Rosemarie Beck (Rosemarie Beck Foundation)
Rosemarie Beck (1923 - 2003) emerged in the mid-50s as a figurative painter; she was a beloved teacher and mentor, and a gifted artist.
MessageCollection: Music-themed Artworks
Throughout her life, Rosemarie Beck was devoted to classical music, reflecting her early training as a violinist. She performed with the Woodstock Quartet in the late 1940s-early 1950s, and later with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, while on the Fine Art faculty at Middlebury College. She loved playing chamber music at Yaddo in the evenings, and was close friends with several prominent American composers. Musicianship and performance - particularly highlighting string players - is a recurrent theme in her artworks. This is most notable in her “Orpheus” series of the early 1970s, in which she depicted the ancient Greek tragic musician alternatively as a guitar player, cellist and violinist, and in her later “Concert in Tuscany” series of the late 1990s, in which she places a string quartet in a north Italian landscape. Her late self portraits include a lute, symbolizing her enduring connection to music, even after a car accident rendered her unable to physically play her beloved “fiddle.” She made it a habit to listen to classical music on the radio while painting in her studio, and occasionally identified with the character of the “Countess” from Mozart’s great opera Don Giovanni, one of her favorites.
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