October 13 to November 6, 2015
Charles Biederman
(1906–2004)
Menconi + Schoelkopf
Foreword We are delighted to offer this selection of works illustrating the depth and breadth of Charles Biederman’s extraordinary oeuvre. He was a uniquely talented, f iercely independent, and thoughtful artist. His body of work reflects that spirit of innovation and robust intellect. The gallery has had the distinct pleasure of working for more than three years with a rich inventory of works from the artist’s estate bequest. In a welcome development, a number of the nation’s leading museums have recently purchased Biederman’s canvases of the 1930s from the gallery. These oil paintings, with their richly patterned surface and vibrant palette, have bolstered our dialogue with scholars, curators, and collectors who had previously been more familiar with the artist’s sculptural works from the last 60 years of his career. This catalogue and exhibition have been made possible by our affable business relationship and growing friendship with Thom Barry and Martin Weinstein. We thank them most sincerely for their assistance in making this publication a reality. Susan C. Larsen offers the superb essay and we are very grateful for her willingness to contribute to the project. Dr. Larsen has written extensively on the artist. Her work with John R. Lane in creating Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1937 –1944, a ground-breaking exhibition and accompanying book, and her many other insightful writings on this era have contributed mightily to our understanding of the development of modern art in America. Hers has been a leading voice in this discussion. The artwork created in this country in the twenties, thirties, and forties represents an important link between early modernism and Abstract Expressionism. A better understanding of this dynamic and revolutionary moment in American art history is one of the leading goals of this gallery and we welcome the chance to be involved in the dialogue. As always, we encourage your inquiries and look forward to the opportunity to discuss these works, or American art generally, and perhaps to meet with you very soon, in person, at the gallery.
Susan E. Menconi Andrew L. Schoelkopf
Untitled, New York, November 1935,
1935 Oil on canvas, 40 x 32⅛ inches Signed and dated at lower left: Ch. Biederman 11/35
Untitled, New York, January 1935,
1935 Oil on canvas, 14⁵⁄₁₆ x 11¼ inches Signed and dated twice on verso across canvas: Ch. Biederman / 1935 / 1935
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Untitled, New York, May 1935,
1935 Oil on canvas, 14¼ x 11³⁄₁₆ inches Signed and dated on verso across canvas: Ch. Biederman / 5.35 Dated and inscribed along stretcher: 1935 / N.Y. / N.Y.
Untitled, New York, September 1935,
1935 Oil on canvas, 16⅜ x 14H inches Signed and dated at upper right: Ch. Biederman 9/35 Dated on verso: 9/35 Dated and inscribed along stretcher: 9/35 N.Y.
Study for Painting, New York, December 1935, 1935 Gouache on paper, 23他 x 17他 inches Signed and dated at lower right: Biederman 12/35
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Untitled, New York, October 1935, 1935 Oil on canvas, 23 x 19Âź inches Signed and dated at upper left: Ch. Biederman 10/35
Gouache Study, January 1936,
1936 Gouache on paper, 14Ÿ x 9ž inches Signed and dated at lower right: Biederman 1/1936
Untitled, New York, August 1936,
1936 Oil on canvas, 40 x 28 inches Signed and dated at lower left: Ch. Biederman 8/27/36
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Untitled, December 1936,
1936 Gouache on paper, 25⁹⁄₁₆ x 19¾ inches Signed, dated, and inscribed at lower right: Biederman / Paris 12/36
Untitled, Paris, November 21, 1936,
1936 Oil on canvas, 51¼ x 34⅞ inches Signed, dated, and inscribed at lower right: Ch. Biederman / Nov. 21/36 Paris
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Untitled, Paris, January 1937,
1937 Gouache and ink on paper, 17 x 13¾ inches Signed and dated at lower left: Biederman / P. 1/37
Study for a Painting, Paris, January 1937,
1937 Ink, pen and gouache on paper, 17 x 13⅞ inches Dated at lower right: 1/37 Signed, dated, and inscribed on verso: Ch. Biederman / Study for A Painting, Jan. Paris 1937. 17 x 14¾ in.
