Contents 2 Text 5 Doug Unger 9 Scott Dickensheets 10 Dawn-Michelle Baude 15 Images 16 Vegas Vanitas 20 Kin 22 Body of a House 24 Under Water 30 Biography / CV 32 Note 33 Acknowledgments
2
“Longing and melancholy, along with slow satisfactions and long-lasting pleasures, suffuse all the works in his ‘Vegas Vanitas’ series, creating a deep sense of mystery at a time when such wondrous sentiments are in short supply.” - David Pagel on Beckmann’s
“readily accessible - yet rigorously intellectual”, “masterfully glazed paintings” in catalog essay “Vegas Vanitas, New Work by Robert Beckmann” Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2001
"Outside of town -- out there somewhere near nowhere -- they tested the instruments of ultimate destruction. In coolly drawn, ominous monochromes, Robert not-so-carefully-controlled simulation of doomsday. Frighteningly serene, his paintings contemplate the attraction of the apocalypse with a nearly religious conviction. Ending it all is a secular revelation, a unifying event, a moment when we live only for today. - Michael Duncan, LA Contributing Editor, Art in America, catalog for "Four Way Stop", UNLV, February 9, 1998
Libby Lumpkin, from the 2001 “Vanitas” catalog interview with Beckmann, poses a question that he answers with eerily accurate insights. Beckmann’s predictions of the present struggles of the region and the country are evident in his latest works
“Is Las Vegas history’s worst tragedy or greatest comedy?” - Libby Lumpkin “Clark County may become tragic if it continues growing as fast as it has been. If the essence of comedy is the non sequitur, or the disjunctive,Vegas is comic” -Robert Beckmann
Series of paintings 3
TEXT Name of work | discription (date)
Text {Doug Unger} Beckmann Meditatio 5
BECKMANN postmodern America where representation has become reality. Whatever must precede our human test site; then begins the slow rise of waters over hollowed out houses and abandoned resort towers in of inferno; contextual windows of idyllic baroque landscapes look out on violent implosions of our landmarks and the ruins of our history; the faintest pink cloud glows through a roiling greyness that surrounds the blue beauty and splendor shimmer under surfaces that evoke a crushed calm of the true deep. Las Vegas is the city of dreams; the city of second chances; the city where the dust of stars is continually falling; the city most society. We must stand thunderstruck at Robert Beckmann’s recognition of this necessity, awed by more than thirty years of his vision showing in these master works. Fine art must mean something if the art means to last. Beckmann paints what we have made of our dream city, what we have let happen here, and what this Doug Unger
6 Essays {writer} title
Series of paintings 7
Name of work | discription (date)
Text {Scott Dickensheets} Introduction: A Matter of Control 9
A
ny time I'm about to refer to Robert Beckmann as "Bob," I stop and switch to "Robert" — usually before anything pops from my mouth, but not always, so sometimes I wind up stammering, "B-uh-Robert." (It sounds even more awkward than it looks.) This, I should add, is not at Robert's request; he's never expressed a preference as to what I call him, and I'm quite certain I called him "Bob" all the time back when I didn't know him very well. No, this is my own thing. I can't think of him as a Bob anymore — that single weightless, too casual syllable, obviously short for something a bit more formal. So what's changed? Just this: I've looked at — I mean really looked at, and thought deeply about — his paintings. Robert's work has many attributes, but one of the most striking is their sense of control, an element that Dawn-Michelle Baude notes in her excellent catalog essay. Get nose-to-nose with the pieces of The Body of a House or Vegas Vanitas; the complete command of technique evident on every square inch of the surface is a visual analog for the utter conceptual precision required to pack so much Jung, alchemy, philosophy, Eastern religion, history and art history into paintings that don't clank with flyaway meanings. Everything harmonizes toward the larger significances that writer Douglas Unger talks about in his catalog contribution. It's no surprise, then, that Body has toured to 20 museums around the nation and in Russia (the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno now owns the series). So the more time I spent looking at and pondering Robert's paintings, more and more taken with their formal mastery, the less right "Bob" sounded. Calling him "Robert" seemed a way of acknowledging something essential about his work, and therefore, I guess, about him. His new paintings totally jacked that line of thinking. Not long ago, Robert showed me his Underwater series, and what did I see: runny paint! In his very deliberate way, Beckmann has been experimenting with spontaneity — pouring paints onto the canvas and seeing where they flowed — uncontrolled! — and how he might usefully mix his usual authority with its very opposite. He found this, he told me, liberating and thrilling with its potential for a new way to make art this deep into his career. This might sound like a small tweak, but in fact it may very well be a major update to the operating system of one of our most important artists. I can't wait to see what B-uh-Robert goes from here.
