The Brooklyn Rail

At Van Doren Waxter, Rosemarie Beck: Earthly Paradise is a kaleidoscopic glimpse at the subjects, themes, and formal concerns that Beck (1923–2003) examined over her prolific, iconoclastic career. With paintings and embroideries spanning 1959 to 2000, Beck's figurative work, which she bravely pursued after her break with total abstraction starting in the mid-1950s, is a resolute but continuously evolving brushstroke medley of color and shape in service of narrative. She amalgamated her everyday observations with imaginative interpretations of centuries-old stories through continual themes like Greek mythic heroes and her son, herself, or families relaxing in a city park or on the beach. Throughout the exhibition's three galleries, Beck's acuity and prescience as a genre-bending, even proto-conceptual, artist is evident, as is her tenacity in refusing singular styles, motifs, or media.

Multiplicity consistently absorbed Beck. The exhibition's front gallery focuses exclusively on interior scenes, almost all playing with portraiture, self-portraiture, and the variances of identity or perspective. In Double Portrait (1959), a large-scale oil on linen, Beck portrays two young boys at a table, an open art book before them. Both boys avoid our gaze, with one looking downward and pointing to the book and the other staring off to the right. Beck's characteristic mélange of soft, short brushstrokes in browns, blues, and reds crisply delineates her subjects. Each of her hundreds of strokes is individual, with variances in texture, length, and shape visible up close, the gestural disparity coalesces into a harmonious whole. As with the surface, a close examination of the subjects reveals other meanings. The boys look to be twins, but the work's title suggests duplicity in the subject. Double Portrait is of Beck's only son, Roger; that he looks both inward towards the artbook and outward beyond the composition implies a conflict between internal vision and external pressures. The book might be an allusion to Roger's artist mother or his poet and publisher father, Robert Phelps, who edited Colette's autobiography, Earthly Paradise. As in elsewhere in this gallery, Beck uses variations of elongated pointillist brushwork to imply doubles or reference literary themes, as in Study, Two in a Room (1967), Eurydice Mourned I (1970), or the confidently loose Study: Self Portrait (2000), which, like her painting of Roger forty years prior, depicts twin figures occupied in different activities, the works title the only suggestion that the pair is actually a single. Like Colette in her "earthly paradise," Beck delights in representing multitudes of stories, scenes, and experiences that comprise the multifariousness of life.

Working from observation was not in vogue when Beck came of age as an artist in the early 1950s. Though at first embracing abstraction as her New York contemporaries did, she broke with the style by the mid-1950s, fully fracturing with friends and peers in her turn to figuration by 1958 (a year before Double Portrait (1959) and a full decade before her friend and neighbor Phillip Guston more famously did in the late 1960s). Beck trusted and followed her own vision, often literally, as she painted from life and outdoors in summers in New England as a guest of friends (while she exhibited throughout her life, she made a modest living as a studio art professor at a number of colleges and art schools). A self-portrait of her painting outdoors, Self Portrait Painting (1973), depicted in her seldomly-exhibited, lesser-known embroidery, is at the center of the exhibition. In it, Beck sits at an outdoor easel with an umbrella, her figure, and painting setup just barely outlined within long, looping stitches of colored thread. She worked in embroidery throughout her life, but never showed it, fearing it would be considered “women’s work," and consequently trivialized. In Self Portrait Painting, her palette is muted, and shapes less detailed than later examples presented in the back room. In these, Concert in Tuscany (1989) and At the Wall (1987), Beck’s bright colors and careful, sharp stitches mimic the painstaking brushwork of her paintings. And as in her paintings, what she sees around her is vibrantly reimagined in interdependencies of line, shape, and color.

Some of the most enigmatically absorbing works on view are the studies Cape Landscape (1973), Bathers (1976), and Study (1972), installed near the embroidery works. In each, there’s an immediacy to Beck’s signature dappled stroke, as if, in her rush to catch the scene before it expires, she lets her ardent defense of figuration tease into pure form. This temporal element affects a more relaxed confidence in her compositions and coloration alike, a feeling she achieves in the paintings Bathers and Diana and Actaeon (both 1985). Both effervescent in their vibrant, almost electric palettes, these works are triumphant in their hybridization of abstraction, figuration, and idea as they transliterate observation and expression into non-linear narrative.