Untitled, Paris, January 24, 1937,
1937 Oil on canvas, 45¾ x 35¼ inches Signed and dated at lower left: Ch. Biederman / Paris 1/24/37
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Untitled, Paris, January 1937,
1937 Gouache and ink on paper, 18 x 14 inches Signed and dated at lower right: Biederman 1/37
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Concrete Outdoor Sculpture, Paris, January 1937, 1937 Gouache and ink on paper, 18 x 14 inches Inscribed and dated at lower left: P-1-37 Inscribed at lower right: concrete sculpture outdoors
Untitled, Paris, February 1937,
1937 Gouache and ink on paper, 18 x 14 inches Signed at lower left: Ch. Biederman Inscribed and dated at lower right: Paris 2/37
Untitled, 1937 Gouache and ink on paper, 17 x 14 inches
Untitled, Paris, April 11, 1937,
1937 Oil on canvas, 19他 x 24 inches Signed, dated, and inscribed at lower left: Ch. Biederman / 4/37 Paris Dated and inscribed on verso: 4/11/37 Paris
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Untitled, Paris, May 10, 1937,
1937 Oil on canvas, 38 x 51Âź inches Signed and dated at lower left: Ch. Biederman May 10, 1937, Paris
Cubist, Paris, January 1937, 1937 Pencil and gouache on paper, 17 x 13¹³⁄₁₆ inches Dated at lower left, beneath matting: P. 1/37
Untitled, Paris, January 17, 1937,
1937 Oil on canvas, 45 x 35 inches Signed and dated at lower right: Ch. Biederman / 1/17/37
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Model for # 14, Paris,
1937 Painted wood, 16Âź x 13Âź x 3H inches
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# 14,
Paris 1937–1983, 1937–83 Painted wood, 32¹¹⁄₁₆ x 27H x 4 inches
# 7,
Untitled, 1937–82 Painted wood, 30 x 25 inches x 4 inches
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# 10,
USA, 1937–83 painted wood, 33H x 28H inches x 3 inches
Work No. 8, New York, 1938,
1938–80 Painted wood, 34¼ x 24⅝ x 8 inches Signed and inscribed on the verso: Work, No. 8, N.Y., 1938 Copyright Charles Biederman 1980
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# 50,
Red Wing, 1953–82 Painted aluminum, 34 x 27ž x 4H inches
# 6,
Untitled, 1983–85 Painted aluminum, 42H x 32ž inches
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# 3,
Untitled, 1982–84 Painted aluminum, 42 x 32H x 9 inches
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# 5-A,
New York, 1938–39 Painted wood, string, glass, 30Ÿ x 14H x 4 inches
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Untitled Sculpture in the Round, Brass, 40H x 13 x 13 inches
1940s
Untitled Steel Abstraction,
1983 Stainless steel, 24 x 11⅛ x 3H inches Sculptural base, 10¼ x 10¼ x 2¾ inches Inscribed beneath base: © Charles Biederman 1983
Work No. 5, New York, 1937–83,
1983 Stainless steel, 26¼ x 16 x 3H inches Sculptural base: 22¼ x 13¾ x 2H inches Inscribed beneath base: © Charles Biederman / Work No. 5, New York, 1937–1983 / Charles Biederman
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Portrait of Charles Biederman, 1946. Courtesy of Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota.
