A 1944 graduate of
Oberlin College with a bachelor's degree in art history, Beck later studied at Columbia University, the Art Students League in New York, The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and in workshops with well-known artists
Kurt Seligmann and
Robert Motherwell.[1] Shortly after graduating from Oberlin in 1944, she moved to Woodstock, N.Y., where she struck up friendships with neighbors
Philip Guston and
Bradley Walker Tomlin, artists who had an influence on her early work.[2]
Career
In the early part of her career, she was regarded as a member of the second generation of the
New York School of abstract expressionists and her work was often exhibited at their annual shows at the Stable and Peridot galleries.
Early in her career, Beck considered herself to be an abstract expressionist painter, but by the late 1950s, she had switched to the figurative focus that she would retain for the rest of her career.[citation needed]
Beck became “one of the few painters of our time 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,” according to critic
Martica Sawin.[citation needed]