"I’m helpless before these self-portraits I do compulsively, when there is so much other work to do. I might have told myself earlier that they serve an autobiographical need. (I want to tell more explicitly what I am.) But I’m not so sure now that explains them." (Journal, October 1955)

1955 was a difficult year for Rosemarie Beck - as wife, mother, and artist. Her marriage to writer Robert Phelps was rocky, as they both struggled to manage his obsession with a reckless truck-driving alcoholic neighbor, one in a series of men for whom Robert developed a helpless and unrequited infatuation. Meanwhile, motherhood was a frustrating dance between immersion and near-abandonment. The demands of her painting and teaching career forced her to leave her six-year-old child with his grandparents for days and weeks at a time, while Beck and her husband shuttled between their home in Woodstock, NY and their professional obligations in Manhattan, all while desperately trying to squeeze in solitary time for writing and painting. On the painting front, Beck had little to show for her efforts in 1955. Yet this was to be her annus mirabilis, the momentous juncture when she came to grips with the greatest crisis in her artistic development: her defection away from Abstract Expressionism, and her decisive move towards Figurative and Narrative painting. Faces and images had already begun to occasionally peep out from her canvases. But to an unprepared observer, the emerging portraiture and objects must have come as a shock when they finally broke through the thick swathes of oversized crosshatching that were so characteristic of her canvases of this period.