Word: biederman
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...long last, the record is being put straight. Last fall the Arts Council of Great Britain accorded Biederman the accolade of a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery. Proceeding from Biederman's early wrestlings with Cubism to his serene, harmoniously colored structurist reliefs (see color opposite), the British show made clear that 30 years of dogged independence and fierce dedication had paid off in an inner consistency and an all too rare freedom from fashion...
Debt to Europe. For all its anomalies, Biederman's career began conventionally enough. As a youth in Cleveland, he apprenticed in a commercial art studio, then set off for studies at Chicago's Art Institute. Finally, like most artists of the day, he headed for New York. In 1936 he went to Paris. "It was a traumatic experience," Biederman recalls. "I felt I had come too late, that it was all over. I decided that America was the place, with an empty culture, a clean slate." Back home again, he eventually settled in Red Wing, where he took...
...Biederman's insights were at sharp odds with the received doctrines of the day. At a time when American artists were loudly proclaiming their independence, Biederman insisted on their debt to Europe. At a time when the Abstract Expressionists were splashing paint as never before, Biederman declared that the machine was the medium of the future, and that the modern artist ought to be working with plastics, Plexiglas, metal rods. One of the mediums of the future, he predicted, would be electric lights, and as early as 1940 he employed fluorescent light fixtures in several works. Art, including...
Machine as Medium. Today multiples are the rule, and machine-made art is commonplace. Biederman himself, having grandly declared that both painting and sculpture were obsolete, arrived at what he has come to call "structurism" -reliefs that have the dimension of sculpture and the color of painting...
Though the machine may be the new medium, it is not supposed to be the end-all. "You look at my work," says Biederman, now 63, "and you don't see technology." What you do see is a perfect balance of angles, colors, shadows and reflections that provide the dynamics for a rich visual experience. They plainly owe their geometry to Mondrian, their spatial dimensionality to the Russian constructivists, their crisp colors to the De Stijl movement. But by logically extending the discoveries of his predecessors, Biederman has created an art form of his own, with tools unique...