Well-known and Unknown
Charles Biederman’s brief but powerful period as a painter is surveyed during an exhibition at Menconi + Schoelkopf
Charles Biederman (1906-2004) admired Cézanne who wrote, “We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.” Biederman had lived briefly in the artistically
fertile circles of Paris which included Mondrian, Pevsner, Brancusi, Arp, Miro and Léger. In 1942, he settled in Red Wing,wisconsin, where he would live the rest of his life. His early landscapes showed his admiration of Cézanne and the cubists. Later, immersed in the rural landscape, he sought the structure of nature.
Menconi + Schoelkopf in Newyork presents an exhibition of Biederman’s paintings from the 1930s as well as examples of his sculptures, through
July 3.The gallery notes,“charles Biederman’s meteoric career as an abstract painter in the 1930s saw him exhibiting alongside Alexander Calder and Charles Green Shaw, before he broke with painting entirely around 1940 in favor of a long and prolific career as a sculptor. Menconi + Schoelkopf presents a group of extraordinary canvases from this brief and powerful period as a painter, along with early examples of his wall-relief sculpture.”
Untitled, New York, August 5, 1936, was painted in 1936 before he left for Paris in October. He would stay there until the following June.the biomorphic forms in his paintings began to shift as can be seen in his 3/17/1937 Paris #37, 1937, painted during his stay in Paris. He had been
experimenting with sculptural reliefs and continued with his experiments in Paris. Back in the U.S. he continued to work on his sculpture, eventually abandoning painting altogether.
Born in Cleveland to parents who had no interest in his artistic pursuits, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 and, failing to attend classes, he left in 1929 for New York. Being a contrarian he often disagreed with any compatriots he managed to have and burned bridges behind him. He left Paris because he had become disillusioned with the personae of the artists he met there. Nevertheless, he had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery in Newyork in 1936.
In 1941 he moved back to Chicago and married the sister-in-law of his patron John Anderson, Mary Katherine Moore.the couple moved to Red Wing where he could observe nature and what he called “the structural process level of reality.” Lyndel King, then director of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, said,“he believed he was revealing the structure of nature, and that’s what he believed all art was about.”
Biederman stated his preferred media was painted aluminum and that his work was “three dimensional art that is neither sculpture nor painting.” #78, 1952, in painted aluminum, illustrates the structure of nature and was meant to be illuminated by natural light that moved and changed throughout the day causing the perception of the construction to change with it. Although he called himself “the best known unknown artist in America” he lived long enough to see retrospective exhibitions of his work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1965, an exhibition organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain in London in 1969 and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1976.