Charles Biederman: A Brief History

Karel (Charles) Joseph Biederman was born August 23, 1906 to immigrant Czech parents in Cleveland, Ohio. Interested in art from an early age, he attended classes in figure drawing and watercolor painting at the Cleveland Art Institute as a teenager, and eventually took an apprenticeship doing layout work for a local ad agency. There he learned a lesson that stayed with him all his life-- that there are two kinds of artists: commercial artists who get paid for their work, and fine artists "who sure as hell don't." Despite his success as a layout man he chose the latter course. Though he lacked a high-school diploma, having dropped out of the eleventh grade to help pay the family's new mortgage, he convinced the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to accept him on merit.

Biederman moved to Chicago in 1926. He chose to work odd jobs for low pay rather than return to the more lucrative commercial work, which he considered an unacceptable compromise. He financed his studies with janitorial duties in the morning, bussing dishes at noon, and ushering at the Apollo Theater at night. His student work was of a well above average quality. He was an excellent draftsman, as evidenced by a large series of portraits drawn from life with the unforgiving sharp edge of a square litho crayon. His student paintings were influenced heavily by an absorbing interest in the Art Institute's recently acquired Helen Birch Bartlett Collection, which he visited regularly despite warnings of dire consequences from his conservative instructors. The Bartlett collection featured the best of late nineteenth and early twentieth century European modernism; Picasso's "Blind Guitarist," Van Gogh's "Bedroom at Arles," Seurat's large "Le Grande Jatte," and other such works. But it was Cézanne's small painting "The Basket of Apples" that struck Biederman like a blow to the solar plexus. It pulled him in immediately, though his response was purely instinctive at the time. Only later would he develop his meticulously thought-out theories about Cézanne's work; why it is so compelling, so important, and so generally misunderstood. For the moment the painting simply slaked thirsts that he hardly knew he had, and he drank it in greedily. He began painting in a style reminiscent of Cézanne's, but using the muted colors of the old masters he loved so well. Paintings like "Still Life, Chicago 1929" show Biederman's potential plainly. The composition is tight but not overly constrained, thanks to his natural feel for three dimensional space and the organizational skills he learned as a layout man in Cleveland. Devices such as multiple perspectives and subtly fractured spatial divisions show an intelligent understanding of Cézanne. The draftsmanship is flawless, though not yet as fluid as it would eventually become. The brushwork is confident, at times even delicate, and the work is animated by a nuanced lighting and subtle transitions that belie the heavily geometricized structure. His instructors recognized all this, but didn't know what to make of him. On the one hand they wanted to acknowledge his obvious talents with prizes and scholarships; on the other hand they were frustrated with his obstinate refusal to attend basic courses like anatomy and art history. Biederman finally came to believe that he had nothing more to gain there, and dropped out in December 1929, just two months after the crash on Wall Street.

Still Life, Chicago, 1929

Untitled, Chicago, 1932

Chicago, 1934

Prompted in part by Barr's 1936 "Cubism and Abstract Art" exhibition at the MOMA and in part by the fact that Anderson's patronage made it financially doable, Biederman decided to leave New York and "go to the source." He arrived in France in October, preceded by the "Concretionists" show which traveled to both Paris and London. Biederman was well received in Paris. With the help of Sweeney and Charles Ratton, a French collector of African art he'd met in New York, he was able to meet all the major players: Miró, Mondrian, Brancusi, Picasso, Vantongerloo, Pevsner, Arp, Domela, and others. But once again he was disappointed in what he saw. After two weeks he felt he had come too late; that Paris was "washed up as an art center," and that the various artists were more concerned with petty infighting than with furthering the cause. He spent a couple months making the rounds, then settled down to work on his own. Establishing a pattern that came to typify his life, he began to decline offers for which most artists would have given their right arm. When Léger asked him to exhibit together, he refused. He returned to New York in June 1937, convinced that Europe was suffering under the burden of an overly imposing cultural heritage and that only America could provide the fresh start needed for the establishment of a truly "New Art."

