He is survived by his daughter, Anna Brown, his son-in-law, Bob Brown, and his grandson, Charles Brown.

Biederman was born August 23, 1906, in Cleveland, Ohio. Interested in art since childhood, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1920s. Finding Chicago too limiting, he moved to New York in 1934, where he quickly established himself as one of the leading modernists of the United States. Preceded by his growing reputation, he moved to Paris in 1936, but soon became disillusioned with the bickering and inbreeding of the art world that he found there. He returned to New York after nine months, convinced that only in America, free of the weight of Europe’s cultural past, could a new art take root, an art that was, paradoxically, non-representational but based purely on visible nature. He worked toward this goal every waking moment for the rest of his long life.

In 1942, after short stints in New York and Chicago, he settled in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he married Mary Katherine Moore and, some years later, purchased an old farmstead on the outskirts of town. There he found both the breathing space and the closeness to nature that he needed to pursue his quest.

In 1948 he published his magnum opus, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, an exhaustive rethinking of art history from a perceptual rather than a stylistic perspective. Biederman’s ideas, elaborated in a dozen more books and numerous articles that followed over the years, exerted a strong influence on artists in Britain, Holland, Canada, and the United States, spawning a number of periodicals and schools of artists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The “classic” Biederman work is an abstract wall-relief of brightly colored rectangular planes fastened almost weightlessly in front of a colored back-plane. Employing the most elemental terms, Biederman created some of the most magisterial art of our times, ranging from quiet meditations on nature’s subtleties to exuberant celebrations of her bounty. Important retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum. Biederman’s work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, the Kröller-Müller Museum, and numerous other public and private collections.

Neil Larson, 2005