August F. Biehle, Jr.:
Styles & Imagery
Presented August 20 through October 29, 1999

"Zoar Hotel" by August Biehle

One of northeast Ohio's most prolific and distinguished artists, August Biehle, Jr. (1885-1979) combined masterful draftsmanship with a superior sense of design. He assimilated aspects of German Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, and moved skillfully between a range of styles, from Jugendstil (a German modernist style) to American Scene realism. He also displayed his versatility by mastering a variety of media and techniques, from graphite drawing to painting in oil, gouache, pastel, and tempera. Highly respected by his peers, Biehle is now gaining wider recognition from art historians and the public.

Around 1919 Biehle began painting with Henry Keller at Berlin Heights, Ohio, an artist's colony near Sandusky. Working mostly outdoors, the painters of Berlin Heights conducted experiments with modern design and color theory.

Their influence appears in Biehle's "Corn Shocks, Puritas Springs, Ohio," especially the rendering of shadows with intense blues. This technique was intended to create the sensation of volume without resorting to the dulling effect of modeling with brown or gray tones.

A different approach is evident in Biehle's paintings of Zoar, Ohio, a small town founded by Lutheran separatists from Wütternberg, Germany, and located about sixty miles south of Cleveland. As seen in "Path to the Zoar Hotel," Biehle depicted the town in a delicate, naturalist style that emphasized its presence as a specific place.

Biehle contributed paintings of both urban and rural Ohio to the American Scene movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Never a doctrinaire "regionalist," he pursued his own, unique style that fused modernist formal design with direct observation of nature. He employed a robust realism in "Republic Steel on the Cuyahoga," which depicts one of the new steel mills erected on the lower part of the river.

"Rocky River Hillside," on the other hand, exploits the inherent transparency of watercolor to produce a Cubist composition of merging, intersecting planes. Areas of white, unpainted paper are skillfully integrated into the composition to create planes of delicate, floating color. By contrast, "Landscape: Farm Scene near Canal" profits from the opacity of oil to create a dynamic composition energized by bold color and rhythmic movement. Unlike the conventional "realism" of American Scene painting, Biehle rendered this vision of rural Ohio in a unique style that fuses the whiplashing line of Jugendstil with the geometric planes of Cubism and the "blue-outline" of Berlin Heights modernism.

August Biehle, Jr., died on February 7, 1979. During a career that spanned nearly seventy years, he created a substantial body of work that is remarkable in its breadth and originality, but which resists conventional categorization. His paintings have previously appeared in numerous exhibitions, including shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Butler Museum of American Art in Youngstown, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.