New York, April 1935

Biederman had only a vague idea of what this New Art might be at the time, but he was convinced that while it would be radically different from what had come before, it would nevertheless ultimately build on the past. He left Paris with two convictions which occupied him for the next ten years: that the Dutch De Stijl movement had the "proper subject" and that Russian Constructivism had the "proper medium" for this new direction. This requires some explanation.

De Stijl's "proper subject" was a geometry of pure forms and colors derived from the study of nature. The cubists were unwilling to embrace the natural outcome of their own structural studies-- they brought mimeticism to the brink of pure abstraction but were ultimately unwilling to give up references to representational subject matter. At this critical juncture De Stijl's originator Piet Mondrian did not falter. Biederman admired the Dutchman's use of orthogonal geometry and primary colors, outgrowths of his earlier studies of trees, piers and oceans. In later years Biederman came to believe-- and not without reason-- that Mondrian had turned his back on nature, an unpardonable sin. But for the decade from 1937 to 1947 Mondrian's work was very much on Biederman's mind.

New York, May 1935

The second major influence at this time was Russian Constructivism, a movement that reached a high point with Antoine Pevsner, whose studio Biederman had visited outside of Paris. Like De Stijl, Constructivism had moved beyond representational mimesis to pure abstraction. The Constructivists were proponents of a technological age. Their works, often based on mathematical models, celebrated a machine aesthetic and the inherent qualities of industrial materials. The "proper medium," then, was the machine. Unlike the Constructivists though, Biederman gave the machine no aesthetic significance. For him it was only a tool; a means, not an end in itself. The same was true of his use of industrial materials, which were selected for their functional properties, not for any inherent aesthetic value. The philosophical differences between Biederman and the Russians are great and can be seen in details as seemingly insignificant as the joining of one part to its neighbor. The Constructivists exalted in the technology which made their work possible; they proudly showed all the fasteners. Biederman hid the fasteners carefully; having no intrinsic value they served only to distract from the business at hand.

Relief, New York, 1936

Biederman traced out the historical reactions to this crisis in a number of his writings. Symbolist painters such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, skeptical of both reason and direct visual perception and trusting only their "inward feelings," strove for a new reality based in the subconscious, creating fantastic images derived ultimately from perceptual nature but seen through a "mirror of distortion." By turning their vision inward they hoped to find truths which could somehow transcend those of the tangible world in which they lived. In the twentieth century surrealism took this search for a super-reality to extremes, while movements such as dada and Duchamp (a one-man movement if ever there was one) revelled in the chaos let loose as the crisis unfolded.

Diametrically opposed to the Symbolists and their kin were Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, who refused to give up on nature as the source of creative inspiration in painting. If Courbet had taken the pure mimetic tradition as far as it could go, then it was time to begin digging beneath the surface, past the natural objects themselves to a study of human perception, and finally, to the very methods nature employs in structuring our world. Monet began a serious and prolonged investigation of the interrelationships of light, color, and form in human perception. Cézanne, taking up where Monet left off, researched the very organization of space itself. His later landscapes-- especially his watercolors-- distill nature down past the level of tangible, space-displacing forms to near-abstract arrangements of planar elements of light and color based on keen and direct observations of nature.

Study for Three-dimensional
work, Paris, May 23, 1937

Work No. 9A Paris, 1937

By 1941 he had returned to Chicago. New York had begun to resemble Paris in Biederman's eyes, with partisan bickering, uninspired painting, and an urban modernist aesthetic heavily derivative of the European example. Biederman sought refuge in the American midwest and found a studio near a park in an attempt to reestablish the strong relationship with nature he had cultivated as a boy. He began to explore new directions in his art works, which he now called "constructions." Inevitably, some of these investigations were more successful than others. An entire series of three dimensional sculptures consisting of a hodge-podge of painted sheet metal cutouts, spheres, wires, rods and strings was eventually scrapped. The few remaining photographs show why; the works were affected and ill-conceived. But another series of early constructions made for the Interstate Medical Clinic in Red Wing, Minnesota was much more successful. One particularly elegant work marks the first use of fluorescent light in the visual arts-- an experiment Biederman later decided was premature and which he never repeated.

