Rosemarie Beck

 

Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career."Rosemarie Beck’s work was first and foremost formal. Always forming, constantly composing, she respected the whole.  Every stroke or spot changed and challenged what had gone before. Choosing as themes the great classical narratives, she remade them as contemporary dramas of color and light." /Martha Hayden, The Rosemarie Beck Foundation/'Beck's determination to keep "everything moving to and through everything" enabled her to orchestrate large and spatially complex compositions while keeping a vitality of stroke and play of light rippling over the entire surface. In this way she has become one of the few painters of recent years to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous."/Martica Sawin in "Never Form, But Forming" (2001) /rosemariebeck.org/

Balcomb Greene - Abstract Figurative Paintings

 

 Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."Balcomb Greene contributed to modernist cause through his writings: "It is actually the artist, and only he, who is equipped for approaching the individual directly. The abstract artist can approach man through the most immediate of aesthetic experiences, touching below consciousness and the veneer of attitudes, contacting the whole ego rather than the ego on the defensive."Wikipedia