Schoelkopf Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Charles Biederman, Untitled, New York, June 1935, 1935 by the Minnesota Historical Society.
Charles Biederman was born in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio to Czech immigrants. His primary instruction was at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1926 through 1929. There he absorbed the lessons of European modernism. Biederman moved to New York in 1934 with a strong foundation in scholarship and rapidly emerging as one of America's most talented artists painting in a fully abstract mode.
In New York, Biederman became involved with the artists and dealers who mattered in the advancement of contemporary art in America. In January of 1936, his work was first included in the Albright Art Gallery presentation in Buffalo, New York, of The Art of Today. By this time he was also acquainted with Albert Eugene Gallatin, the influential purveyor of contemporary art who fostered the careers of any number of young American artists needing an exhibition space and a champion to promote their work on a broader stage. Gallatin selected Biederman as one of the artists in that year's exhibition, Five Contemporary American Concretionists: Biederman, Calder, Ferren, Morris, Shaw, which traveled on to Paris and London. The promoter's purchase of Biederman's work allowed the young painter to study in Paris. In this same year, Biederman enjoyed his first one-man exhibition at the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
Writing in 1976 about his work in 1934-37, Biederman remarked:
Through Braque and Picasso I directed my search for a structural mode of expression around the transformations possible with studio subject matter. I concluded this effort provided no solution, for it reduced apparent structural interests to mere devices for perpetuating representational painting as simply expression [Charles Biederman: A Retrospective (1976), p. 38].
Biederman's interest in Picasso in these years was no longer moored to the early analytic cubism of the early 1910s, but rather examined the synthetic cubism that the Spaniard had developed more recently. Biederman's palette was his own-- far more brilliant in color than Picasso's-- but he adopted a broad array of innovations, including swelling biomorphic forms, iconographic cartoons, dotted lines and spots to evoke planes, and even the occasional collage. Several of these elements are on display in the present work, but perhaps most noteworthy is the "painterly" quality of the works in these years of Biederman's career. When Biederman exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1936, the reviewers noted this quality especially:
In the oils he swears bright-eyed fealty to Miro and his school, though once or twice the impasto is piled up with a largess that recalls the pigment reliefs of Mrs. Irving T. Bush, who startled Fifty-seventh Street a few seasons ago. These however, are exceptions, for in the main Mr. Biederman lays his high-keyed color on flatly ["In the Swim," The New York Times, March 8, 1936, p. X9].
The present work was exhibited alongside Alexander Calder's work in the Five American Concretionists exhibition in 1936, one of only two such works that have been located. The lingering influence of Miro and Picasso is still manifest in what can be read as surrealist humanoid form. The posture of the central shapes echoes Picasso's famous harlequin pictures, even without a clear delineation of a human form.