No. 9, New York, July 1940

Meanwhile, he was making some headway on the social front. He had reconnected with Mary Katharine Moore, the beloved sister of John Anderson's wife Eugenie. Charles and Mary had met and enjoyed each other's company on a number of occasions over the years, but Mary had been engaged the first time they met and married the next. Her marriage finally ended in divorce. She had become frustrated living with a friendly but highly conventional man who seemed to lack any interests beyond his workaday career and the sports pages. Biederman, on the other hand, was anything but boring and anything but conventional. Charles and Mary were wed in a simple civil ceremony in Red Wing on December 25 1941, with John and Eugenie Anderson as witnesses. Mary's importance to Biederman's work cannot be overstated. In the catalog to the 1976-77 retrospective exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Biederman wrote:

Mary and Charles,
Wedding Day,
December, 25, 1941

Mary and Anna, 1946

By the late 1940s Biederman had achieved the clarity and direction he had been seeking since his return from Paris. He had reconsidered his output of the previous decade and found it lacking. Granted he had made some exciting things, but in retrospect he found much of his work arbitrary and forced, with decisions having been made for short-term effect rather than long-term progress. A retreat to the rural landscape and slower-paced life of Red Wing made it possible for him to step back and reconsider his approach. He realized he had been moving too quickly, rushing things. He needed to slow down. If he was to succeed he must ensure that each new step was a natural outcome of what had come before. True forward progress in art could neither be dictated nor rushed, it must evolve at a pace and in a direction determined by its own necessity. Once again Biederman pared his plastic vocabulary down to the simplest elements: thin planes of painted aluminum attached in horizontal and vertical relationships to a painted back-plane. This is reminiscent of his position back in 1937, only this time around there was a distinct difference. He had rediscovered Paul Cézanne.

Work No. 27, 1952 - 1971

Saying that Biederman rediscovered Cézanne actually understates the case. He in fact believed that he had discovered Cézanne's true significance-- his true intent, which had eluded other followers-- and that the turn-of-the-century modernists who claimed Cézanne as their predecessor had misinterpreted him and were false heirs to his legacy. Biederman's 1958 "The New Cézanne" argued the case effectively, though its main premise is clouded by some curious hypothesizing about mechanically derived "concentrics," a position he later recanted. The basic argument is this: Cézanne was a painter whose every move was guided solely by what his careful eye could see in nature, and who believed that nature was the sole wellspring of valid artistic activity. His was very much an extroverted perception. He did not look inward like the Symbolists for guidance and inspiration, he looked outward, to nature. Biederman included numerous Cézanne quotes to drive home this point:

But he didn't arrive at this understanding by reading Cézanne's limited writings, he arrived at it by looking at his paintings. Anyone who has been stirred by a mature Cézanne landscape will understand this easily. Cézanne's translation into paint of what nature put before him was an almost unfathomable mix of sophisticated intellect and pure instinct, all guided by keen observation. Yet he did not content himself with merely reproducing what he saw. Like Monet, Cézanne valued subject matter only as far as it provided a vehicle for investigating deeper aspects of nature. "Nature is not on the surface," he said, "it is in the depth." Biederman wrote:

That Cézanne's work is grounded in nature may seem obvious, but the theoretical implications are less readily apparent. One relates to idealist philosophies, which have roots extending back to classical Greece. Biederman noted that Cézanne rejected idealism, criticizing the Beaux-Arts painters for believing they could "trace the truth through preconceived types." The classical tradition saw nature as striving for a perfection she somehow never achieved. In this view nature had in mind an archetype, an ideal toward which she strove with each individual creation, but try as she might she somehow always missed the mark. The artist, though, could divine nature's intentions and achieve this elusive perfection in his art. Cézanne saw this as just so much hogwash-- introspective theorizing; verbalisms at the expense of simple perception:

