Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003)

Born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants in New York, Rosemarie Beck graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1944. She later studied at Columbia University, the Art Students League in New York, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and in the ateliers of Kurt Seligmann and Robert Motherwell. In 1945, she married writer Robert Phelps and they moved to Woodstock, N.Y., where she struck up friendships with neighbors Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin, artists who influenced her early work.

Beck was initially regarded as a member of the second generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, and her work was often exhibited at shows at the Stable and Peridot galleries, as well as at the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Beck considered herself an abstract expressionist, but by the late 1950s, she had switched to the figurative focus that she would retain for the rest of her life. Beck described her transition this way: “The ore in my abstract veins had thinned. I thought I would nourish my abstract painting by painting subjects. Then I couldn’t go back. I must have been a secret realist all along because I had never stopped drawing from life.”

Beck became “one of the few painters of our time 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,” according to critic Martica Sawin. She taught in the Fine Art departments at Queens College of New York, Vassar College, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, Parsons School of Design, and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, where she was on the faculty until shortly before she died.