Structurist for a New Age

In a rambling old house outside the small town of Red Wing, Minn., lives a warm, engaging man whom contemporary critics are finally coming to recognize as one of the important figures of modern American art. Charles Biederman has labored so long in obscurity that he good-naturedly describes himself as "the best-known unknown artist in America." Partly because of his geographic isolation from the world's art capitals, and partly because of his prophetic, much maligned theories about art, most of his career has been shadowed by misunderstanding, rumor, and critical hostility.

At 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 to studying the architecture of hornets' nests and the intricate compositions of flowers in order to understand, he says, "the structure common to all objects in nature." He also worked on a weighty, 696-page tome. Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, which he published himself in 1948.

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 his own, might even be mass-produced, he proclaimed--at a moment when American art was glorying in the notion of self-expression. The book was consequently greeted with the pious outrage so often reserved for heretical documents. Perhaps Biederman's cardinal sin was his polemic against some of the most noted art pundits of the day. There followed many lean and bitter years.

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.

Since 1950 he has built them entirely of high-grade aluminum, working first with sketches, then wooden models, and finally delivering precise mechanical drawings to a machinist who produces the carefully milled pieces. He finishes them off himself with several coats of spray paint.

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 to his own time.

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