Beckmann is best known for his large-scale paintings in an exhibition entitled “The Body of a House”, which has toured to 20 museums in the United States and St. Petersburg, Russia, and is permanently housed in the Nevada Museum of Art. In this series of eight large-scale canvases, Beckmann reveals the rapid disassembly of a house by a nuclear explosion on the Nevada Test Site.  Originals from this monumental series and a collection of the Kin Series (based on the manikins used as surrogate humans during above ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site) will be displayed. Historic pieces from “Vegas Vanitas”  will be shown for the first time since 2001.  The series simultaneously critiqued Vegas’ use of the world’s culture in designing it’s casinos, while paying homage to the Old Masters. 

“Longing and melancholy, along with slow satisfactions and long-lasting pleasures, suffuse all the works in his ‘Vegas Vanitas’ series, creating a deep sense of mystery at a time when such wondrous sentiments are in short supply.” 
 

-  David Pagel on Beckmann’s “readily accessible - yet rigorously intellectual”,  “masterfully glazed paintings”

catalog essay “Vegas Vanitas, New Work by Robert Beckmann” Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2001

"Beckman: painter laureate of Las Vegas, of three eras of representations in tidal flows of images of a postmodern America where representation has become reality.  Whatever must precede our human relationships is a bright flash of recognition that ignites all we know of civilization in an instant at the Nevada test site; then begins the slow rise of waters over hollowed out houses and abandoned resort towers in elegies of grief and revelation."

“Beckman paints what we have made of our dream city, what we have let happen here, and what this must mean—these striking recognitions in a hyper-brilliance of the nuclear flash that shapes our future, these heart-stirring glimmers and afterglows amid the ebb and flow of what remains.” 

- Doug Unger in his Meditation on Robert Beckmann from exhibition catalog