Robert Beckmann: Minute to Moment

Robert Beckmann, The Day After, oil on linen, 2018

Robert Beckmann: Minute to Moment at the Sahara West Library in Las Vegas.

By D.K. Sole

As I looked at the smaller, recent paintings in this show I noticed that Robert Beckmann had brushed paint lightly outside the edges of his subjects, making them look weirdly blurred. When did he start doing that? Decades ago? 

In my memory of his best-known groups of works–the depictions of nuclear testing painted mainly during the 1990s and into the 2000s–an impression of haziness restates not only the lost-to-time shock of bombs in the Nevada desert but also the presence of the machine that was used to create his source images. It’s as if the camera that took the photo went out of focus, or the film somehow can’t stop moving a bit. I’m not the first person to be reminded of Gerhard Richter, although Beckmann’s subjects, such as the disintegrating suburban home in Body of a House, make me think he’s not after the disembodied effect that the German painter once described as “blur[ring] things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.” (But of course history breaks through: he can’t make those images of Germany’s past unimportant enough.) I can accept the grimly playful idea that Richter’s foggy family members (his aunt Marianne, his father in law) might be mistaken for insignificant things. I can’t say the same for a house blowing apart. 

What’s done is done, the bomb is blown, Hitler happened, we can’t answer it. It’s a mystery that we can’t actually (we realise, once we’re confronted with a picture) grapple with visually. Not only painting: photography can’t grapple with it either. Maybe Beckmann’s photo- or film-based painting helps to undermine the confidence I feel when we look at one of those recorded images and feel that I’ve got it, that I see something truthfully–no, I can only stare in helpless observation, locked out of the event forever (the bomb was not comprehensible at the time and not now either), and once I have that understanding then that goes for all photos, even beyond that, for all of the arts and humanities, writing as well, all history studies, all inadequate . . .

Robert Beckmann, Oppie and Grove, oil on panel, 2024

The new show at Sahara West includes some reminders of those series, with one medium-sized bombed-mannequin painting and a depiction of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr in conversation. There are samples of his landscapes. A stream runs through chilly-looking trees and that implied chill is a different kind of remoteness. But the most significant works here, for me, are those little paintings of closely-cropped bodies. I was told he makes them as a daily practice. The subjects are enigmatic. Hands play with coins, a head pokes out of a river. They don’t signify the past and aren’t obviously taken from a photograph. Now the blur is suggesting a present you can’t bring into focus: I can’t blame a camera or suggest that the passage of time is disintegrating my memories. The feeling of something disruptive that can’t be seen–the intuited mushroom cloud in the atomic paintings–gets deferred into an amorphous and possibly unspectacular contemporary moment. The desire to see something more is still here, still smelling of Cold War paranoia. Who belongs to those hands? What are they planning as they fiddle those coins around? I know as I stare at them that I’ll never come up with an answer. The painting only has enough information to present me with the question. I look at that question. I try to fit different parts of his career together: his decades-ago (1980s-90s? I really need to research things) interest in medieval alchemical formulae merging into the modern alchemy of the bomb and now, years later, dematerialising into a state that evades historicity, or a name. I’ve never consciously seen one of his big casino murals, but I want to think that these smaller works at Sahara West make more of an impact than they did.

Robert Beckmann, On a roll, oil on panel, 2023

Images courtesy Sahara West Library.

Robert Beckmann: Minute to Moment
Sahara West Library, 9600 W. Sahara Ave.
Through March 2, 2025

Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on February 12, 2025.