“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies . . . yet, everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”1
Far, far fewer than 30,000 people saw the the Five Contemporary American Concretionists show at Paul Reinhardt Gallery in 1936,2 but it was that sort of event. The exhibition doesn’t rank as one of the most important shows by any metric—critically or commercially—but it was a spark that ignited the careers of the six artists involved. (Never mind that only the words “American” and “Contemporary” were true—there were ultimately six artists3 and no two of them agreed on what a “concretionist”4 was supposed to be). But nonetheless, it went bang!
We’ve devoted articles to Charles Green Shaw, George L. K. Morris,5 and A E Gallatin6 as intellectual keystones in the development of international modernism; John Ferren was on the cusp of his greatest breakthroughs,7 and Alexander Calder pulled out of the exhibition before it travelled—his next move was to become that really famous Calder that we all know today. That leaves only one cipher, the strange and wonderful Charles Biederman—the artist of the six that I know best, but haven’t had time to write about until now.
II. A New Aesthetic Category.
The appellation “Concretionist” sat ill on every one of these artists—they didn’t share a practice or a philosophy, and none of them felt strongly about “concrete.” But they shared a quality that made them distinct from other cutting-edge abstract artists of the day: they each had a vision of what modern art was going to be. It was less a debate about what comes next than it was six monologic prescriptions. The titles of the books and magazines they contributed to summarizes their monomania: Art as the Accumulation of Visual Knowledge; Plastique; It is. All make good reading, but these are the years of dialectical materialism in art theory: be prepared to be told exactly how it is, the only way it can possibly be.
Here, Calder’s arc is instructive. Calder had a vision of what abstract art could be—famously, that it could spin around in a lazy, hypnotic circle—but even though Calder became as successful with this new vision as any artist to ever propose something new, his kinetic sculpture notably did not come to dominate the art world. Only Calder does what Calder does, and though many kinetic sculptors followed in Calder’s wake, no one would sensibly say that kinetic sculpture is the core, dominant, or even a sizable portion of the intellectual space of modern art. In this way, each of the visions of the “Concretionists” were wrong about everyone, but right about themselves.
Biederman’s vision was just as compelling as Calder’s, if you spend some time with it.
Born in Cleveland in 1906, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where he worked through the lessons of Cézanne, Picasso, and Léger in a rapid series of increasingly abstract paintings. He took stock, in 1976, of his work in the mid-1930s:
There now takes place in 1936-1937 a reconsideration of various subject and/or structural modes of expression I had explored since 1934. The figurative briefly reappeared to then disappear for good. My attention was focused on various structural directions which often appeared together in a single work. Finally structure was gradually subjected to geometric determinations leading to fully represented three-dimensional forms in space. I, in fact, made paintings of sculpture floating in space.8
He soon found even these efforts to be insufficient; he sought a form so significant that it reached out of the picture plane, a painting in space. This is not even a paraphrase of his words, of which there are so many—he self-published many books on his theories, which must be taken with several cups of salt—but it is what he ended up doing: he started making sculptures that embody the subjectivity of analytic cubism, the chromatic harmonies of Cézanne, the shiny objectivity of Léger—and, like Calder, they change, different at every time of day and with every light source and every different angle. He eschewed frames on these new wall-mounted sculptures; they are things in the room with you, hard to ignore like a sculpture, but undeniably in the visual tradition of paintings. They predate some of Donald Judd’s innovations by decades, and their brightly colored squares of painted aluminum have the rare quality of looking both scientific and childishly playful at the same time.
(Grabbing here an example almost at random—they photograph poorly but never fail to inspire joy in person.)
Once he developed this new aesthetic category—neither sculpture nor painting!—he did what one does after developing a new aesthetic category,9 declaring painting dead and obsolete and irrelevant for all time and everywhere, forever, and only idiots would bother lifting a brush again, etc. etc., in hundreds of thousands of words. This, in 1940.
See what I’m saying? He was wrong about everyone but very right about himself. That singularity of vision guided him well through the next five decades, during which time he never looked back at flat paintings, worked with vigor into his 90s, and built an international coterie of disciples.
One thing he did not do? Become a household name.
III. Why didn’t it make Biederman famous?
Alexander Calder mobiles are very expensive. They are easy to identify at a glance. But what strikes me as the most important measure of his success is that every kid in grade school in America at some point hangs some string from a coat hanger and hears the name of Alexander Calder. His innovation is easy to digest and hard to look away from, and the grown and the childish alike need only to see it to understand. That grip on the human imagination is paralleled by only a few artists in any field.
Why not Biederman? His mature work, too, has a hands-on, playful quality that needs no explanation—they just get at something very core to abstract visual thought; children love them. Very few humans have ever achieved anything like Calder, but it’s a worthy question: Why isn’t Biederman somewhere up there in the firmament? It’ll take a full session just to crunch the numbers, but we’ll give you all that and more next week in Failure to Launch: Biederman’s Worst Enemy, a tale of Brinks trucks and convicts experimented upon against their will, in seven short days.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Brian Eno, as quoted by Kristine McKenna in the Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1982—full quote here.
Calder was in one iteration of the show; but when he dropped out, Gallatin dropped in for the touring version of the show. So though there were only five at any one time, there were six in total.
You may think I’m splitting hairs, but there was a robust dialogue about the implications of the term at the time, and it continues in some form today. Scratch the surface with this 1972 ArtForum synopsis of abstraction in the 30s. Something’s gotta keep the grad students off the streets.
More about Gallatin here.
Ferren deserves a brighter spotlight, but pending that, consider that in 1937 Gertrude Stein called him “the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider a painter and whose painting interests them”; he helped Picasso stretch Guernica that same year, and the next, he co-founded “The Club” of New York Ab Ex painters.
Charles Biederman: A Retrospective, 1976, p. 51.
I’m cribbing this phrase from a Biederman scholar whom I’d wish to contact before quoting his unpublished remarks but whose email address has just gone missing. If you recognize your elegant turn of phrase, drop a line!