German painter, art collector and art dealer, also known as Hanna Bekker through her marriage to music critic Paul Bekker.
Early in life she discovered her love for art, and took private painting and drawing lessons from Marie Paquet-Steinhausen in Frankfurt, Ottilie Roederstein at Hofheim am Taunus and Ida Kerkovius in Stuttgart, and belonged to the circle around Adolf Hölzel. She had a lifelong friendship with Ida Kerkovius.
In the 1920s she made friends with, among others, Ludwig Meidner, Alexei Jawlensky, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emy Roeder.
During the period in which Modern art was being destroyed by the Nazis, Hanna Bekker organized secret exhibitions of outlaw artworks in her Berlin studio apartment in Regensburger Strasse. She followed the example of courageous art dealers such as Günther Franke or the now controversial Ferdinand Möller and continued until the spring of 1943.
In 1947 she founded the “Frankfurter Kunstkabinett Hanna Bekker vom Rath,” which initially offered a forum for her artist friends defamed under the Nazi regime. Her circle now included Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who settled in Hofheim from 1945 to 1952, the photographer Marta Hoepffner, who opened her private photography school there, and her teacher Willi Baumeister. Also Ludwig Meidner, returned from exile, lived between 1955 and 1963 in a district of Hofheim. She contacted artists who had emigrated, along with collectors and art dealers who revealed that many emigrant artists abroad had gone unnoticed in their host countries during the twelve years of the Nazi dictatorship.
From 1952 she travelled to meet the once outlawed artists in North and South America, South Africa, India, Greece and the Middle East, and became known as the “Ambassador of the Arts”.
She died on 8 August 1983 in Bad Nauheim, aged 89.
Today, part of her private collection of German Expressionists focusing on Alexej von Jawlensky is in the Museum of Wiesbaden. The Stadtmuseum Hofheim am Taunus owns a collection of Hanna Bekker’s own works.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)