#gallerist

✨I’ve been switching up my social scene lately and am now convinced that I can become a socialite via the art scene.

(via Monique Knowlton, ’60s-Era Model and Provocative Gallerist, Dies at 87 - The New York Times)

At a time when women were largely confined to household and parenting Hanna Bekker vom Rath (1893-1983) pursued a different path: born into a wealthy, liberal family then Hanna vom Rath neither wanted to fulfill representative functions nor did she want to live the life a traditional housewife. Instead she wanted to become an artists and took painting and drawing lessons with Ottilie Roederstein, Ida Kerkovius and Adolf Hoelzl. But although her dream of a full-time artistic career never materialized she devoted her life to art: at the „Blue House“ in Wiesbaden, the family seat of her, Paul Bekker and their children, she displayed her growing collection of works by Heckel, Kirchner, Lehmbruck or Schmidt-Rotfluff. Together with Alexej von Jawlensky, whom she had befriended around 1926, Schmidt-Rotluff became Bekker's house artist and spent many summer weeks in the „Blue House“, especially after the Nazis seized power in 1933. During these years and despite the danger of being denunciated Bekker began to support „her“ artists by organizing secret exhibitions in her house as well as her apartment in Berlin: her goal was to secure the artists’ economic base by selling their „degenerate“ artworks to progressive collectors. Among the exhibited artists verifiably were Erich Heckel, Willy Baumeister, Ida Kerkovius, Ernst Wilhelm Nay and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff while visitors included sculptor Georg Kolbe, the founding director of the Brücke Museum Leopold Reidemeister as well as Ernst Gosebruch, the forcibly removed former director of the Folkwang Museum. These exhibitions, hosted under precarious conditions, nevertheless lay the foundation for Bekker’s postwar Kunstkabinett in Frankfurt/Main where she showed prewar as well as contemporary art.

Right now and up until 16 June the Brücke Museum in Berlin with „Hanna Bekker vom Rath. A Rebel for Modern Art“ devotes a comprehensive exhibition to her pioneering work and the artists she collected and represented. Alongside it the Hirmer Verlag published the present catalogue which provides a concise overview of Bekker’s many activities: besides featuring a beautiful spreads of her legendary residence and her artworks the included essays elaborate her biography and artist network, her clandestine exhibitions during wartime as well as her women artists network.

At just 7 years old her mother gave her over to trusted close friends with whom she immigrated from Barbados to the US with. Eventually settling in Harlem, NY where she graduated from Wadleigh High School in 1930. Now known as Wadleigh Secondary School For the Performing and Visual Arts, the only accredited arts high school in Harlem.

She went on to attend Howard University studying fine arts with Lois Mailou Jones and printmaker James Lesesne Wells from 1931-1933. The thick of The Great Depression caused financial hardship for Knight who had to drop out before receiving her degree. She then returned to NY and began work at the Works Projects Administration as an assistant to the muralist, Charles Alston. She didn’t let her early departure from college stop her. She continued studying art at the Harlem Community Arts center where she was mentored by Augusta Savage. Through Savage, she met and was exposed to the work of other artists, poets, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. 

In 1934 she joined another Works Projects Administration mural project, where she met fellow painter and future husband Jacob Lawrence. In 1946 Knight and her husband were invited to teach at Black Mountain College, a private Liberal Arts College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Returning to work and live in NY during the 1950s.

She then moved with her husband to Seattle Washington after he accepted a job at the University of Washington’s School of Art. The traveling and work she has done from the 40s-60s some would say makes her an itinerant artist. She is quoted in a Callaloo magazine interview with Charles H. Rowell saying “It wasn’t necessary for me to have acclaim… I just knew that I wanted to do it, so I did it whenever I could.”

Knight procured support from the National Links, INC for her first one woman show that was developed in 1976. This exhibit created a greater desire for her works and acquiring of her pieces by national museums. 

Knight’s work was concentrated on storytelling paintings that illustrated the lives, culture, and history of African Americans that surrounded her own daily life.  Her paintings encompassed a diverse range of subjects such as still life, portraits, and urban scenes. She worked with a variety of different mediums from oil paints, water colors, and gouache. Later in her artistic journey her paintings started to have a more poetic depiction of animals through etching and monoprints. You can also see that she draws from her admiration for African dance, sculpture, and theatre.

https://jacobandgwenlawrence.org/

Love Haitian art? Find your next piece at Myriam Nader Haitian Art Gallery