Weisman Art Museum Touring Exhibits

Charles Biederman, an acclaimed American abstract modernist who lived in rural Minnesota for over six decades, believed that the close observation of nature was the basis for art. After moving to the woods outside of Red Wing, Minnesota in 1942, Biederman ventured on a personal search for a new way of seeing, a new vision of nature, and a new art. Rural Minnesota offered Biederman the perfect place from which to observe nature, which he believed was the only authentic basis for art. However, Biederman did not mimic nature-he did not paint representational landscapes. Biederman's quest was to discover the structure of nature through art.

Biederman was born in Cleveland in 1906 and studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago before he gravitated to New York City in 1934. Like other young American modernists, Biederman also made a pilgrimage to Paris in 1936, then the international art capital. He stayed nearly a year, absorbing the art and critical discourse of the avant-garde and investigating currents of European modernism. There he encountered artists who shaped 20th-century art history including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró. In 1937, Biederman returned to New York in the hope that America would be more conducive to creating art that "legitimately belongs to our times."

Biederman's early work shows the influence of the European art he saw in Paris. He progressed through a variety of styles before making his distinctive art-painted aluminum reliefs with geometric forms projecting from a background plane. He painted still lifes after French painter Paul Cézanne, landscapes and self-portraits inspired by the geometry of cubism, non-representational images of organic forms, then geometric abstractions. Sculptures, collages, and wood reliefs followed. By the late 1930s Biederman gave up painting and sculpture altogether, concentrating instead on the painted aluminum constructions he believes most fully represent his ideas about art and nature.

Biederman's lasting achievement resides in his late work and the ideas that shaped it. Beginning in 1942 he developed a set of theories about art, wrote extensively on his ideas, and constructed reliefs with projecting forms that reflect a vision of the structure of nature, inspired by Cézanne. The interlocking planes and patches of unmodulated color in Cézanne's canvases became the touchstone for Biederman's mature artistic vocabulary. Biederman's reliefs use form, color, space, and light to express nature's most essential structure.

Works in the Exhibition: The exhibition consists of 16 oil paintings on canvas, 2 wood and metal constructions, 2 sculptures, 4 collages, and 19 drawings on paper. Venues may reduce the works in the exhibition with curatorial approval from the Weisman.

Gallery Space: Requires approximately 250 to 400 lineal feet of gallery space.

Fee: The participation fee for the exhibition is $7,500. Each venue is responsible for round-trip shipping.