Charles Biederman

Charles Biederman, born Karel Joseph Biederman (August 23, 1906 – December 26, 2004), was an American abstract artist who lived in Chicago, New York City, and Paris before settling in Red Wing, Minnesota.

Biography Born in Cleveland in 1906 to Czech immigrant parents, Biederman studied at the Cleveland Art Institute before enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). At SAIC, Biederman received the prestigious Paul Trebeilcock Prize. Despite this, he dropped out of school in 1929 due to ideological differences with the faculty. The artist Paul Cézanne is also cited as a major influence on Biederman's work. Unlike Cézanne, however, Biederman abandoned painting early in his career, focusing on three-dimensional reliefs after 1937.

Between 1937 and 1941, Biederman lived in New York City and Chicago and continued to explore the ideas developed in Paris. He made relief constructions, often incorporating non-traditional materials such as string, wire, and glass panes. He married in 1941 and moved to Red Wing, Minnesota in 1942 with his wife, Mary Moore Biederman. Red Wing was the home of Mary's brother-in-law and sister, John and Eugenie (Moore) Anderson. John was independently wealthy at the time, and was an important patron for Biederman from 1931 until 1953, helping to financially support him and encouraging his work. Biederman's farm near Red Wing influenced his work and his ideas about the relationship between art and nature. In the 1950s, he introduced the term Structurism to describe his vividly painted three-dimensional geometric reliefs, in order to distinguish them from Constructivism and De Stijl.

There was a major Biederman show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1965. Then in 1976 the Minneapolis Institute of Art held a retrospective of the artist. These two exhibitions helped to solidify Biederman's place within American Abstract art.

Charles Biederman died at home in 2004 at the age of 98. His estate was given to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, which has organized traveling exhibitions of Biederman's work.