The Hundred Year Flood

Robert Beckmann
"The Hundred Year Flood", 2001
Oil on linen
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection
Gift of the Las Vegas Art Museum, 2021; Gift of Glen Schaeffer, 2003.
2021.08.033

Robert Beckmann’s Vegas Vanitas series returns to the theme of the sublime that suffused his earlier (1993) paintings of atomic testing in the desert. The imagery still includes Nevada, but now the sublime has been opened to a different range of allegorical and art-historical interpretations. By incongruously introducing Las Vegas casinos into the landscapes of paintings by long-dead European artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and, here, the classical French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665), he has also opened the sublime up to comedy. A lifelong environmentalist, Beckmann drew a connection between Las Vegas and the biblical disaster in Poussin’s mid-seventeenth century painting L'hiver, or Winter (The Deluge), after a devastating flood struck the city in 1999, wiping out fauna and vegetation along the Las Vegas Wash. In Beckmann’s version the original image is horizontally reversed and Poussin’s cloudy Mount Ararat has been replaced with the Luxor. (DKS)

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