Charles Joseph Biederman

1906 - 2004

BiographyAmerican painter and theorist. Biederman worked as a graphic designer for several years before studying art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1926 to 1929. A week after his arrival he saw a painting by Cézanne that greatly influenced his subsequent thought. He lived in New York from 1934 to 1940, except for a nine-month period in 1936–7 when he lived in Paris. He began to make reliefs in 1934. His visits in Paris to the studios of Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, César Domela and Antoine Pevsner made him aware of De Stijl, Neo-Plasticism, Abstraction-Création and Constructivism. He also met Léger, Miró, Arp, Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Picasso and Brancusi.

Shortly before returning to New York in 1938, Biederman made his first abstract reliefs, which he termed ‘non-mimetic’ (e.g. New York, Number 18,1938; New York, Met.). In the same year, while visiting Chicago, he attended a seminar given by the Polish-born writer Alfred Korzybski, founder of the General Semantics Institute, which strongly influenced his later theories about history as an evolutionary process. He moved to Red Wing, near Minneapolis, MN, in 1942 to work on an army medical project. Although he did not make art again until 1945, when he returned to painted aluminium reliefs of geometric elements (e.g. Structurist Relief, Red Wing No. 20, 1954–65; London, Tate), he began work on his first book, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), in which he explained how art could reflect the structure of nature without imitating its outward appearances. His beliefs, formally referred to as Structurism, were espoused in other books and influenced other Constructivist artists such as Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill.

Source: Roy R. Behrens. "Biederman, Charles." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed December 14, 2015, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T008792.

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