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Maxwell Johannes Biedermeier (1870-1938) b.Wilkensburg, PA. American painter.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER
Hans’l (as his mother referred to him) Biedermeier was sent by his parents to study art in Munich, Germany, at the age of seventeen. While studying there, he fell under the influence of the paintings of Degas, Morisot and other Impressionist painters from Paris who had begun to exhibit their works in the major cities of Holland, Denmark and Germany.
Returning home in the spring of 1892, he found that his parents and friends were not at all happy with the direction his work had taken, although the vibrant color of the work he brought home with him soon gave way to more earthy coloursand prosaic realism compatible with a Pennsylvania tradition fostered and perpetuated by the family Peale. The strength of this tradition governs much of Pennsylvania based painting of our own day as may be observed in the art of the Wyeth family of painters.
In any case, Maxwell was forthwith enrolled by his family in classes at the Pennsylvania Academy where studies in drawing and painting from plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptors were designed to restore the young painter to " traditional and true artistic ideals". Impressionist painterly modes did not find a place in the Academy’s teaching. Biedermeier, in a letter to a friend of his Munich days speaks of "the tyranny of the almighty goddam outline".
Against this teaching Maxwell did rebel for a time. His "PORTRAIT OF HIS MOTHER" (1895) belongs to this period. The portrait was not held in high regard by either his mother or Philadelphia critics of the Biennial Exhibit in which the painting was submitted and exhibited in 1896. " The work of Biedermeier lacks the conviction of sure drawing (pentimenti in certain parts on close examination demonstrate confusion and indecisiveness), all too clearly bearing the imprint of those hasty Impressionistic works he had fallen prey to before returning home." (F.S. Snodgrass, writing in Wilkensburg Art Today).
Biedermeier continued to submit his work to Biennial Pennsylvania Exhibitions for a few years before giving up art to join his family’s textile business. Although a good part of his work has probably been lost (unappreciated and neglected by his heirs), the paintings of Maxwell Biedermeier, especially those from his period of "daring experimentation" between 1891 and 1897, are earning him a belated but deserved praise from those Art Historians and Antiquarians who specialize in the study of late nineteenth and early twentieth century art.
N.S.
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