Wolfgang Becker (art historian)
Wolfgang Becker (* 1936 in Hanover ) is a German art historian and former director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen.
Life
Becker studied from 1960 to 1967 at the University of Paris , the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn and at the University of Cologne , the fan art history , archeology and history. In 1965 he received his doctorate from the University of Cologne with the thesis " Paris and German painting 1760-1840".
From 1967 to 1969 Becker was artistic advertising manager for the city of Cologne . Since 1968 he worked with the collector couple Peter and Irene Ludwig . In 1970 he founded the municipal museum "New Gallery in the Old Kurhaus" in Aachen , which took on the task of presenting the constant new acquisitions by the collector Peter Ludwig and supplementing them with exhibitions and events. With a look at the many students at RWTH , he created an art education program that had an impact on the media landscape: 1973–1977 he published a weekly lexical article about contemporary artists in the Aachener Volkszeitung under the title KUNST-ABC (173 articles), opened a children's gallery and achieved the hiring of a museum educator. The first solo exhibitions presented the works of Wolf Vostell , Nancy Graves , Anne and Patrick Poirier and were accompanied by a program of performances and video installations. The video works that were donated and acquired at the time now form the basis of the video collection that is archived in the Ludwig Forum for International Art and can be accessed in an online video archive. As the German commissioner of the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris from 1971 to 1977, he introduced German video artists such as Ulrike Rosenbach and also showed French and Belgian artists in Aachen.
The term “ Neue Wilde ”, which was effective in the media and ultimately used , was first used by Wolfgang Becker in 1980 for an exhibition of the new acquisitions of the Peter Ludwig Collection in the Neue Galerie - Ludwig Collection and its catalog: “Les Nouveaux Fauves - Die Neue Wilde”. It spread quickly, and Becker added to the Aachen collection in the following exhibitions. The hype of the German Neo-Expressionists, the French Supports Surface group, the New York graffiti writers of the Wild Style and the Pattern Painting movement was mainly caused by the large number of purchases by the collector Ludwig and their wandering presentations.
Becker organized numerous traveling exhibitions of the European, American and Eastern European holdings of the Ludwig Collection and showed the first exhibitions of contemporary artists from the GDR, the USSR, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the CSSR and Cuba in Aachen.
In 1989 Becker was appointed honorary professor for art history at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences .
The Neue Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig resided in the Alten Kurhaus Aachen, designed by Jakob Couven , until 1991 . When the collection moved in 1991 to the former Brauer umbrella factory , a Bauhaus- style building designed by the architect Josef Bachmann in 1928, and the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen was founded there, Becker became its first director. In 2001 he retired.
Becker has been working as a freelance art critic and art consultant in Aachen since 2002. From 2013 to 2016 he organized the producer gallery "Art Change" in vacant shops.
Becker published numerous catalogs of the collection and the exhibitions and in 2001 said goodbye to the Ludwig Forum with the book Streitlust. The Art of the Last 30 Years and the Ludwig Collection , Cologne 2001
Wolfgang Becker is married and has one son.
Awards
- In 1990 he was awarded the knight class of the Order of Arts et des Lettres .
- In 1995 he was honored in Cuba with the Distincion por la Cultura Nacional de Cuba .
- In 2007 he received the Golden Laurel of the Society of Austrian Artists .
Web links
- Literature by and about Wolfgang Becker in the catalog of the German National Library
- Homepage of Wolfgang Becker
- the 50 most powerful Aacheners
Individual evidence
- ↑ places. In: the scales. Grünenthal GmbH magazine , volume 36, Aachen 1997, number 1 (with articles by Jürgen Werner, Klaus Semsroth and Kunibert Wachten , Gerwin Zohlen, Sebastian Redecke, Gerhard Ullmann and Wolfgang Becker), p. 44
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Becker, Wolfgang |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German art historian and former museum director |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1936 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hanover |