10 Text {Dawn-Michelle Baude} Prospective
R
obert Beckmann's "Retrospective" is a misnomer. "Prospective" is a more accurate word for an artistic output that synchs with an art world currently shifting gears. Beckmann's five decades of work—from the early abstractions to the major cycles, including the iconographic excursions in Vegas Vanitas, the apocalyptic alchemy in Body of the House, and the metaphorical nexus of the current Underwater series—seem poised to satisfy an art world weary of the wit and irony of postmodernism and in search of richness and depth. As the paradigm shifts, Beckmann—who's been out-of-step for most his career—has stumbled into the new frame. "Stumble" is an important term in Beckmann's world. The etymology is instructive, because Beckmann, who abandoned a career in philology, knows words. "Stumble" originally meant to take a misstep, but also refers to serendipity and chance. Beckmann, who has a virtuoso's command of artistic technique, views mistakes in the process of art making as vehicles of intuition, flubs as requisite to discovery—physical events that challenge the artist to break through the familiar into the unknown. By linking the "stumble" to artistic risk, and to the physical entrainment of the artist's body in the creative enterprise, Beckmann positions himself in the aesthetic camp that privileges immediacy and sensation over the deliberations of reason in the experience of art. His principal source is Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). To paraphrase Burke, art that strikes us deeply is "sublime," a quality that involves "astonishment, admiration, reverence and respect" as well as "fear." Chiaroscuro is an identifying feature of Burke's sublime, along with vastness, power and obscurity, and a nagging, if not terrifying, sense of incomprehensibility. The description would end up almost Gothic, were it not for the component of pleasure—despite its alarming attributes, the sublime is oddly appealing. No matter how disturbing the art object, the viewer is safe in a gallery or museum, and so can afford feelings of awe and wonder. While all of Beckmann's major work lends itself to discussion of Burke's criteria, the Las Vegas-based artist has his own version of three site-specific sublimes: the casino, the Nevada test site, and the desert, all of which overwhelm, disorient and, perhaps more reluctantly, fascinate. Consider, for example, Beckmann's Vegas Vanitas cycle. The eight, large format (48" X 66") paintings, completed in 2000-01, adopt slow, Old Masters techniques, such as glazing (applying transparent layers), scumbling (applying light opaque paint over a darker color) and grisaille (a system of underpainting). The hard-won intensity of the resulting picture plane delivers a proficient wallop and follows-up with a disorienting disconnect. By combining Old Masters methods and imagery—appropriated from Nicolas Poussin, J. M. W. Turner, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Thomas Cole—with contemporary Las Vegas landmarks and architecture, Beckmann invents his own allegoric semantics. In The Fifth Plague, for example, instead of the two dead horses Turner placed in the foreground of original, Beckmann paints a wrecked Ford
Text {Dawn-Michelle Baude} Prospective 11
Pinto, while in Renewal, he substitutes the ritualistic implosion of the Dunes hotel for Wright of Derby's ceremonial Vatican fireworks. Although the visual puns and comic displacements in the Vegas Vanitas are amusing, vanitas paintings of the 16th- and 17th-century were anything but. Featuring grim reminders of the transience of life, such as crusty skulls and wilting blossoms, the historic vanitas relied on a language of symbols common to Western Christians. A few sly reminders aside, Beckmann swaps vanitas stock in trade for iconic Sin City imagery, situating it in European landscapes oozing allegory at every level, from the splashy beam of sun light pouring through the menacing cloud cover to the open book in the architect's hand. The Las Vegas icons, in turn, symbolize the city of Las Vegas, which then is symbolized by the Strip, which itself symbolizes excess, greed, sin, and so on. The overdetermined meaning in Beckmann's vanitas series easily tempts narrative interpretations on the perils of commercial and material culture, when arguably the paintings point the other way, into a hall of mirrors. The etymological root of vanitas means "empty," but this "empty" potentially signifies a recursive infinity in which various art critical readings (historical, psychological, biographical, literary, religious) multiply and compete for attention— Burke's sublime, appropriately writ large. In The Body of a House (1992-93) cycle, eight 69" x 96.5" paintings permanently 'housed' in the Nevada Art Museum (Reno), and Secular Light (1994), seventeen 15" x 20" paintings held in a private collection, the subject matter is disturbing, fraught and stunning. Although the cycles are distinct in size and style, both Body of a House and Secular Light were generated from film stills shot at the Nevada Test Site, and both are conceived as cinematic sequences, the former of a wooden-frame house in the path of "a nuclear device nicknamed Annie," the latter a "doom town" detonation. Here, as elsewhere, Beckmann's works engage the process and fallout, literally and figuratively, of the Cold War nuclear project. Over the course of the last three decades, Beckmann has painted incandescent mushroom clouds; muscular, polychromic explosions; the calligraphic filigree of primordial shock waves; and the sludgy disintegration of matter transmuting into nonexistence—the sublime at its most terrifying. In trying to come to terms with a Cold War undertaking that subsists at the limits of comprehension, Beckmann is responding to his own biographical imperative. Two facts: Beckmann was deeply marked by films of atomic explosions as a child, and Beckmann's youthful mentor was disfigured in a laboratory explosion. In this sense, Beckmann's The Body of a House and Secular Light cycles recall Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 series (completed in 1988), based on images of the Red Army faction (the Baader-Meinhof Gang) that haunted the German artist. Also like Richter, Beckmann processes photographic images in various ways in his art works, with results that range from hyper-realistic detailing to brushy entropy. Although Beckmann's Retrospective includes at least four paintings explicitly contending with the Nevada Test Site, the destructive content is sublimated in other works, such as Firefall
12 Text {Dawn-Michelle Baude} Prospective
(2009), which ostensibly takes a California wildfire as its subject, but which iterates the nuclear conflagration with a gently dripping rain of fire, the trees glowing with an almost reverent light. Another standout is Oak (2013), a mesmerizing crimson and black 56" x 50" canvas in which Beckmann uses enamel and vintage sign-painting techniques, wiping the paint away with a rag and then reworking the surface, gradually building up a laminated image that corresponds to an atomic auto-da-fÊ. Oak is a modern Burning Bush, a fiery palimpsestic shorthand for the 8.9 megaton Marshall Island explosion in 1958, when atmospheric tests were perversely named after trees and scientists were intoxicated with their own omnipotence. Even in the recent "underwater" series, the clouds loom, although Beckmann has switched alchemical elements, from fire to water. Returning to Las Vegas in 2012 after seven years in Oregon, the artist was struck by the ubiquity of the depressed real estate market, which led him to paint a series of works that use underwater housing as subject matter, from the town of St. Thomas, literally submerged in 1938 by the rising waters of Lake Mead, to the figuratively submerged Fontainebleau resort project, a doomed hulk of iridescent blue at the north end of the Strip. Some of the paintings in this series are elegiac, such as the nighttime Departure (2013), with its Rothko-esque gray and blue color fields coalescing and vibrating in the picture plane, although the eye stays anchored on the figure departing the house for the boat, with the river distorting the scene in the foreground. Underwater (2013) is more robust in tone, theatrically depicting the St. Thomas Hotel in the thrall of a watery apocalypse. The buildings, like other subjects on the verge of annihilation, conversely reify survival, as if the creative act could not shed the destruction and violence with which it is existentially linked. In taking on big subjects, and dealing with the enormity of imagination and experience, as Burke required, Beckmann takes on big risk, stumbles and all. In doing so, he succeeds more, impresses more, wows more, surprises more—stops us in our tracks and makes us look because there's literally more at stake. Life is at stake. And death. Creation and destruction. Carl Jung's understanding of alchemy is never far from Beckmann's mind—that by manipulating elements in reality, alchemists aimed at manipulating inner states. Beckmann's gold is his art.
