Bernd and Hilla Becher valuation
German photographers whose grids of water towers, blast furnaces and cooling towers founded the Düsseldorf School of Photography.
Bernd Becher (1931–2007) was born in Siegen and studied painting in Stuttgart and typography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; Hilla Becher (1934–2015), born Hilla Wobeser in Potsdam, trained as a photographer there before studying photography at the same academy.
What a work by Bernd and Hilla Becher is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Bernd Becher (1931–2007) was born in Siegen and studied painting in Stuttgart and typography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; Hilla Becher (1934–2015), born Hilla Wobeser in Potsdam, trained as a photographer there before studying photography at the same academy. They married in 1961 and worked together from then on, photographing framework houses, water towers, coal bunkers, cooling towers, gas tanks, grain elevators and blast furnaces in Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in North America, square on and usually on overcast days. They showed the results as typologies, grids of one kind of structure, and called the buildings anonymous sculptures. Bernd taught photography at the Düsseldorf academy from 1976 to 1996, and his students, among them Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, became known as the Becher school. They received the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award.
Their photographs are gelatin silver prints, sold singly and as grids framed together, and some were issued as editions or in portfolios. A grid should be complete and in the arrangement they made, and a buyer will want the title, the date of the negatives and of the printing, and signatures, usually both names, on the reverse or on labels. Prints should be checked for silvering, foxing and damage from framing, and the provenance should go back to their galleries where possible.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