Work No. 12, 1979-1981

In 1954 Biederman was able to scrape together enough money to buy a small farmhouse about seven miles outside of Red Wing. Just behind the house was a hill leading up to a wooded valley. Weather permitting, he climbed this hill every day and sat for a few hours, simply studying nature. He did this for the better part of half a century, always sitting in exactly the same spot. The view was neither exotic nor spectacular, but he found it inexhaustible. The theoretical underpinnings we've been examining were left behind when Biederman climbed his hill. Cézanne once remarked that every time he saw nature it was as if he had never seen it before, as if he saw it each time with the eyes of a child. Biederman too learned to disconnect his mind while he looked. He simply drank nature in with his eyes, and accepted what he saw unquestioningly. This is where Biederman's "New Art" was really forged, not in the studio, not poring over books of theory and philosophy. Out in Nature, with a capital N.

The Biederman home.

The relationship between Biederman's art and nature can be difficult to grasp, perhaps especially so for those who have studied his theory extensively but have seen only one or two original works. It's difficult to understand how something so pristine and geometric as a mature Biederman relief can have any connection to sprawling organic nature... but then it isn't a question of understanding. Grasping this link is not an intellectual exercise. It's a gut-level realization bordering on epiphany and based entirely in looking, not thinking. It is extremely difficult-- perhaps impossible-- to grasp this connection without having a chance to spend some time with original works, preferably alone, in diffused and changing natural light, and over an extended period of time. In such circumstances the organic qualities of the work manifest themselves abundantly.

A Biederman needs to be looked at in the same way it was created-- the viewer must disconnect the intellect and drink the work in visually. Whatever is in us that makes us respond so passionately to the beauty of nature then takes over, and we experience a startlingly analogous response to the work of art. Everyone has had a moment or two in nature when the landscape suddenly "falls into place"-- those rare and spine-tingling instants when everything seems intensely beautiful and one feels almost urgently in-and-of nature. These are entirely visual experiences; they bypass our intellects and go straight to the cores of our being. Our spines chill because of what we see, not because of what we think. Our species evolved in nature, we're part of it, and we are predisposed to respond to its beauty in an almost visceral manner.

This is not to say that all Biederman reliefs are equally successful. He was constantly experimenting and constantly striving to evaluate his results as dispassionately as he could. He often backtracked, believing that he'd either strayed down a rabbit trail or forced a development before he was really ready for it. At such times he would resimplify his approach, returning to an earlier stage at which he felt he was truly in command of his means, then strike out anew. Early on he dropped the use of blending two colors on a single plane-- the modulations should be effected by light, not by pigment. In the mid 1950s he quit placing planes parallel to the back-plane, believing they restricted the free flow of space. A later series of works allowed the foreground planes to extend past the edges of the backplane. This too was dropped, ruled out as contrived and giving an affected and overly architectural effect. Numerous forays were made into the use of diagonals and branching, each time pushing the limits to the point where the overall organization was finally compromised and retreat was considered necessary. But a successful relief-- and there are many-- is an unusually eloquent visual statement: a sensuous and endlessly varying fugue of color and light accomplished with stoically limited means, and a structural composition so open that it almost floats, activated by nuanced changes of lighting and subtle shifts in the viewer's position.

Biederman considered a 1965 retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis his break-through show. A few works were sold to the museum trustees and, as interest increased steadily following the exhibition, more sales followed. Finally Biederman's work was able to meet the modest needs of his family, and Mary could resign her teaching position.

