Art of Marta: Death Valley artist displays works at Las Vegas Art Museum

Jeffrey Libby

Monday, Sept. 17, 2001 | 8:27 a.m.

DEATH VALLEY JUNCTION, CALIF. Marta Becket has been painting for close to 40 years in the upper room of a ranging, decrepit adobe house, waiting at a bend in the road for her first art opening. The studio windows look north over Ash Meadows desert toward the Nevada Test Site, beyond two bleached state byways that the winds from the Funeral Mountains pour sand over in veils.

It's desolate, far from art galleries. Wild horses are restive. Creosote puts out hard, pungent leaves for miles. Shoshone, Calif., the nearest town with a post office, is about 30 miles away. Las Vegas is 100 miles away. Reception for National Public Radio faded to a dull crackle a few years back maybe because the the population has dipped to two.

But Becket, 77, better known as the silent ballerina of her one-woman show at the Amargosa Opera House, says she isn't lonely with all the space.

She paints the bright, lazy back yard of a circus. She paints an argument over the price of fruit at a street corner. She paints Catholic girls running in white dresses on Confirmation Day.

That's not to say her paintings, for all their warmth and acrobatic realism, aren't eerie or otherworldly. They are. Almost every one of them. But the stark desolation of Becket's physical surroundings, which has kept most dreamers at arm's length since the Pacific Coast Borax Co. abandoned mining operations in the 1930s, serves more as her sanctuary than anything else. It has yet to make a literal appearance in her work, but it keeps people, and the mounting years, at bay. All that wind-swept, low plain lets memory take center stage.

When her long-awaited show opens Thursday at the Las Vegas Art Museum, the roughly 40 paintings planned for display will provide a look into the world of a young dancer from Depression-era Greenwich Village in New York. Becket is still painting the scenes of a young girl who quit high school to support her mother a divorcee and problem stock-market gambler by dancing classical arrangements in nightclubs, often accompanied by no more than a desultory snare drum, saxophone and piano. She watched vaudeville die as she waited nights to go onstage, ashamed of herself and of her mother, but too proud and too in love with theater to quit.

Becket left that poor-but-inspired life behind her more than 30 years ago when she and her former husband limped into the Death Valley Junction gasoline station to have a flat tire on their trailer repaired.

Becket, after performing as many as three dance routines a day in three different towns, often for schoolchildren in lunch rooms, decided to stay.

All across the country, she had been watching towns tear down their opera houses or convert them for use as wholesale storage. She decided she would put down roots and build an opera house of her own.

But in her paintings, as with her theater, the vagabond life she led continues to haunt her canvas with nostalgic, if unsettling images.

The star

When this reporter pulls up to the Amargosa Hotel, which adjoins the opera house by way of a long adobe colonnade, Becket is seated in the shade at a picnic table next to two helpers from Amargosa Valley, an agricultural enclave about 20 miles north of Death Valley Junction. A man and a woman -- the helpers -- are tanned, with hard-but-friendly faces. They're dressed in jeans and boots, puffing at cigarettes as they inspect what the city brought in.

Becket, by comparison, is a neat figure -- thin, her face powdered white, her hands pressed together on her lap. But she's also the star. She's dressed all in black, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and large, round sunglasses.

This is the same woman that, come October, will attract busloads of people each weekend from Las Vegas, and carloads more from Los Angeles and Furnace Creek, Calif.

They'll come for the 33rd season of theater at the opera house, to see Marta Becket, the classical ballet dancer, perform one of two silent acts, "The Goodtime Cabaret" or "The Dollmaker," to music by Strauss and others.

The stage, the costumes, the choreography and the recorded narrative are all her making. So, too, is the mural of a 17th century Spanish audience, covering three walls and the ceiling. It helped put the opera house on the National Register of Historic Buildings in 1981.

Becket will be accompanied onstage by her all-around handyman and comic-relief artist, Tom Willet. After each show, which starts promptly at 8:15 p.m., autograph-seekers will probably besiege her, as they have in previous years.

As we make our way down the colonnade, she is half-shuffling, then pilots forward with confidence as the conversation catches on money. Becket has been saving again, raising money through donations to her foundation and through selling her paintings, this time for a crushed-diamond roof over the opera house. The spring rains seeped in.

She has replastered damaged sections of the mural already, but there's more work to be done. It's always that way.

As Becket says, she is the opera house. Without her, Death Valley Junction would come to a stop -- all 268 unincorporated acres.

At the end of the colonnade, Becket reaches through a cast-iron gate and slips open the latch. Our feet hit open desert with a loud crunch. After a few strides she gestures across vast plain toward the Funeral Mountains.

"We're backstage," she says with a smile.

The painter

Marta Becket the painter is difficult to classify.

An art critic might compare the emptiness and dread in some of her paintings -- the sense that something unpleasant is about to happen -- to the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio di Chirico.

