Charles Biederman

Charles Joseph Biederman (1906?2004) was a highly influential and iconoclastic American artist and theoretician who influenced the modernist movement both abroad and in the United States. He was particularly drawn to the relationship between nature and art, and wrote extensively on the subject?it became the topic of fourteen books that he published. Deeply engaged in theories of art and nature and art and science, he maintained a nine-year correspondence, eventually published, with the British quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm. Biederman, Midwesterner by birth, held nature as the ultimate root of art, but insisted upon a wholly abstract translation of the natural into visual elements of color, plane, and form. He worked extensively in the medium of sculptural reliefs created in painted metal to execute his vision of creating pure visual forms; these reliefs became his most sought-after work. Biederman?s work is represented in distinguished collections across the United States and Western Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate, London, among many others. Susan C. Larsen is an art historian and former curator of the Permanent Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This monograph was initiated and researched by Neil Juhl Larsen (1956?2006), a brilliant friend and trusted colleague of the artist.