Roger Hankins makes his way to the studio on Bethuen Street in Manhattan’s West Village every six months or so. Behind the pale-yellow concrete exterior and brass and glass doors, dozens of painted canvases lie vertically on racks, some as large as five feet across. Hundreds more drawings and sketches, stored in flat file drawers and portfolios, fill the space, along with a worktable in the center of the room.
The canvases and papers are alive with shapes, people, animals and objects, all drawn with the sharp lines, flattened forms and distorted imagery typical of the expressionist art movement.
The artist is acclaimed expressionist Robert Beauchamp (pronounced “Bee-chum”), who was renowned for his paintings and drawings from the 1950s until his death in 1995.
Beauchamp lived and worked in this Manhattan studio, and also spent time in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Major galleries in both locations and across the United States exhibited his work during his life, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, as well as galleries in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
His widow, Nadine Valenti Beauchamp, also an artist, maintains this studio space for her own painting, as well as to store her husband’s legacy, a sizeable portion of which has become a permanent part of the fine art collection at Holy Cross.