Charles biederman biography

As a teenager, he enrolled in figure drawing and watercolor courses at the Cleveland Art Institute, and apprenticed at a local advertising agency, where he learned layout design.
Charles Biederman, born Karel Joseph Biederman (August 23, 1906 – December 26, 2004), was an American abstract artist who lived in Chicago, New York City.
Charles Biederman, born Karel Joseph Biederman, was an American abstract artist who lived in Chicago, New York City, and Paris before settling in Red Wing, Minnesota.

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CHARLES JOSEPH BIEDERMAN

Charles Joseph Biederman was a twentieth century abstract American artist best known for his constructivist, cubist-inspired reliefs. Biederman is often regarded as an American original, the self-proclaimed “best-known unknown artist in America.” Influenced by the aesthetic of Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, he dubbed his vivid geometric three-dimensional reliefs “New Art,” disregarding traditional mediums such as painting, drawing, or collage. Instead, he favored synthetic materials such as plastic and aluminum, most often coated with bright oil-based paint.

Regardless of his use of similar materials and aesthetic, Biederman’s work departs from the interests of De Stijl, Constructivism and Neo plasticism in his desire to depict the natural world, stripped to its most simplified and beautiful elements. Biederman’s work emphasizes line, transparency, light and shadow in his use of basic geometric shapes and symmetrical compositions. Initially inspired by the cubism of Braque and Picasso, his signature relief

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Charles Biederman in Red Wing, MN, 1976. Gift of Gary Mortensen to the Weisman Art Museum

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Biederman grew fond of the visual arts at a young age. As a teenager, he enrolled in figure drawing and watercolor courses at the Cleveland Art Institute, and apprenticed at a local advertising agency, where he learned layout design. Despite failing to obtain a high school diploma, he later attended The Art Institute of Chicago from 1926 to 1929. While at school, Biederman began to explore various artistic influences and was immediately drawn to the early twentieth century European modernists, such as Picasso, Van Gogh, Seurat, and particularly Cézanne. Cézanne heavily informed Biederman’s early style, and his fascination with the artist is evidenced in both the visual and written work that he produced throughout his lifetime. Though professors celebrated his technical ability, Biederman failed to attend basic courses at the Art Institute. With no desire to complete his formal education, Biederman eventually left the school in 1929. Bie

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At the age of sixteen, Charles Biederman was apprenticed to a commercial art studio in Cleveland, where he worked for four years before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926. In his early years as an artist, Biederman's admiration for Cézanne and the Cubists was incorporated into his landscape paintings. When Biederman moved to New York in 1934 he began to paint pure abstraction, encouraged by the friendships he forged with other artists committed to modernism, such as George L. K. Morris, Albert E. Gallatin and Charles Green Shaw. Two major influences on his artistic developemtn in New York were the Cubist works at the Gallery of Living Art and the Joan Miró paintings shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.

In addition to painting, Biederman began to create reliefs and collages in 1935. Biederman was an early artist to create painted sculptural wall reliefs, often using wood, thumb tacks, and string. Biederman's first critical success came in 1936 with his first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The exhibition was well timed, opening the same d