The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Rosemarie Beck at Van Doren Waxter
2024.12.3
Years ago, when I was Rosemarie Beck’s teaching assistant, I was struck by her passion, her ability to instill that passion in her students, and her creative approaches to assignments. More importantly for me, we became friends for life. Actually, I became one of her many students that became friends for life, as Rosemarie had so much love, so much belief in art, so much belief in the pursuit of authentic visual exploration, that she had enough energy to share with all of us. Now, through Jan. 10 at the Van Doren Waxter Gallery, we are all able to experience her intensity and humanity directly through a mini retrospective of her paintings, works on paper, embroideries, sketches, writing, correspondence and photographs, pulled from the Rosemarie Beck Foundation. This is a must-see show for anyone who loves the transcendent powers of paint. Initially pursuing music, Rosemarie enrolled in Oberlin’s prestigious Conservatory as a violinist, but soon switched to art history, and later life drawing classes at the Art Students League, but musical tempos remained within her, and breathe through all her art. Soon after college, Rosemary moved to Woodstock, where she circled in the 1950’s AbEx crowd, becoming good friends with Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin, and studio assistant to Robert Motherwell. Though her early paintings followed the ubiquitous AbEx trend, and she received important accolades and prestigious solo exhibitions, around 1959, Rosemarie Beck bucked the system, and followed her own voice by focusing on figurative art, and it is this representational art that the current show exhibits. An avid reader, Beck created complex compositions based on Greek/Roman mythologies, in addition to self and family portraits and landscapes, but more than from the subject matter, her paintings gain emotional resonance from their glorious color and light, their freedom within a strict discipline, her translation of emotion into gesture and mark-making, and the probing penetration of her gaze.
Doria Hughes (Rosemarie Beck Foundation Collection Manager and Archivist)