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It got me many times through the years: I’d be walking through Philbrook and think I’d just seen a live woman, standing in some alcove in my peripheral vision, bending over a vacuum cleaner. Then I’d do a double-take and realize (again!) that it was the work of the surprising, delightful, masterful Tulsa artist Otto Duecker. The M.A. Doran Gallery, which has shown Duecker’s work since 1984, has confirmed to The Pickup that the beloved Tulsa artist died Friday, January 23, at age 77.
“It's just a big, huge loss for the Tulsa art community,” gallery owner Mary Ann Doran said. “For me, it's a huge personal loss. He was a close friend, and I was used to popping over and seeing all the progress on his work in his studio, which I always teased and said it's great because [the gallery] would get first pick.”
Best known for his hyperrealistic oil paintings of floating fruit, still lifes, and portraits of celebrities and historical figures from Marilyn Monroe to Winston Churchill to the Dalai Lama, Duecker exhibited work in galleries across the country, and locally his paintings hang in the permanent collections of the Philbrook Museum of Art and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. Born in Milwaukee in 1948, he settled in Oklahoma with his family and attended Oklahoma State University as a business major before, as a 2010 Tulsa People story reported, he had a conversation that changed everything: “As a college sophomore home on vacation, a friend said, ‘You love to paint. What I think you ought to do is get a teaching degree and you can paint in the summers.’ That’s what he did.”
Duecker stands with the likes of Patrick Gordon and the late Bill Rabon (another M.A. Doran Gallery-represented painter) as part of an extraordinary generation of Tulsa artists whose work brought the city to the attention of the global art world. “People loved his work because it's realism,” Doran said. “No one ever walked in and said, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ They really respected his talent, his ability to make magic with paint.”
Philbrook curator Susan Green met Duecker in 2008, while working on a show at the museum. “He could walk people through his paintings and help them see, not just what made an Otto Duecker painting an Otto Duecker painting, but rather, what makes painting, just in general, really interesting,” she said.
“He could help people see the beauty in everyday objects,” Green continued. “If it was a wrinkled piece of paper, or a leaf, or a piece of fruit, or a stick, things we might otherwise pass by in our lives—he would help us say: this is art; this could be hanging on the wall. Because Otto Duecker is looking at them, they’re worthy of being painted and appreciated for their intrinsic beauty. When I did a studio visit and someone was in there with him, I’d see them start looking at a stick and they’d see: Oh, it’s got different colors; it’s got different textures. Now they’re looking at the world in a different way. When I would leave, I always felt lighter. I felt like I needed to stop and look around and pay attention to the world around me. The world around me didn’t seem so urgent.”
It wasn’t just Duecker’s art that made an impact; it was him. He was active throughout the local arts community, and for 12 years he served as an art teacher at Edison High School, continuing to work with Tulsa Public Schools on its Levit Prize for Excellence after his retirement from the classroom.
“You know,” Doran said, “I watched over the years, there were a number of artists who would go to his studio, and he was very kind and very generous with his time, and he mentored some of them and showed them things about background colors. And he willingly shared info about his glazes and varnishes and gessoing practices. He also was a beloved teacher. I mean, we still would have to this day people come in and say, ‘Oh, I remember Duecker. He was my teacher. He was so funny, or he taught me so much, or he was so very young.’ So I think he made a big impact on people because they're still talking about it.”
“His wit was so dry,” Green said. “He would include everyone in his laugh. He would light up and throw his head back…. There will never be another laugh like Otto's. I’ll always remember his laugh and the way his face would light up. He would make everyone in the room want to laugh with him.”
According to the M.A. Doran Gallery’s Instagram, there will be a memorial service for Duecker at All Souls Unitarian Church on Thursday, February 5, at 4pm with a reception immediately following.
Z.B. Reeves contributed reporting for this story.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Duecker was 78. He was 77.