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Charles Biederman (1906–2004)
by Susan Larsen
Every great viable art is done only once, each time by one person. —Charles Biederman¹
Charles Biederman was a protean spirit, an uncompromising, restless man, greatly gifted, sometimes flawed but never small in any aspect of his art, life or character. He burst upon the New York art world in 1934 still a young man studying the work of the first generation of European modernists. By 1935, Biederman was making highly original large paintings of fluid forms tumbling in space flooded by light and a spectrum of bright subtly graded color. He attracted the attention and patronage of New York art world luminaries including Alfred Barr, A. E. Gallatin, Fernand Léger, Pierre Matisse, and James Johnson Sweeney. Too impatient to have completed his degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, Biederman understood the modern movement to be in a state of rapid evolution. The era of cubism and Picasso was over and the future belonged to a species of constructed art combining elements of painting and sculpture. Biederman set out to become the chief exponent of this new art, a journey that would take the next seventy years. Biederman occupied an envied position with steady support from John Anderson of Minnesota and other patrons. His New York studio was lined floorto-ceiling with a series of ambitious paintings as the lyrical buoyant charm of the 1935 canvases gave way to new works with a muscular, sculptural geometry. These bear the imprint of Biederman’s admiration for Fernand Léger whom he met in New York City. But Biederman’s canvases of 1936–37 have nothing to do with Léger’s world of people in a busy urban landscape. Charles Biederman had his sights set on a bigger prize, nothing less than a thorough consideration of mass and space understood both visually and intellectually as a scientist might if he also had the soul of an artist. In this effort, Biederman’s only lifelong guide would be another modern French master, Paul Cézanne who mined the world of nature’s visual appearances to unravel the forces inside, between and beyond the visible world. In time, Biederman’s studies would include quantum physics through a ten-year (1960–70) almost daily correspondence with Nobel laureate David Bohm. The 1936–7 paintings feature massive ribbon-like forms interwoven with one another soaring in an open limitless space. They are abstract inventions of the mind, rather like architecture, a new creation still tethered to real world experiences of weight, mass, torque, light and shadow. They have an elegant forcefulness and a clarity of form and purpose seldom found among American painters of Biederman’s generation. In the spring of 1936, Biederman had a oneperson show at the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Pierre Matisse also staged a one-person show for Alexander Calder during the same
season. Curators at the Museum of Modern Art were famously cool to the work of young American modernists of the mid-1930s, but these two, Biederman and Calder, had their attention and regard. Albert E. Gallatin, a senior figure of influence in New York, staged “Five Contemporary Concretionists: Biederman; Calder; Ferren; Morris; Shaw” in the spring of 1936 at the Paul Reinhardt Galler y. It ran concurrently with Biederman’s show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. It was an historic show bringing together a handful of Americans Gallatin felt were doing the most mature and sophisticated work in the modern idiom. The entire season in New York was reinforced and illuminated by Alfred Barr’s significant “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, with its influential catalogue and a storm of critical debate by journalists in and out of the art world. When the American Abstract Artists group formed in the fall of 1936, they invited Biederman to join as an early member. He felt no need to be part of an organization and had ample opportunities to show his work on his own. Biederman’s curt reply to the invitation demonstrated his contempt for the polyglot, often imitative modernism of his generation of American artists. His response would earn him their lasting enmity. Raised in a working class household in Cleveland, Biederman saw no need for fine manners and polite evasions. His own program was clear in his mind and it had nothing to do with group support and fellowship among struggling artists. Each and every step of Biederman’s evolution had to be reasoned, secured by a great outpouring of major work and pointing ahead to a future art involving contemporary materials used to demonstrate a new understanding of physics and human perception. Year by year, his work became leaner, clearer and more startlingly beautiful. In time, he would invent a body of written theory to support his artistic practice. Biederman traveled to Paris in October of 1936 seeking direct communication with the early 20th century European modernists he admired. Gallatin’s “Concretionist” show had been in Paris just months before, giving Biederman entrée to artists and gallerists in the city. There he met with Arp, Brancusi, Domela, Ferren, Helion, Kandinsky, Léger, Miró, Mondrian, Pevsner, Vantongerloo and many critics and dealers. His own artistic production slowed in the absence of a working studio. He attended a performance of Calder’s “Circus” and watched Picasso hold court at the Café Dôme. He grew in his understanding of the differences between individuals and philosophical concepts. Biederman came away admiring the fiercest most uncompromising of the expatriates in Paris: Mondrian and Pevsner. They, and they alone, had the key to the future of modern art in the opinion of young Charles Biederman from the American Midwest. Biederman spent nine months in Paris until June of 1937. Gallerist Pierre Loeb who staged the Paris version of Gallatin’s “Concretionist” show treated young Biederman to a round of café hopping where they witnessed the ascendancy of Surrealism among French artists and the expatriate community. He observed Picasso and André Breton holding forth on the transformative power of dreams and the unconscious for painters and poets. Their hauteur and theatricality put off Biederman but he saw their influence on a visit to Stanley William Hayter’s
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Announcement for the exhibition, Five Contemporary American Concretionists, at the Paul Reinhardt Galleries, New York, March 9–31, 1936. Charles Green Shaw papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Atelier 17 where many artists, including Picasso, were using automatic processes to create innovative works on paper. A more congenial and lasting Surrealist influence was Joan Miró with whom Biederman had a nodding acquaintance in the neighborhood they shared. It took several months to find a studio, but Biederman settled into Rue Froidevaux to create a group of monumental biomorpic canvases. No longer tumbling in free space, these curvilinear forms suggest a three-dimensional world, solid and imposing in its grandeur. James Johnson Sweeney, curator for the Museum of Modern Art, brought Joan Miró and American Wolfgang Paalen to Biederman’s studio in November of 1936. They applauded the young American’s command of form and his resplendent palette of subtly graded colors. On the same visit, Sweeney would take Biederman to the Paris studio of Piet Mondrian, an event that Biederman found un-nerving and profoundly transformative.
One of the most enjoyable of Biederman’s studio visits was to the home of Jean Arp. In Arp, he found an artist who could move freely between two and three dimensions. Primarily a sculptor, Arp was also a poet and a maker of constructions. The latter were especially influential upon young American modernists of the 1930s working in New York. A. E. Gallatin owned several Arp constructions and exhibited them at his Gallery of Living Art at New York University in Greenwich Village. They had an immediate impact upon the art of Charles Shaw, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ibram Lassaw and many others within the A.A.A. group. Although many Americans exhibited constructions in the late 1930s and early 1940s, most did not continue in that format beyond this early period. Only Charles Biederman and Burgoyne Diller went beyond admiring imitation to take the construction to a new level of rigor, beauty and significance. In so doing, they created a sturdy bridge from the modernism of the 1930s to the reductive materiality of Minimalism. Biederman’s Paris sojourn marks the end of his evolution as a painter and the beginning of his mature work in three dimensional constructions and sculpture. A visit to the studio of Antoine Pevsner in the summer of 1937 confirmed his decision to leave painting forever. A forward-pressing veteran of the international avant-garde, Pevsner was also approachable and humble. Biederman said of him, “Here is a man whose work is going in the direction art should go . . . I like him!.”² During his final months in Paris, Biederman planned a series of wooden constructions in fully saturated color. They are unlike anything created on either side of the Atlantic. Biederman’s reductive forms speak boldly and clearly and his color startles and seduces. Many were realized in smaller versions or on paper and brought back to his New York studio to work on in the future. Some were not realized for many years. Had these been exhibited in New York when they were made they may well have changed the path of modernism in America. Returning to New York City in the summer of 1937, Biederman reworked his studio and went to work on the constructions he had planned in Paris. His acquaintance with Pevsner and his friendship with John Anderson led Biederman to imagine new works in novel materials such as colored plastic, sculptured glass, metal alloys and fluorescent light. While New York was still the epicenter of the art world, Biederman’s contacts and patrons in