Charles Biederman (1906 – 2004): In Memoriam

A crank and a recluse, a seeker and an obsessive, Biederman was the kind of artist who made art simply because he couldn’t not do it! He was from a whole different era than the graduates turned out by today’s BFA and MFA programs, but he might as well have been a whole different species. As a quintessential modernist, Biederman was forward-looking, using fluorescent tubes in his work in 1940, decades before Dan Flavin (whose work is currently sought after by the kind of art-world “phonies and hypocrites” that Biederman loved to hate), but he also reached back. In a sense he was our last long link with early moderns like Cezanne, his first love. Don’t pass up the opportunity to rediscover a true American original. As Biederman himself proved, a restless eye does not go unrewarded. 333 E. River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494; www.weisman.umn.edu