HAIDEE BECKER
A long association Discovering a new artist is one of the most exciting moments for a gallerist. In my own career spanning some thirty-five years, I have found quite a few. However, some of those experiences stand above the rest because my response to the art was so powerful. Looking back, I realize these encounters were telling me that who and what I was discovering would be important to me for years to come, perhaps even after my death. This was certainly the case with Haidee Becker, whom I discovered at a Los Angeles art fair in 1989. I still recall the day vividly. It was rather momentous, like seeing paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Manet, Van Gogh, and Balthus, to name a few, in person for the first time. I immediately wanted to acquire her work. In fact, thirty-three years later I own seven of her paintings.
Haidee was born in Los Angeles in 1950 to an actress mother from Louisiana and a writer/art dealer/civil-rights-activist father from Chicago. From the age of two, Haidee lived abroad, initially in Rome, then Vienna, and later in London. Due to her parent’s artistic influence, she knew by the age of sixteen that she was going to be a painter. Since I have known Haidee, her subject matter has been flowers, still life, and portraits—primarily of people whose countenance inspires her. Her rare, classical technique, one not taught in art schools for decades, was acquired by working one-on- one with highly respected artists in their ateliers. For example, she sat with her mentor Uli Nimptsch seven days a week, six hours a day, for several years, just learning to draw. This is the level of dedication she brings to her work. When we first met, her paint application was dense, the brushwork loose and expressionistic, and the colors vivid, though not without a dark undertone. These works were followed by a period where her palette turned somber and the brushwork tighter . It took me a moment to adjust to these changes, since the paintings began to convey a sadness that wasn’t evident before. But as Haidee explained in the April 2022 article in House and Garden UK , “My work has always been about death really – but also about
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