for "Eurydice Mourned," (1971)? A Christ figure with
female breasts leaves the impression of a chunk of art history swallowed
whole, undigested. And what are we to make of that discreet loincloth
on a female whose breasts are left exposed? Models have to be chosen
carefully to avoid a clash of meaning and tone between the antecedent
and its inheritor.
Beck used classical subjects
as pretexts for the act of painting. She employed ancient narratives
in much the same way a composer makes use of musical staves. Each serves
primarily as a support for notation, musical in one, painterly in the
other. My favorite painting in this exhibition is "Antigone Before
Creon," (1991). The lively tempo of paint marks, tonal subtleties,
and faceted white dresses played against brooding blue-greens and blue-blacks
of the middle distance are deeply satisfying. But satisfaction on the
retina exists in inverse proportion to satisfaction with the theme.
The painting gives little hint of the gravity of its own subject.
Rosemarie Beck Euyridice
Mourned 1971
oil on linen, 50 x 60 inches
The story of Antigone is
one of the great founding myths of Western culture. Our own faith in
"inalienable rights" is rooted in the Sophoclean understanding
of transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable.
What we believe about the dignity of the human person finds expression
in the tale of Antigone.The profundity and civilizing grace of the myth
is not easy to convey pictorially. Certainly not for modern painters
who inhabit a cultural moment unmoored from the deepest currents of
its own history. The temptation is to turn ancient myth into a simple
narrative (most commonly, of individual rebellion) or costume drama.
Beck's classical references are ornamental, all flourish and arabesque.
Her dramatis personae are as radiant and cheerfully colored as
guests at a mid-summer garden party. Not quite the troupe to evoke a
tragic sense.
In a certain respect, Beck's
small free-wheeling gouaches are the most successful pieces in the show.
I particularly liked the pastel-toned ones, in which line and color
join in free, fluid movement. These are brief cantatas of great charm.
At heart, Beck was a musician, not a tragedian. And charm occupies a
world apart from tragedy.
In the 50's and 60's, when
figuration was on the defensive, Beck's painting was rightly considered
gutsy, against the prevailing rush to abstraction. But those days are
past. Now, we can look at the work without reference to a looming polemic.
Viewed without that external enhancement, Beck's figures seem less vital
than they once did. The finest figure on display is her own self-portrait.
She depicts herself as a physically imposing, even imperious, presence.
There is a veracity and power here that is lacking in other, psychologically
thinner, figures. In her own mirror was a fine model for Creon, if she
had wanted it.
of related interest: David
Cohen on Lovers: Drawings by Rosemarie
Beck and Paul Resika, 1968-69 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
