Charles Biederman

Charles Biederman (born Karel Josef Biederman August 23, 1906 in Cleveland , Ohio , USA ; died December 26, 2004 in Red Wing (Minnesota) , USA) was a painter of the abstract direction and author of books on art.

life and work

Charles Biederman, the son of Czech immigrants, became interested in the fine arts from an early age. As a teenager, he enrolled at the Cleveland Art Institute and took courses in figure drawing and watercolor painting. He learned layout design at a local advertising agency. Although he had not graduated from high school, he later attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1926 to 1929. While at school, Biederman began exploring various artistic influences and was immediately drawn to early 20th century European modernists such as Picasso , Van Gogh , Seurat, and Cézanne . Cézanne in particular had a strong influence on Biederman's early style, and his fascination for the artist is evident in both the pictorial and written works he produced throughout his life. Without wishing to complete his formal training, Biederman finally left the training facility in 1929.

In 1934, Biederman left the Midwest and moved to New York to establish himself in the city's modern art scene. During this time Biederman was shown in the exhibition "Five American Constructionists" in the Paul Reinhardt Galleries and in 1936 he had his first major solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. In 1936 Biederman traveled to Paris, where he met several European modernists, including Joan Miró , Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , Constantin Brancusi , Picasso, Georges Vantongerloo, and Hans Arp . His disappointment with the artists and his growing dissatisfaction with the medium of painting led him back to New York in 1937, where he remained to himself and continued to perfect himself. By the late 1930s, Biederman had withdrawn from the traditional medium of painting and worked exclusively with structural reliefs made from synthetic materials. Soon after, he began studying semantics with Alfred Korzybski in 1938 and was inspired to write what developed into his own interpretation of the history of Western art.

In 1941 Biederman moved to Chicago, where he met his future wife, Mary Katherine Moore. In 1942 he settled on a farm outside Red Wing, Minnesota, where he lived until the end of his life. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis hosted the artist's groundbreaking exhibition in 1965, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art held a retrospective of Charles Biederman in 1976. Both exhibitions helped promote his work in the United States and solidify Biederman's role in the development of American abstract painting in the twentieth century.

Publications

• 1948 Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge
• 1958 The New Cézanne: From Monet to Mondrian
• 1988 Art, Science, Reality ;
• 1992 The Dehumanization and Denaturalization of Modern Art, which follows such artistic movements as Symbolism, Surrealism and Neoplasticism
• 1993 Nature and Art Anew ; a compilation of notes from 1959 to 1990
• 1994 The End of Modernism, Figurative or Abstract ; a compilation of selected journal articles from 1983 to 1992
• 1998 Visual Art Humanifies the Sciences (1998)
• 1999 Creativity and Science ; an exchange of letters with the physicist David Bohm
• 2000 The Visual Millennium: Leonardo to Cézanne

Awards

• 1962 Sikkens Award, Amsterdam
• 1964 Ford Foundation
• 1966 National Council on the Arts
• 1966 Walker Biennial Donors Award
• 1969 Minnesota State Arts Council

Web links (images)

• Bidermann picture example in the Tate Gallery of Modern Art

Web links

• CV Charles Biederman