"My first startling encounter with Haidee Becker's painting is refreshed with each new exhibition. Friends of hers and mine had left with her their two children for a few days. When I saw the portraits of these two, painted during those days, the shock of their live presence, in such marvelously fluid and moulded colours, was something I shall never forget. Those pictures became, for me, an ideal, of portraiture. The painted surface like some kind of precious substance - nothing fixed or cold, yet nothing arbitrary or external - and a vibrant immediacy of the person.
After that, I got to know some of her still lives and flowers. They have for me the essential quality; the revelation of a passionate inwardness, like portraits of hypnagogic images just about to materialize, lit and shadowed with a turbulent yet magnetic inner form. The depth is the psychological depth of great sweetness - gently and powerfully focused. Living with them has confirmed all my first impressions about them."
Ted Hughes
...
"When Haidee Becker paints a sunflower viewers do not require dark glasses. High noon is not her time, outward show not her subject. As a matter of fact I knew the aforementioned flower when it was but a seed, and was the one who delivered its radiant head to her studio in Chelsea. It was a rare bloom; crimson, not common or garden yellow, with the texture of velvet. Now I could describe every stage in that flower's growth, but you would never know it as well as you would by looking at the finished painting. Gone are the trappings of majesty the carmine blaze of glory. Only a few petals remain, as if they were the sunflower's last drops of blood. Otherwise it is naked, vulnerable, itself sans everything save the self. Beauty is greasepaint; the artist's gaze is cold cream and witch hazel. But Haidee Becker's eye has other, even witchier, attributes; can pierce the surface tension, can read the mind within (the hopes, the fears). Her paintiing could perhaps be called, 'The Sunflower's Fear of Death'. And yet it continues to stand, despite all possibilities to fall. Vanity, stripped bare, has become heroic. It has learned the truth that beauty hides; that time has a gravitational pull. The oft-quoted Ode On A Grecian Urn makes the same point, and yet John Keats ends it thus: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Haidee Becker, obviously, would beg to differ.
Except that - here lies the paradox - in exposing her subjects (be they flora or fauna), and reproducing their essential being, she is creating another kind of artifice, another kind of beauty. What she sees, what she feels - her insight, her intuition - cannot be expressed in an instant. Instead of spontaneous transmission, she must rely upon the skills and techniques of fine art to preserve her vision. The passion of her performance (she paints like a fencer, prowling around the canvas, until - spotting a weakness - she grunts and attacks with wild thrusts and slashes) is always regulated by the need - and ability - to represent. Haidee Becker is an artist, after all, not a clairvoyant or a fortune-teller. So what distinguishes her from the make-up artiste, the Max Factor factotum? What makes oil paint more truthful than greasepaint? Surely it all depends upon the hand that applies it, and the heart that guides the hand. I have said that the sunflower is better represented by Haidee Becker's painting than by its horticultural history. Likewise the artist is better introduced by her oeuvre than her biography. Nevertheless, it may be instructive to learn a little about what moves the heart that guides the hand that paints the pictures.
Haidee Becker was born in Hollywood as the 1950s commenced: the synthesis of two disparate histories. John Becker was a yekke, a descendant of German Jews. As old as the century he had already lived several lives before becoming a family man and a father; had been a newspaper columnist in Chicago, an art gallery owner in New York (presenting Picasso, Leger, Arp, Le Corbusier and Noguchi to a public unaccustomed to the avant-garde), as well as a civil rights activist (writing The Negro in American Life).
His wife, Virginia Campbell, came from a different world; the gentry of Louisiana. Her early years could have been penned by Chekhov. Perhaps this is why she was moved to enroll at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Thereafter she performed on and off Broadway (where she co-starred in The Yellow Jacket with Fay Wray, Alexander Woolcott, and Harpo Marx), before moving to California. There she worked with Ernst Lubitsch and Cecil B DeMille, featuring in the latter's Unconquered with Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard and Boris Karloff (who remained a family friend).
In 1952 the Beckers left Hollywood and, after many peregrinations across Europe, finally settled in Rome. Young Haidee grew up in a renaissance palace, the Palazzo Caetani, the property of a patrician family, whose ancestry dated back to ancient Rome (how the family came to rent such apartments is explained in John Becker's 'autobiographical novel', Jaime). Prince Caetani, who remained in residence, had known Brahms ("funny little man," he recalled, "smoked a cigar before breakfast"). His library contained letters written to his predecessors by Stendhal, Dumas, Hugo et alii. Young Haidee would wanter Alice-like along hidden corridors, along vast rooms, with murals by Guiciardini and Poussin, sometimes surprising the Prince and Princess at tea with their cousin Tom (aka T S Eliot).
The Caetanis weren't the only ones to attract the literati, however. The Beckers established a marionette theatre on the premises. Virginia Campbell created and directed the puppets, while John Becker supplied the scripts. Young Haidee (sometimes in the company of her half-brother) stood without, looking through an open door at a candle-lit scene full of strange and eccentric personalities. Those who came included Aliice B Toklas, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin, Alexander Calder, Diana Cooper, Aaron Copeland, John Cheever, W H Auden, Karen Blixen, Dick and Mickey Fleischer, Robert Graves and Frederico Fellini. But what were these poets, painters, writers, actors and film-makers to a small girl? Nothing but life-sized marionettes. Instead she sought the company of the servants, the apparent embodiment of real life.
