Hildegarde Haas [née Vogel], painter and printmaker, was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Edith and Kurt Vogel on April 19, 1926. In 1937, the Vogels left Germany and emigrated to the United States, settling in Dallas, Texas where Hildegarde attended Highland Park High School.

She took summer classes at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center and then studied for two years at the University of Chicago. In 1949, she received a scholarship to the Art Students’ League in New York, where she studied under Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor. Haas was completely self-taught as a printmaker and explored the woodcut medium with other students at the Art Students’ League, learning "as she went.” She was included in the 16 Newcomers show at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in January 1949.

In 1950, Haas was included in the American Color Woodcuts exhibition at the George Binet Gallery in New York that was in cooperation with the Print Club of Philadelphia. She was a member of The Printmakers, an established group of New York graphic artists whose ranks included Ross Abrams, Seong Moy, William Rose, Peter Kahn, Ruben Reif, Jim Forsberg, Wolf Kahn, Dorothy Morton, and Aaron Kurzen. Haas was included in the Young American Printmakers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953. The physical demands of carving and hand printing were too great so after seven years she put down her knives and gouges and exchanged them for brushes.

After moving to Northern California in 1951, Haas returned to school and received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from San Jose State University and began her teaching career at Tennyson High School in Hayward. She was affiliated with the San Francisco and Oakland Art Associations and the Arts and Crafts Coop in Berkeley. She continued to exhibit nationally and had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Kaiser Aluminum Corporation.

Hildegarde Haas’ work is represented in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Seattle Museum of Art, Washington; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.

Hildegarde Haas died in Berkeley, California on 25 October 2002.