Minnesota were part of pre-war technological innovation soon to be crucial to the American war effort. His friends and colleagues opened the doors to Midwestern laboratories and factories working with new materials and helped Biederman to master their use. He began to spend more time in Minnesota and fell in love with Anderson’s pretty sisterin-law, Mary Moore. Frequent trips to Chicago en route to Minnesota introduced Biederman to prominent people in the arts. Veteran gallerist and writer, Katherine Kuh, exhibited Biederman’s new constructions in March of 1941. In November of the same year, he had a one-man show at the elegant Arts Club in Chicago. As possible service in World War II threatened to take him away, he married Mary Moore on Christmas day of 1941. Biederman spent the war years in Red Wing, Minnesota working on a medical research project sponsored by the War Department. A daughter, Anna, was born in
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1943. In the deep Midwestern countryside, the complex geometry of the natural world inspired changes in his art and flooded it with vibrant color. Having traveled a long path from his native Cleveland to New York, to Paris then through Chicago to Red Wing, Biederman was at last creating the “New Art” he dreamed about at the beginning of his career. It has a visual syntax reminiscent of classical music or the sound of wind and birds in the trees. His constructions seem ever in motion as the viewer moves through space and from side to side. They respond to changes in light, the seasons and times of day. They are both dynamic and majestically still. The art world finally caught up with Charles Biederman in the 1960s with celebratory retrospectives at: Columbia University; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Walker Arts Center and in 1970 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He had numerous successful exhibitions at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York from 1980 through the early 1990s. Biederman published 14 books of essays on art and theory including the epic tome, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, in 1948. Biederman’s prescient body of work suddenly made sense with the advent of Minimalism even though he was by this time pursuing richness and polyphony rather than pure reductivism. Towards the end of his career, Biederman once again turned to Cézanne in an effort to merge scientific inquiry with a great awe and respect for the ultimate mysteries of nature. He said that one must not imitate the visible world but instead, create out of one’s own natural gifts. His great constructions of the 1960s through the 1990s are increasingly daring and complex with planes reaching far into space as they lift off the colored surfaces of his painted aluminum panels. Each different and yet following one upon the other, they were preceded by sketches from nature then followed by polished technical drawings like those of an architect’s f inished presentation to his engineer. Watching his process, we see the perfect blending of deep feeling and intellectual rigor, all culminating in works possessed of mystery and elegant clarity. Biederman lived to be ninety-eight, still reading, writing and talking with a wide circle of interesting colleagues and friends until the end of his days. He was ahead of his time in proving that distance from a big city is no impediment to leading a life of the mind and staging a world-class creative adventure. Each time he showed in New York City, the critical reception was warm if a bit surprised. John Russell said of the late constructions, “They take the air as if they owned it.”³ This current survey offers the full panorama of Biederman’s life achievement. He was not merely a gifted modernist of the 1930s, but an American artist with a fully realized body of work backed up by seven decades of serious thought and elegant craftsmanship. His is an art that grows in stature with time and familiarity. It is hoped that you will be moved to linger a while and enjoy the —Susan C. Larsen, Ph.D. surprise and richness of Biederman’s vision.
notes 1. Charles Biederman, “Art as the Humanization of Science,” Red Wing, 1997, p. 16. 2. “Letter to John Anderson,” June 11, 1937. 3. John Russell, “Selected works 1936–84 by Charles Biederman,” The New York Times, February 15, 1985.
Staff: Susan Menconi Andrew Schoelkopf Jonathan Spies, Gallery Director Kathryn Fredericks, Registrar Photography: Joshua Nefsky Design: Russell Hassell Printing: Puritan Capital All rights reserved. Reproduction of contents prohibited Publication copyright © 2015 Menconi + Schoelkopf All works by Charles Biederman © Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis cover: Untitled, Paris, November 21, 1936, detail, 1936 (p. 11) inside front cover: Portrait of Charles Biederman. Courtesy of Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. back cover: Work No. 5, New York, 1937–83, 1983 (p. 33)
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