The 1950s were a time of turmoil for Beck, who started the decade as a solid practitioner of Abstract Expressionist painting, having studied with Robert Motherwell and other adherents of the so-called New York School. However, as the 50s progressed, Beck began to question her allegiance to non-objective modes, and figures began to stealthily emerge in her paintings. At the same time, she was drawing furiously, especially nudes and full-length figures. By the late 1950s, she had come to some measure of self-acceptance of her transgressive move away from abstraction, resolute devoting herself to the fertility of her newfound figurative mode.
In the late 1970s, Beck immersed herself fully in Shakespeare's magical and valedictory play "The Tempest". She identified closely with the main protagonist, the exiled duke and master magician, Prospero, conceiving him as an artist who wields his magic wand similarly to how she as a painter wielded her magical brush to create and alter reality as she saw fit.
Many of the "Tempest" works were set in Menemsha Cove, a lovely spot on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where Beck and her husband Robert spent time visiting friends. Martha's Vineyard proved to be a fertile source, and many of her Tempest scenes were explicitly set in particular favored locations on the island's western end, which locals call "Up Island."
On August 15, 1983, Beck wrote in her journal about her current area of interest for her paintings: "Ovidian narratives". This was a reference to her growing preoccupation with the Metamorphoses, a collection of ancient Greek narratives written down by the Roman poet Ovid in the first century AD.
Beck had already devoted almost five years in the early 1970s to one of Ovid's most famous narratives, the tragic tale of Orpheus. But in 1983 she was particularly focused on the story of Apollo and Daphne, in which a river nymph evades the unwanted sexual advances of the god Apollo, by transforming into a laurel tree. It is the ultimate case of a woman who is forced to take extreme action in order to preserve her autonomy in the face of unrelenting male pressure. Today, we would probably call it a #MeToo story.
Around 441 BC, the Greek writer Sophocles wrote a play about Antigone, part of a group of plays that concern the tragic figure of Oedipus. The narrative concerns the highly moral Antigone, daughter/sister of Oedipus, who insists upon her right to bury her dead brother, Polynices, in defiance of the orders of King Creon of Thebes. When she violates the king's command, she is arrested and brought to trial, and then put to death. In anguished rebellion, Creon’s son, Haemon - who was in love with Antigone - kills himself in protest of his father’s judgment. Antigone is vindicated posthumously for having followed divine "right" in defiance of human law.
Centuries later, the French writer Jean Anouilh wrote a play about Antigone during WWII, which was censored by the Nazis because of its implicit critique of the Vichy government. The character of Antigone is heroic and unshakably moral, refusing to compromise on what she believes to be right, and she gives her life in defense of her beliefs.
Beck's husband, Robert Phelps, died towards the end of 1989, so her work on Antigone coincided with her early widowhood; it was a means of confronting great grief. Beck was also still actively teaching as well as painting. She retired from Queens College, where she had been Professor of Fine Art for many years, and then began teaching at the New York Studio School, in lower Manhattan, very near her studio (which is now the RBF Studio space).
Despite the the story of Antigone being essentially tragic, it is also about doing the right thing even when it is dangerous or difficult. At its core is a stubborn woman holding her ground in the face of male criticism; Antigone is in defiance of the status quo and she is punished, but also vindicated for validating Truth. It makes sense that Beck was drawn to this theme. Ultimately, of course, it was the characters and their movements that attracted her; she was always on the lookout for “pretexts” that would work well as paintings.
Painted by Beck when she was in her mid-70s, the “Phaedra" cycle was the last of her great mythological cycles. Beck had retired as a Professor of Art at Queens College in 1990, however, when she was invited to join the faculty of the New York Studio School a few years later, she could not resist the opportunity to resume teaching. Teaching had always been a nourishing and enlivening activity that acted as an energizing, propulsive force behind her painting practice, and so it proved to be in Beck's elder years.
The tragedy of Phaedra, based on a play by Euripides, is the means by which Beck framed the series’ primary figures: Phaedra’s Nurse and the Attendants. These latter working women - a nod to the foreground figures in "The Spinners" by her venerated master, Velazquez - busily adorn the walls around their queen with large bolts of cloth, as if to mark out the space as female territory. These women are always on their feet, engaged in physical labor that seems incidental to the drama playing out in their midst. Yet their omnipresent activity cannot be ignored. The image of a woman handling cloth with professional skill inevitably leads us back to Beck herself, a woman who demonstrates assured mastery of the wrought canvas, whether painted or sewn.
Throughout her life, Rosemarie Beck was devoted to classical music, reflecting her early training as a violinist. She performed with the Woodstock Quartet in the late 1940s-early 1950s, and later with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, while on the Fine Art faculty at Middlebury College. She loved playing chamber music at Yaddo in the evenings, and was close friends with several prominent American composers. Musicianship and performance - particularly highlighting string players - is a recurrent theme in her artworks. This is most notable in her “Orpheus” series of the early 1970s, in which she depicted the ancient Greek tragic musician alternatively as a guitar player, cellist and violinist, and in her later “Concert in Tuscany” series of the late 1990s, in which she places a string quartet in a north Italian landscape. Her late self portraits include a lute, symbolizing her enduring connection to music, even after a car accident rendered her unable to physically play her beloved “fiddle.” She made it a habit to listen to classical music on the radio while painting in her studio, and occasionally identified with the character of the “Countess” from Mozart’s great opera Don Giovanni, one of her favorites.
