Among the foremost figural painters to emerge in the mid-20th century, Robert Beauchamp combined abstraction, representation, and the force of his own response to the world in his exuberantly expressive paintings and drawings. “The first thing is that it has to have personality, to be worth looking at,” he once claimed about his approach to his work. In New York in the 1950s, as Hans Hofmann’s student, Beauchamp absorbed the tenets of European Modernism and American Abstract Expressionism—with which he eventually broke. While abstraction, with its focus on color and form, underlies his compositions, he filled canvas and paper with psychologically acute portraits of himself and others, nudes, animals, and objects of all kinds. These images emerge from the patchwork of colors and brushstrokes that Beauchamp would apply semi-unconsciously, intuitively, fueled by the joys and anguish of his own life.