Fellini felt otherwise. So entranced was he that he offered Virginia Campbell (and her marionettes) a role in his new film, La Dolce Vita. Even though she declined (being over-wary of his satirical eye) he remained sufficiently moved to recreate a Becker-style soiree. The host and hostess are named Steiner. Their guests are as above. Also present is Marcello (viz Marcello Mastroianni), Steiner's protégé. Indeed Steiner is the moral centre of the film, the one man who recognizes the decay inherent in the sweet life. As the scene is played out the perceptive viewer might note the striking paintings (bold, almost naïve) that decorate the walls of the set. These are by Virginia Campbell, for whom her daughter often sat. As a matter of fact the doll-like portrait to the right of Marcello's head (as he listens to a recording of bird-song) is of young Haidee. Suddenly the camera moves from the assembled adults and settles on the open door, where two children stand; actors representing young Haidee and her half-brother (just as I had imagined them). Steiner says of the boy: "When he hears something interesting he pauses to think, then he bursts out laughing in delight. For instance, he'll examine a flower very carefully, then he'll laugh, because he understands it." If John Becker had said this of his own daughter he would have to be called a prophet. At the same time it must also be recorded that the children come to a sticky end; shot by their father, who then takes his own life. The assumption is that Steiner had succumbed to a sort of futurephobia, had foreseen a time when he could no longer protect his offspring from evil. Perhaps Fellini had sensed some such fear in John Becker. Certainly he (and his family) left Rome shortly thereafter.
In Vienna he would often take his daughter to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where they studied paintings by Titian, Giorgione, Velazquez, Durer, Cranach and Brueghel. At the same time he taught her to find beauty in unexpected places; a decaying house, an unkempt vagrant. In short young Haidee was already learning to observe what others might miss, to puncture the meniscus of the quotidian. It was the beginning of her formal education in art. She learnt something else in Vienna too; that there is no such thing as a half-Jew. By 1966 all the foundations were in place; she knew what she was, she knew what she wanted to be, she even knew who she was going to marry.
Settling in London Haidee Becker gradually acquired the basic skills, began to properly comprehend the craft of painting. Unfortunately it was no longer on the curricula of the famous art schools, so she sought a sympathetic teacher. Under the guidance of Sophie Wysotska, she copied paintings in the National Gallery. From there she graduated to the studio of Anthony Whishaw and Jean Gibson, husband and wife, painter and sculptor. And then refined her hard-won knowledge under the eagle-eye of Herta Kottner, an alumnus of the Slade, and a rigorous draughtswoman. Finally she met Uli Nimptsch, a Prussian sculptor (interned on the Isle of Man with his friend Oscar Kokoschka at the outbreak of the Second World War). He remained her mentor until his death in 1977. She made the pilgrimage to his studio seven days a week, staying a minimum of six hours (as if that wasn't enough, she also attended evening classes given by Elizabeth Keys at the Royal College of Art). They worked in silence, side by side; he sculpting, she drawing from the models. He rarely spoke, even when delivering criticism. His mere presence, the intensity of his concentration as he stood over his pupil's easel, being sufficient to communicate what was required. Nimptsch subsequently introduced her to the painter Adrian Ryan, whose pupil she also became, learning from him by emulation.
In the meantime she married her fiance from Vienna. They travelled to Greece in the summer of 1972. One evening, driving between cities in a rented car, husband said to wife, "Do you mind if I go a little faster?" They were his last words. (John Becker tenderly recorded the crash and his daughter's convalescence in Jaime.) Et in Arcadia ego, death too dwells in paradise .. That knowledge, so familiar to the old masters, has surely been passed on to Haidee Becker (by the painters themselves, and by life). Yet her work is never dismal nor bitter; rather, it is flush with joie de vivre, and informed with an unflinching curiosity. At the close of the 1970s Haidee Becker married a cellist. They had two children, Jacob and Rachel (the name of Haidee's fictional counterpart in her father's book).
Perhaps the fact that John Becker ahd already colonised the written word ensured that his daughter would seek an outlet elsewhere. Painting thus became her private language, albeit non-verbal. Revered works, viewed in museums, spoke to her, their vocabulary consisting of light, colour, texture and thickness of paint. What she listened for - above all - was the expression of feeling, emotion rather than ideas. At the beginning of her own career everything seemed to be a stimulus to paint. It was as though she needed to prove that she could (with nothing but the paint) capture and hold a space; take it boldly, powerfully, and with panache. Nowadays she is more contemplative, regarding with wonderment the passing of time. Fresh flowers decay long before she knows them sufficiently well to paint them (which explains the sunflower's passage from youth to old age). But this is not regarded as a cause for despair. Unlike Steiner in La Dolce Vita she does not fear the future. On the contrary, her work embraces past, present and future with equal vigour, finds beauty in decay.
Even if Haidee Becker has become more thoughtful her true subject remains unchanged; light and its sinister sister. It is the shadowland - still, dark, silent, soft, seducing, dangerous - that has always beckoned, that has always tempted her to paint. Nor is her art simply a matter of knowing the sitter (be it animate or otherwise). A silent dialogue ensues. "I am not with myself unless I am painting," she has remarked.."
Clive Sinclair
December 1998