All the while he was creating visual works Biederman was writing prolifically as well-- fortunately a solid financial base wasn't required for the pursuit of this secondary passion. In the early 1940s he attracted a small group of followers in Chicago including Joan Saugrain, Aspasia Voulis, and others. After moving to Red Wing he maintained these contacts by mail. Excerpts of letters to Saugrain comprised his second book, "Letters on the New Art," published in 1951. We've already examined his third book, "The New Cézanne." Initially intended as a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Paul Cézanne's death in 1906, it went unpublished until 1958-- as Biederman noted in the introduction "every effort to secure funds for 1956 publication met with failure." As with all of his books it was self-published in a limited edition, promoted primarily through word of mouth, and not widely read.

The Hayward exhibition passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, save a small write-up in Time Magazine, but it was followed seven years later by a major retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in late 1976. Here finally was the recognition which had largely eluded Biederman on American shores. With about 250 works, roughly half of which were three-dimensional constructions, this was the most extensive show of his career and earned a well-considered review by Donald Kuspit in the May/June 1977 issue of Art in America, the first major article in a US journal. But it was a bittersweet success. Biederman's confidant, collaborator, trusted friend and beloved wife Mary died just months before the exhibition opened.

Mary's death plunged Biederman into even deeper isolation. Living alone on a dead-end country road without a car, he relied on a few friends and neighbors for the occasional trip to town. He had so few social contacts for a decade or more that he almost lost his voice, he used it so rarely. He worked as feverishly as ever, but lacking Mary's domestic concerns he let the housekeeping go completely. His ubiquitous cigars (he smoked a hundred a week) sooted the walls, carpeted the floor with ash, and burned holes in his clothing, but he was well content so long as he could work uninterrupted.

The major New York galleries began courting him following the success of the Minneapolis show but he was suspicious of their motives, having been down the same road before. After including Biederman in the 1964 "Mondrian, De Stijl and their Impact" exhibition, the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery had made similar overtures. Biederman's recollection of the event, recorded in a 1976 interview for the Archives of American Art, is telling:

Any other artist would have jumped at the opportunity to be represented by Marlborough, but Biederman valued his integrity above all else and instinctively avoided anything smelling even vaguely suspicious. When the Fifth Avenue galleries began showing a renewed interest he devised a simple test of their intentions. He invited the owners to pay him a visit in Red Wing; those serious enough to make the trip would be considered. Only Grace Borgenicht did so, and was duly rewarded with a contract which lasted from 1979 until her gallery closed almost twenty years later.

1979 also saw the publication of "Search for New Arts" which summarized Biederman's thinking as it had developed beyond the earlier books, pulling architecture and the photographic arts into the mix as well. SNA gives a good introduction to the theoretical and historical context in which Biederman wished to be viewed, as well as providing some fine color reproductions of his work, which can otherwise be difficult to find. By the time this fourth book was published Biederman had dropped the terms "Constructionism" and "Structurism" which he had originally used to describe his work, and settled simply on "New Art", a phrase he borrowed from Cézanne.

In the 1980s Biederman developed an association with the PRO Foundation, a Dutch organization dedicated to promoting constructivist art and architecture internationally. PRO arranged a 1988 European tour for Biederman, with stops in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Switzerland and France. This was followed up by a second trip a year later to attend and participate in the third PRO conference "Constructivism: Man vs. Environment" at which Biederman's 1988 book "Art-Science-Reality" was introduced. Biederman's interest in the PRO Foundation declined in subsequent years as he came to believe that its membership was overemphasizing mathematics and science at the expense of simple perception and the lessons of nature.

Charles, 1946

Charles, 2000

History will decide which assessment holds. Biederman, who still lives and works in Red Wing, Minnesota, is convinced that the market and career driven machine which the art world has become has too much momentum and too much at stake to acknowledge his lone voice in the wilderness. He wrote me in 1993 that he felt "as one speaking to the wind as it blows by and disappears." But he keeps on just the same, trusting his fate to the thin thread that he believes carries art forward and to future generations who might sympathize with his core beliefs and work to pick up where he left off.

Neil Larsen

December 2000