13
Essays {writer} title 15
IMAGES
16 Vegas Vanitas
“The Fifth Plague”, (based on J.M.W. Turner: “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” 1800), | oil on linen, 48” x 66 (2001)
Vegas Vanitas 17
“Eighty-Sixed from Paradise” (based on Thomas Cole: “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”, 1827-1828) | oil on linen, 44” x 61”(2001)
18 Vegas Vanitas
“The Death of the First Born”, (based on J.M.W. Turner: “The Tenth Plague of Egypt”, 1802) | oil on linen, 44” x 72” (2001)
Vegas Vanitas 19
“Renewal”, (based on Joseph Wright of Derby: “Annual Girandola of Castel St. Angelo”, 1776) | oil on linen, 48” x 61” (2001)
20 Kin
“Kin – Nuclear Family #1” (of 4) | oil oncanvas, 24” x 32” (2007)
“Kin – Nuclear Family #2” (of 4) | oil oncanvas, 24” x 32” (2007)
Kin 21
“Kin – Nuclear Family #3” (of 4) | oil oncanvas, 24” x 32” (2007)
“Kin – Nuclear Family #4” (of 4) | oil oncanvas, 24” x 32” (2007)
22
Body of a House
“Test House – Fire” | oil on canvas, 18” x 24 (2008)
Body of a House 23
“Test House – Concussion” | oil on canvas, 18” x 24 (2008)
24 Under Water
The Vegas Graces | mixed media on canvas, 42"x48"(2013)
Under Water 25
"The Impecunious Cloud" | acrylic on canvas, 66" x 48" (2013)
26 Under Water
“Departure” | acrylic and oil (2013)
Under Water 27
"Underwater" (St. Thomas, NV, Hotel) | mixed media (2013)
28 Under Water
"Stars Dust" | acrylic on canvas, 48” x 72” (2013)
29
“Starry Night” | acrylic on canvas 30” x 40” (2012)
30 Biography {CV}
ROBERT BECKMANN Honors and Awards 2001 Fellowship (for painting), Nevada Arts Council 1999 Publisher’s Picks for Best Artist and Best Public Art, Las Vegas Review Journal’s The Best of Las Vegas, NV 1996 The Governor’s Arts Award for Excellence in The Arts, The State of Nevada 1990 Fellowship (for painting), Nevada State Council on the Arts 1977 Fellowship (for painting), Western States Arts Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Selected Solo Exhibitions 2012 Bohemia Gallery, Ashland, OR 2011 Bohemia Gallery, Ashland, OR 2009 Springs Preserve, Las Vegas, NV 2008, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV Davis and Cline Gallery, Ashland, OR 2007 Water Street Gallery, Henderson, NV 2002–2006 Hiatus; major commission from The Architect of the Capitol, for the U.S. Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. Move: Nevada to Oregon 2002 Vegas Vanitas, Ham Hall, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV (with catalog; essay by David Pagel)
2001 Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las High Desert Museum, Bend, OR Vegas, NV 1999 1993 Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada (CataSanta Anna, CA log with text by William L. Fox) The College of Wooster, OH Barrick Museum, University of Nevada, Las 1998 Vegas, NV Sam Francis Gallery, Peter Boxenbaum Arts 1977 -1993 Education Center, Santa Monica, CA Hiatus; concentration on major commissions 1997 1977 University of Alabama., Tuscaloosa, AL University of Nevada, Las Vegas. NV Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA 1976 Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA University of Nevada, Reno, NV Ringling School of Art and Design , Sarasota, FL Boise Gallery of Art, ID The Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX 1975 University of Maine, Orono, ME Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, WI Sun Valley Art Center, Sun Valley, ID Radford University, Radford, VA 1974 University of California, Riverside, CA Joseph Magnin Gallery, Denver, CO Small Works Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (with Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV Barbara Kasten) 1972 Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, OH Illinois Arts Council Gallery, Chicago, IL 1996 Western Illinois University, McComb, IL University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 1971 University of Idaho, Moscow, ID Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Schrack, Barrick Museum, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV (with Danila KoroPublic and Private Collections godsky) Amarillo Museum of Art, TX State Museum for Public Sculpture, The Artists’ Robert H. Baldwin (President & CEO, BelNecropolis, Saint Petersburg, Russia lagio & CFO, Mirage Resort, Las Vegas, NV University of Maryland, College Park, MD Bank of America, Las Vegas, NV 1995 College of Charleston, SC, Halsey Boise Cascade Corporation, Boise, ID Gallery Anderson Gallery, Virginia ComBoise Gallery of Art, ID monwealth University, Richmond 1994 Bowling Green State University, Bowling HERE Art, 145 Avenue of the Americas, Green, OH New York City (Catalog with texts by RobCity of Las Vegas, NV (Mayor’s Office) ert Abel and William L. Fox) City of North Las Vegas, NV (City Hall) Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, CA College of Charleston, SC
