American engraver and teacher Fred Gerhard Becker was born in Oakland, California, in 1913. He grew up in Hollywood, where his father was a silent actor, and attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1931/33). As a young man, he moved to New York to study architecture briefly at New York University; there he met Eugène Steinhof, with whom he also worked at the Institute of Fine Arts Design.It was Louis Lozowick who allowed him to join the WPA (Works Progress Administration). At...

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  Biography of Fred Becker

  American engraver and teacher Fred Gerhard Becker was born in Oakland, California, in 1913. He grew up in Hollywood, where his father was a silent actor, and attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1931/33). As a young man, he moved to New York to study architecture briefly at New York University; there he met Eugène Steinhof, with whom he also worked at the Institute of Fine Arts Design.
  It was Louis Lozowick who allowed him to join the WPA (Works Progress Administration). At the WPA from 1935 to 1939, first under the direction of Gustave von Groschwitz, then under that of Lynd Ward, Fred Becker made etchings and woodcuts. Two of his prints (“John Henry’s Hand” and “Jazz Monsters”), each from 1936, were the only WPA prints in Alfred Barr’s 1936/37 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”. Becker’s works were exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and again at the 1963/64 World’s Fair. Becker’s first solo exhibition took place at the Willard Gallery, New York, in 1938.
  The artist became involved in Stanley William Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 in the 1940s. He was thus part of the inaugural class of Hayter’s Atelier 17, the New School for Social Research, where the many artists who participated had a profound impact on the New York art world. Fred Becker was particularly intrigued by the possibilities of automatic writing, various intaglio techniques and new methods of color printing. Among the artist friends of the Atelier were Ian Hugo, André Masson, Matta and Yves Tanguy. In 1941, Becker moved to Long Island and worked at Republic Aviation as part of the war effort. Although enlisted in 1945, he served in China as part of the War Information Bureau. Returning to New York after the war, he worked at Atelier 17 until 1948. At ctte date, Becker’s interest in abstraction resulted in a set of complex drawings and prints related to constructivism.Fred Becker began teaching in the 1940s at the Tyler School in Philadelphia, before spending 20 years at the University of Washington at Saint-Louis and finishing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986. He received a Tiffany Fellowship in 1948, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1954, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1957/58, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1975. Thanks to the Guggenheim scholarship, Becker returned to Paris for a while to work at Atelier 17.Fred Becker was a prominent member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. Personal and collective, the artist has seen his work widely exhibited. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.Fred Becker died in 2004 in Amherst (Massachusetts), he was 90 years old.
  
  

  

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