Raphael Beck's granddaughter gives others a chance to see art of her ancestor
Johanna Van De Mark doesn’t remember much about her grandfather.
To the young Van De Mark, Raphael Beck, who died in 1947 when she was 6 years old, was “an old man sitting in a comfortable leather chair, and that’s about all.”
PREVIEW
WHAT: “Raphael Beck Revisited”
WHEN: Opening reception at 2 p. m. Sunday; runs through March 1
WHERE: Kenan Center, 433 Locust St., Lockport
TICKETS: Free
INFO: 433-2617 or www.kenancenter.org
But as Van De Mark grew up, her mother filled in the background of her famous grandfather’s life and work. Van De Mark, who now lives in the Lockport house that once belonged to her grandfather, learned about Beck’s contributions to the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, his prolific and diverse artistic output and the international reputation he built for himself across decades of painting, etching, mural-making, sculpting and sketching.
“I’ve lived with it for so long,” Van De Mark said of her grandfather’s work, which surrounds her in the family home in Lockport. “Over the years, it sinks into your soul.”
Now, in “Raphael Beck Revisited,” the first major Beck exhibition since 1981, the artist’s work will have a chance to sink into everyone else’s.
Van De Mark is loaning dozens of her grandfather’s artworks to the exhibition, which opens Sunday at the Kenan Center in Lockport. In addition to oil paintings, watercolors and other works by Beck, the show will feature pieces by Beck’s late brother Harry and Beck’s father, J. Augustus Beck. Many pieces are also on loan from the Niagara County and Buffalo & Erie County historical societies.
In the years since his retirement in the early 20th century, Beck’s repute has shrunk from international to regional, but his work remains just as vibrant and intriguing. In his day, Beck was probably best known for the emblem he created for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, which featured the North and South American continents portrayed as women in flowing gowns, joining hands across the Isthmus of Panama.
Beck’s work is also on view in the North Park Theatre, in a large mural in Lockport’s Erie Canal Discovery Center (24 Church St., Lockport) and in several other spots around Western New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was born.
In his portraits, Beck hewed to a traditional realist style to which he added enough impressionistic touches to separate his work from much portraiture being done at the turn of the century. His large-scale portrait of President McKinley, painted shortly after his assassination at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, ranks as one of his most highly praised works. (Due to its size, the portrait will not be part of this exhibition.)
The artist was also fond of creating and painting realistic life masks of historical characters, which he and his friends would then wear and perform in, as well as miniature ivory sculptures, impressionistic landscapes and some pieces that approached pure abstraction.
By working so expertly in various media and across so many styles, Beck established himself in his time as an artist of national stature with incredible talent and range. But his diverse and prolific output, combined with a relatively traditional bent, also managed to keep Beck in the footnotes of American art history at large.
For Van De Mark, living with Beck’s work and that of his family for so long has helped her get to know her artistic ancestors in a way few else could.
“They were so prolific, and they were casual artists probably in life and painting,” Van De Mark said. “They weren’t into thinking their work was great. They weren’t self-promoters or anything. It was just a way of life.”•
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