College of Wooster, OH Denver Art Museum, CO Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID Las Vegas Art Museum (gift of Glenn Schafer, CFO, Mandalay Bay Corporation) Mobile Rehabilitation Center, Mobile, AL Northeast Nevada Museum, Elko, NV Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV Nevada State Library, Carson City, NV Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Renown Health, Reno, NV (10 paintings) Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL The State Museum for Public Sculpture, St. Petersburg, Russia University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL University of California, Riverside, CA University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA University of Maryland, College Park, MD University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV (Library; Special Collections) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA Western Illinois University, McComb, IL Yale University, New Haven, CT Selected Bibliography Matt Jacob, Interview, Seven Questions, VEGAS SEVEN, July 5, 2012 Scott Dickensheets, “Blown Away”, CITY LIFE, Las Vegas, NV April 7,2011 Fox, William L., Interview, Land, Language and Wine Labels, Edible Geography. Onine. 2011 Mary Manning. “The Artist as Naturalist”, LAS VEGAS SUN, October 8, 2009 Arcy Douglas, “brighter than a Thousand Suns” , PORTLAND ART, June 13, 2008. Fox, William L., “The Kinship; after much rumination, Robert Beckmann unveils his
31
though provoking Atomic Age Paintings”, Nevada Public Radio: Desert Companion, Fall/ Winter, 2007 Fox, William L., In the Desert of Desire (book), University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2005 Maria Phelan, “Art Above all Else”. VIEW NEWS, May 26, 2004 Miller, Greg Blake, “Painting the Town,” HENDERSON AT 50” August 2003 Dickensheets, Scott, “Creating Chaos,” LAS VEGAS LIFE, October 2001 Dickensheets, Scott, “Body and Soul”, LAS VEGAS LIFE, November, 2001 Pagel, David, VEGAS VANITAS (Catalogue), University of Nevada, Las Vegas,September, 2001 Dickensheets, Scott, “Vegas Sublime”, LAS VEGAS LIFE, July, 2000 Fox, William L., DRIVING BY MEMORY (book), University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999 Fox, William L., MAPPING THE EMPTY (book), University of Nevada Press, Reno, 1999 Duncan, Michael, 4-Way Stop (Catalogue), Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, February 9 – March 6, 1998 Knaff, Devorah L., “Haunting Childhood Images Fill his Canvases”, On Art, THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE, San Diego, CA , October 26, 1997 Hahn, Cheryl H., “Nuclear Cities”, ART PAPERS, Atlanta, GA , July/August, 1997 Marger, M., “Atomic Art”, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, FL, August 8, 1997 Costello,Kevin, “2.33 Seconds”, Art Beat, PELICAN PRESS, Sarasota, FL, July 31, 1997 Altabe, Joan, “House Embodies Many Possibilities”, SARASOTA HERALD- TRI-
BUNE, FL, July 18, 1997 Milani, Joanne, “Cold War Hits Home in Exhibit”, TAMPA TRIBUNE, FL, July 18, 1997 McTaggart, Tom, “BAM the Bomb”,EASTSIDE WEEK, Bellevue, WA, March 19, 1997 Boylan, John, “Exhibit Unveils our Nuclear Family”, EASTSIDE JOURNAL, Bellevue, WA, March 19, 1997 Thorson, Alice, “Ignore the Exhibit but look at the Art”, KANSAS CITY STAR, MO, August 30, 1996 Arsenieva, Zinaida, “Secret Material” (a review) , CHAS PIK (Rush Hour) Daily Newspaper, Saint Petersburg, Russia, July 11, 1996 Lowe, Charlotte, “A Riveting Look at Destruction”, ARIZONA CITIZEN, Tucson, February 8, 1996 Portwood, Pamela, “Beckmann’s Series on Abomb Strikes Terror”, STARART, ARIZONA DAILY STAR, Tucson, February 9, 1996 Zavitas, Steven T., NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS (book), The First Open Studios Western Competition, Number V, Open Studios Press, Needham, Mass., 1995 Drake, Nicholas, “Eve of the Atom”, ART PAPERS, Atlanta, GA, September/October 1995 Potters, Merilyn, “Into the Sublime with Beckmann”, LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE, NV, May, 1995 Field, Richard S., “Contemporary Emblems”, Reinventing the Emblem, (Catalogue), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, January 20, 1995 Mills, Kerry, “Art in View”, V MAGAZINE, Roanoke, Virginia, December, 1995
