Becker
An American Artist
About
August Becker is an American artist, born 1933, Columbia, S.C. and was raised in Miami, Florida. After graduating from Miami High School in 1950, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. (BFA, 1954; MFA 1955.)
Becker won the Campana Memorial Prize at the open juried Chicago Show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955 for his painting called Tom Figure, and was acclaimed by Arts Digest, as a “sophisticated newcomer,” to the Chicago art scene.
After serving two years in the US Army, Becker returned to Chicago where he worked briefly in advertising, and taught at the Hyde Park Art Center. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1959-60, then took up residence in New York City where he taught at the High School of Music and Art and Pratt Institute, while earning a doctorate in Art and Education at Columbia University. In 1971, he joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii, and taught there for eleven years. In 1982 he returned to New York City.
Contact
August Becker presently lives and works in Washington D.C.
August can be contacted at aoutbecker@gmail.com
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Press
“
... Becker’s vision of the body is that of a form never entirely at rest—even in the most relaxed of postures or gestures there remains a slight disturbance of a limb, a movement of a head, a multiplication of contour. Much more often, however, Becker will portray the body as multi-limbed, where each limb or limb fragment catches a point through which a larger movement will pass. Not only does the body move, but in moving, it continually redefines the space which contains it.
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A second element of Becker’s work relevant to this issue is the quality of his drawing with paint. The contour, single or multiple, of the figure is laid in with freshness and assurance. This aspect of the preliminary sketch is balanced by denser, more finished passages of paint which give additional substance and solidity to the form. Occasionally the body-defining contour exists more independently, as if to say, this is what the leg would look like if it were here.
A final aspect of the work vital to Becker’s dynamic is his use of color as an integral spark or prod. Generally this takes the form of an emphasis on a section of body contour in a way that celebrates a momentary fusion of line and color, as well as a linear rhythm. An orange thumb reaching into green space, a garnet shoulder bunched up by the weight of an ocher torso, an edge of pink on a black man’s thigh—these fragments renew and refocus the energy contained within the work.
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Artweek, September, 1979