Or a critic might compare the comfortable familiarity of her scenes, and at the same time, the iconic loneliness of the figures who have landed there, to the American painter Edward Hopper.

Another might compare the stubborn, self-imposed isolation of her personal life to that of Rockwell Kent, another American painter and poet who sailed a small boat from New York to Greenland in the 1920s to live among fishermen and carve woodcuts.

But Becket belongs to the school of the unschooled. She has no formal training in art, save the few commercial art classes she took while a student at Washington Irving High School in Greenwich Village.

By traditional art standards, she belongs to Outsider Art, that hodgepodge of self-taught talent that includes folk artists, primitives, naives and visionaries. And yet she grew up in a cold-water flat during the last years of the Roaring '20s -- considered Greenwich Village's golden era for writers, musicians and artists living a Bohemian life of late nights, a love of ideas and a scorn for everyday morals.

Her mother made sure the Victrola cranked out classical music most nights. Her father, who was a journalist, used free passes to take her to concerts before splitting from her mother and disappearing.

Despite Becket's early exposure to the arts, she remains true to the school of outsiders. She takes no real interest in the mainstream art world or other artists. She says she was influenced early on by the Ash Can School of the 1930s, a group of artists painting blue-collar scenes with a realist, but familiar eye.

She also mentions painters Francisco Jose de Goya, Honore Daumier and Edgar Degas.

But Becket has not been to an art museum in 15 years. She is emphatically offended and bored by the contemporary artists who for the past two decades have been tearing down realism and representation, and replacing those canvases with an intellectualized nonrepresentational minimalism.

Instead of joining that movement, or any other, Becket rents old movies. She watches them over at Willet's house to avoid the wasted expense of a second VCR in Death Valley Junction.

She eats microwaved dinners with a salad most nights. She tends to her peacocks, chickens, 14 cats and pair of burros. She hires help to put out alfalfa for the wild horses each day at sundown. And if she reads something, it's most likely Time magazine.

If Becket feels like getting some culture, she and Willet drive the 28 miles to Pahrump in her AMC Eagle to have a meal at the Mountain View Casino and bowling alley. The dark, concrete tilt-up fills with locals and snowbirds in for the crisp air-conditioning and the $4.99 dinner specials.

Or if she doesn't feel like crossing town, she and Willet might go to the Coyote Cafe, on the near side of Pahrump, for a cup of coffee.

Some of the workers at these two establishments know who Becket is, most often because a relative did some work for her.

Becket doesn't care much for the company of like minds. But she has waited almost all her life for an art opening. She has looked forward to the recognition as a serious painter that kind of event can bring.

It was two missed chances for such recognition in the mid-1960s that actually helped convince her to leave New York for the West.

In 1963, newly married at 39 and still painting on cardboard salvaged from men's dress shirts, Becket earned an invitation for a one-woman art show at a small gallery off Washington Square. On the day of the planned opening -- Nov. 23 -- President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated.

The gallery was locked. The opening was missed.

A citywide blackout in 1965 crushed another anticipated debut at a gallery in Carnagie Hall.

Becket took those disappointments as signs to move on. But her paintings, completed between her performing engagements, continued to sell. So she continued to paint.

A fan

James Mann, curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum, first heard about Becket in 1998 -- as most people do -- from a friend imparting what he considered an invaluable secret. Because for as much star power Becket has in person, she still remains largely unknown outside her immediate venue.

And of those who have seen her unique theater, especially Nevadans more familiar with the high-gloss finish of art on the Strip, many talk of her as an eccentric or a curiosity.

Mann himself, though interested by his friend's description of her, didn't make the journey to the opera house until spring last year.

Mann is now another ardent fan of Becket. He says he wouldn't be surprised if Las Vegans head to movie theaters 10 years from now to watch a major feature film of her life.

Two companies have already made documentaries of her story. The New York Times and National Geographic have printed stories. Several film companies are vying for rights to a movie about her.

Becket, for her part, is about 1,000 pages into an autobiography she is writing longhand.

"Because of some quirk of individual vision, Marta creates paintings that fascinate, that intrigue, that compel you to contemplate her eerie world, one that seems to be a part of ordinary life, and yet distinctly is not," Mann said recently by phone in his slow, Southern drawl.

"It's a radical critical position I'm taking and many will disagree," he said. "But I find in her work profound elements equal to that of historians and philosophers -- those people generally associated with high culture, scientists like Einstein or politicians like Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln.

"She has an awareness, like them, of just how paradoxical and difficult our world is, that we don't ever find any final solution for anything. She is able to impart to her work a maximum philosophy equal to the mystery that human life is in nature.

"But let me say, too, that it will be a long road before I can convince the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art that they should have a Marta Becket."

In the meantime, Las Vegans can judge for themselves the stubborn vision of an unschooled woman painting alone in the desert.

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