Caniglia, Julie, “Nuclear Legacy : 50 years under the cloud “, CITY PAGES, Minneapolis, MN, July 12,1995 Burchard, Hank, “Zany Exhibition Rises from Communism’s Rubble”, WASHINGTON POST, DC,December 30, 1994 Dickensheets, Scott, “Anxiety, Alchemy, ABombs Mix in Artist’s Recent Work”, LAS VEGAS SUN, Nevada, November 25, 1994 HARPERS (magazine), color reproduction of four paintings, New York City, May 1994. Levin, Kim, “Voice Choices - Art: Robert Beckmann”, The VILLAGE VOICE, New York City, February 22, 1994 Remnick, David, “Renegade Artists with an Eye for the Subversive”, WASHINGTON POST, DC, Sunday July 15, 1993 Macias, Sandra, “Atomized Artistry”, Reno Gazette-Journal, September 26, 1993 Lumpkin, Libby, “Robert Beckmann’s Post Faustian Las Vegas”, NICA NEWS (Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art), Las Vegas, Fall, 1991 Hickey, Dave, “Augustine In Las Vegas”,VIVA LAS VEGAS (Catalogue), Mark Masuokoa Gallery, Las Vegas, NV, June 21 – August 3, 1991 Sandberg-Diment, Erik, “Machine-Aided Art”, The New York Times, New York City, March 24, 1987 Dean, Hoadley, “Walled In By B-17 Flying Fortresses”, Frontiers (Frontier Airlines Magazine), Denver, Colorado July, 1985 After the Battle (magazine) London, England, February 15, 1983, #39 Nairn, Janet, “Adaptive-Reuse of Garage into Office Building”, Architectural Record(magazine), New York City,
December, 1982 Sourcebook of Architectural Ornament (book), Reinhold and Co., New York City, 1982 Clurman, Irene, “Muralist Succeeds in The Real World”, Rocky Mountain News-Arts now, Denver, Colorado, January, 25, 1981 Morrison, Jane Ann, “Next, Hoover Dam”, Nevada (Magazine), Carson City, Winter, 1979 Murphy, Maripat, “Dialogue-Interview”, Emphasis, Western State Arts Foundation Newsletter, Denver, Colorado, 1979
32 Note
I
t all went down at the Thai restaurant next to the gallery. The gallery opened two years ago this month and
back in my hometown, I asked him which artists I should know. It was clear he was captivated by this Robert Beckmann. Lunches and time went by; he was still gushing and mentioned Beckmann had just returned to Las Vegas. I had to meet this guy. I invited him to Thai lunch. He was as engaging as his work. By the end of the meal, it was made clear he must make his move permanent and start painting for a show. Eight months later, I’m not sure a day has gone by when we haven’t been in contact. With his broad smile and brilliant eyes, he can be counted on for his knowledge of varied know him because his story-telling is subtle and seeps out only when relevant to conversation at hand. Tidbits I’ve gathered from art-hounding road-trips and here and there are tales we all hope we can sometime tell. Robert Beckmann embodies the life of an artist. The natural world fascinates him. Introduced to bird watching at age 8 by renowned artist/naturalist, Roger Tory Peterson, Robert also began collecting minerals. He became a story in the Philadelphia Enquirer after built a geiger counter at age 12 and discovered a uranium mineral near
anti-war rally while in graduate school, meeting the Berrigan brothers, Robert went skinning Edie Vonnegut and
included choosing colors for the Riviera and other casinos.
Smiths Food King on Maryland Parkway in 79, he asks me ‘Tell me about yoghurt in Vegas?’ Heading over to the
This isn’t “a” retrospective but “Robert Beckmann Retrospective”. It’s a pun. This is a gallery show and as such is limited to a selection of available work from a well-lived, long, life and career. Beckmann, the man himself, is at that comfortable juncture in life and in his art where he can look back and tell tales with ease. And always a good a pun. Thank you Mr. Beckmann. We look forward to future works and word-play.
Acknowledgments 33
ROBERT BECKMANN RETROSPECTIVE May 4th - June 15th, 2013 Published on the occasion of the exhibit V A S T space projects / Smacksheets publishing Publisher Shannon Mc Mackin Editor Scott Dickensheets Brent Holmes Photography Checko Salgado
The catalog was produced entirely by Las Vegas vendors. Thank you for taking the time to work on a limited edition art press: Julian Cardona, Kelly Paper Christy Creel, Creel Printing Acknowledgements: Thank you to Mr. Robert Beckmann for the opportunity to survey his career. The their eloquent words describing the lengthy career of a Nevada legacy artist. The support of intern, Jackson Tyler who will be leaving us for Rice University. The ease and professionalism of Checko Salgado. The backbone, and crack-a-rib humor of Brent Holmes. V A S T catalogs do not happen without the allied community and “can do” Western spirit of it’s contributors. Thank you. © 2013 SmackSheets publishing all rights reserved