Charles Biederman

In his signature late work, Biederman distilled color and form to their very simplest means. In the three-dimensional painted-aluminum constructions he made from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, a single rich hue provides a visual field roughly the size of a traditional easel painting. A complex of colored squares and rectangles project from this background in a dance of rhythmical patterning. Lush primary colorsÑhighly saturated reds, yellows, bluesÑcreate a visual syncopation involving varied riffs and trills. The result is at once lyrical and bold, subtle and forceful. Further, these three-dimensional constructions call for the viewerÕs direct engagement. BiedermanÕs late constructions are fully activated and appreciated only when one moves from side to side and notices the shifts in composition, color contrast, and shadow.

Beautiful and visually stimulating as his constructions are, they have gained an honored place in art history through the importance of the concepts that informed their making. Names for this body of art and ideas have changed over the years. From 1938 through the early 1950s, Biederman used the term constructionism to describe his workÑsomething related to and yet distinct from the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1910s and 1920s known as constructivism. By 1952, he had begun using the term structurism, to mark a clearer separation between his oeuvre and that of the Russians. He dropped that designation in the late 1970s, feeling it was being inappropriately employed by his followers, and settled on a simpler appellation: new art. One senses a dual purpose in these name changes. On the one hand, they provide an easy means of identification, a ready reference to the content of his art and theory. On the other hand, they reflect his desire to distinguish that art and theory from all others. And although the names have changed, the core themes remain constant.

BiedermanÕs self-enforced isolation in rural Minnesota gave him the intellectual elbow room to enunciate his theories carefully and commit them to print. His first book, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, a tract nearly seven hundred pages long, appeared in 1948. Ten other titles have come out since then, including a new book, The Visual Arts Are the Humanifiers of Science, published not long after the artist turned ninety-two. Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, nonetheless, is generally considered BiedermanÕs masterpiece. In it and in his other books, articles, and voluminous correspondence, he has argued passionately for his approach to art-making. He came to see French impressionism, and particularly Paul CŽzanneÕs role in the impressionist project, as the vitalÑindeed the onlyÑsource for artÕs continued development.

For Biederman, the impressionists were the first to initiate a formal pictorial vocabulary that responded to the natural world without seeking to mimic it. Claude Monet in particular, Biederman believes, created a vocabulary of colored marks on canvas that harmonized with the artistÕs experience in natural settings but also operated as a distinct language of its own. The nineteenth-century German aestheticians Konrad Fiedler and Adolf Hildebrand had been arguing for exactly this direction, suggesting that ultimate meaning in the visual arts should depend on pictorial elements absolutely intrinsic to them. Matters of narration, morality, historicism, or accurate verisimilitude exist outside the realm of "pure artistic interest," these theorists contended, and should not enter into any measurement of a work of artÕs accomplishment. In making these arguments, they established the construct of formalism, an analytical approach that contributed to the advent of abstraction and went on to dominate the realm of art theory for most of the twentieth century.

Charles Biederman has lived within the potent legacy of formalism and made important refinements to it. His advances depend in large part on his understanding of CŽzanne and on the artistic steps he took to build upon the precedent that the French artist set. Biederman reveres CŽzanne as no other because he sees in CŽzanneÕs art a colossal accomplishment that left an open door for the future of all art. In his immense admiration for this master, Biederman is in excellent company: Maurice Denis, Marsden Hartley, Jasper Johns, D. H. Lawrence, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, and Rainer Maria Rilke are just a handful of the modern writers and painters who have felt similarly. Gertrude Stein, for one, acknowledged that she began writing inspired by a CŽzanne painting she owned. CŽzanne became important to Biederman because CŽzanne turned to nature as the primary source for perceptual experience of the visual, which in turn fueled an independent pictorial formulation on canvas. It was not a precise recording of the scene that was vital for the making of art but rather the fleeting complex of visual sensations experienced by the artist. As CŽzanne acknowledged, "I believe in the logical development of what we see and feel through the study of nature. . . . Art is a harmony parallel to nature." In other words, art acts analogously but stands as an independent entity. Biederman called the result "an art of pure creation."

CŽzanne juxtaposed patches of unmodulated color that interact to create highly nuanced shifts of depth and volume. Such shifts in dimension arise from a reading of each patch as a plane that recedes at one moment and projects at another as the viewerÕs focus and color relationships change. This planar construction of CŽzanneÕs art became a touchstone for BiedermanÕs own efforts, and it led the American to think even more deeply about the options for advancing from CŽzanneÕs groundwork. It also moved him to conclude that CŽzanneÕs art was, at bottom, an inquiry into the mutability of human perceptionÑspelled out in purely visual terms.

Here, according to Biederman, lay the necessary future for art: CŽzanneÕs project put the continual, arduous search to understand and articulate "reality" at the heart of art, a reality understood through the filter of nature. For Biederman, there could be no greater calling. Consequently, he has lived close to natureÕs rhythms for more than half a century in Red Wing, observing, internalizing, and processing what he sees and feels. Attending to what he calls the "structural process level" of nature, he intuitively recasts the stored memory of his experiences in the woods into colored shapes that pulse and tangle and quakeÑmuch as we witness and sense the actions of nature. Writing about his effort to convey such perceptions, Biederman related that to "achieve the highest degree of ÔrealityÕ possible for the new art . . . it was necessary that it be as similar in structure as possible to the structure of natureÕs reality process."

In all of this it is clear that BiedermanÕs reality is a restrictive one. He is concerned with empirical reality and is not interested the search for higher or spiritual reality. In fact, he rejected the abstraction of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who had been an important early influence for Biederman and scores of other American abstract artists of his generation, on the grounds that Mondrian argued for an art divorced from empirical observation of nature and expressive of "cosmic relations." Indeed, Biederman went so far as to accuse Mondrian of the, for him, heretical act of "denaturalizing art."

In insisting on making a particular connection between art and nature and in devising a system of thought based on that connection, Biederman shows himself to be part of a distinguished philosophical and artistic tradition that has roots in both Germany and America. Beginning in the early 1800s, the German author Johann Wilhelm von Goethe and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson following him conceived a new aesthetic challenge: They encouraged artists to focus on and absorb the effects and animate forces of nature and to express them through the literary, musical, or pictorial arts. For these two thinkers and for those who pursued the path they opened, the natural realm provided the setting for firsthand empirical observation informed by an individualÕs intuitive, free-form inquiry. For some, that inquiry bordered on a spiritual quest. In its emphasis on direct, unmediated encounters with nature, this approach also fostered an independence of spirit that later became a hallmark of artistic modernism. Subsequently, when abstract art first took hold in the early twentieth century, legions of American artists were unable to accept the notion of a wholly nonobjective art. The lessons of this empirical tradition and its powerful linking of art and nature had been deeply ingrained in them. Charles Biederman is a vivid case in point.

BiedermanÕs art and ideas comprise a new link in a distinguished philosophical chain. If he has often stated his principles stridently, his certainty and impassioned rhetoric should be seen as reflecting the period when he was formed as an artist, the 1920s and 1930s, a time when manifestosÑartistic as well as politicalÑzealously called for new, sometimes radical approaches. This zeal, this urgency for Biederman also stems from the fact that he has sacrificed much in devoting himself wholly to his project over the course of six decades. These sacrifices have repaid him well, for he has produced art and ideas recognized worldwide as singular achievements. Philosopher, artist, and authorÑCharles Biederman is indeed the sage and adept artist of Red Wing. His late constructions convince us of this, for, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of CŽzanneÕs canvases, they create a presence "that closes over you like a colossal reality. ItÕs as if these colors forever purged you of all uncertainty."