Full Name: Becker, Felix
Gender: male
Date Born: 27 September 1864
Date Died: 28 October 1928
Place Born: Sondershausen, Thuringia, Germany
Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): biography (general genre)
Career(s): art historians and biographers
Overview
Co-editor of the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Becker studied art history in Bonn and in Leipzig as the assistant to August Schmarsow. He and Ulrich Thieme began work on a comprehensive dictionary of artists, architects and decorators in 1898. The first volume appeared in 1907. Becker withdrew from the project in 1910 because of ill health. Ironically Thieme preceded him in death in 1922 and the editorship was assumed by Hans Vollmer who saw the immense project to completion. Vollmer continued the initiative for a twentieth-century set, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX. Jahrhunderts published between 1953 and 1962. A re-edition of the work began in 1983 in Leipzig, but the poor quality of this (published in the Communist DDR); resulted in the project’s revision and complete re-editing as the Saur Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, its successor.
Selected Bibliography
Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart: unter Mitwirkung von 300 Fachgelehrten des In- und Auslandes. 37 vols. Leipzig : E. A. Seemann, 1907-1950. ____ 0 – Metzler
Sources
Fork, Christiane. “Thieme, Ulrich.” Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 434-436.