Rosemarie Beck

Rosemarie Beck

American, born 1923

A.B. Oberlin College

Columbia University

New York University

Artist in Residence at Middlebury College, spring terms in 1959–60

Lecturer in Fine Arts, spring term 1963

Member, National Academy of Design, New York

Selected Collections

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C.

Middlebury College Museum of Art

National Academy of Design, New York

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Weatherspoon Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

When Rosemarie Beck taught at Middlebury, there were only two full-time members of the art faculty. She became a visiting artist, returning to campus during spring term over a period of years. Students at the time were working from nature, she recalls, specifically from still lifes set up for them in the Carr Hall studios.

Because she was interested in painting the figure in the late 1950s, Beck considered her work of that time somewhat eccentric. Painters were stuck in what Hans Hofmann called the “push-pull,” or the tension between the illusion of space and the preeminence of the picture surface. You could not “model or make allusions to atmosphere,” and there was such an emphasis on the flatness of the picture surface that you could not imagine anything, not even a pin, piercing it.

Her 1961–62 painting Le Macquillage, or makeup, is emblematic of making art and making up. The composition is based on figures and objects drawn from life, while the subject alludes to the classical theme of the three graces.

A retrospective exhibition of Beck’s works was on view at Queens College, New York, in 1999.

Rosemarie Beck lives and paints in New York, where she teaches at the New York Studio School.