Gerda Becker Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1910 - d. 2002

Gerda With was born in Hamburg, Germany, and comes from several generations of artists. Being surrounded by painters and designers from an early age, she can't remember the time she herself did not draw or paint. She received her art-training in drawing and various art-media and techniques at the Charlottenberg School of Art in Berlin. Her natural talent and educational background led to early success as a muralist and portraitist. Besides, she gained wide recognition as an illustrator and was for several years closely affiliated with the world-famous "Ullstein" Publishing House in Berlin.
Her inner conflict with the Nazi regime compelled her to forgo her highly rewarding career and exile herself voluntarily.
In 1939 she arrived in New York, where she married Dr. Karl With, well known art historian, author, and museum director from Cologne, Germany. In 1945 she became an American citizen.
After several years of working for a New York advertising agency and raising two children, she resumed her career as an artist and again devoted full time and energy and a prolific imagination to her creative work, motivated, as expressed in her own words, by a "love of nature and everything living."
"In my paintings," she says, "I try to impart some of the wondrous excitement I experience in things close to my heart: flowers, meadows, woods, children, animals. All that grows I want to grow anew in my work. I want to paint the essence of things, my own vision and imagery, a transformation, interwoven like a tapestry of dream and reality."
The unique and very personal style and technique, developed by Gerda With, caused an immediate recognition in the art world.
Along with many solo exhibitions and numerous awards, her paintings are found in many collections, here and abroad.