Beauchamp was an American figurative painter and arts educator known for dramatic figures and expressive colors. Robert Beauchamp studied with Boardman Robinson at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and attended Cranbrook Academy of Art before working with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. In 1953 he gave up abstract art, believing it to be too esoteric and remote from immediate life, and returned to painting the figure. Beauchamp's approach, however, was to "distort, fantasize and pile in the images ... to paint objects with the subtleties of natural forms and the subjectivity possible through abstraction." In the decades after he began exhibiting, Beauchamp received several grants, traveled to Rome on a Fulbright fellowship (1959), and held several teaching positions. A New York resident in his later years, Beauchamp exhibited regularly and painted fanciful, sometimes horrific, scenes in which "reality" provided as important a source of inspiration as did the imagination.
