Rosemarie Beck: Letters to a Young Painter and Other Writings

Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career. In addition to her five decades of visual work, Beck left behind volumes of letters, journals, and essays on art–ranging from formal analysis of the canon, her own work, and the works of her peers to Letters to a Young Painter, an epistolary lecture project. In the writings gathered here, Beck approaches her subjects in the same manner as she would have approached a complex narrative painting: through a richly textured combination of literary allusion, metaphor, direct observation, and autobiography. Rosemarie Beck: Letters to a Young Painter and Other Writings brings together a selection of Beck’s writings for the first time, situating her distinctive voice within the milieu of mid-century artist-writers.