Born in Philadelphia, Beckmann graduated from the University of Iowa with a MFA in 1967, and moved to Las Vegas in 1977 when the city hired him as a mural painter. Ideas about Nevada have informed several series of his works – his Body of a House canvases in the early 1990s were inspired by footage of bombs at the Atomic Test Site blowing houses apart, and Vegas Vanitas reconfigures seven classical oil paintings to include Strip casinos. Las Vegas is “in some ways a very funny town,” he said during a public talk in 2013. “As a scientist you can see two parts that don’t want to fit together, as making a new matrice, a new something-or-other, or maybe if you’re a writer, a filmmaker, you’re struck by the friction that those parts have. I prefer the comic approach, which is to see things in terms of non sequiturs.”
