Reckoning with Modernism: August Biehle at Wolfs

The exhibition of August Frederick Biehle’s work at Wolfs Gallery is one of the standout exhibitions in this region of the year—indeed of the last several years—and a major contribution to our understanding of the Cleveland School.  Both in its visual impact and in its scholarship it achieves a level of quality that matches that of the shows put on by this country’s major museums.   It’s also a pioneering venture.

 Sadly,  the very realization that there actually was such an entity as the “Cleveland School –a vigorous group of modern artists in the city–is a fairly recent development.  But in fact recent scholarship by Bill Robinson, Larry Waldman and others has revealed that for the period from about 1910 until the 1940s, Cleveland was this country’s liveliest and most progressive center of modern art outside of New York. 

Even before the famous Armory Show of 1913, Cleveland artists were making paintings  influenced by the Cubists, the Fauves, and the mystics of the Blue Rider group, and notably their circle of creatives included figure in other media as well, such as the great poet Hart Crane and William Lescaze, the architect of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, which is often ranked as this country’s best and first truly modern skyscraper.  Sadly in the years after World War II, when Cleveland ‘s prosperity took a downward slide, and it changed from an industrial powerhouse into a rustbelt city, this cultural Renaissance largely evaporated, although echoes still reverberate today.    

Biehle was one of the major contributors to Cleveland’s artistic Renaissance.  And like other key figures of the Cleveland school—notably the master draftsman for Otis Lithograph, William Sommer—he is a difficult artist to pigeonhole with a single artistic label since his artistic range was very broad. 

The son of a skilled craftsman who came from Germany to Cleveland to decorate the mansions rising on Euclid Avenue, August Biehle began drawing as a young child, filling sketchbooks with nature studies and ornament.  He then apprenticed with his father,–learning stenciling, paint technique and design principles—and assisting his father with murals and interior decorations for buildings in Cleveland, St. Louis and Chicago.  This solid practical artistic training stood with him.  Over the course of his life he made a solid income working for lithography firms, designing and executing posters, as well as through advertising work. 

Concurrently with this commercial output, however, Biehle produced daringly adventurous work in an explosive variety of modern styles.   And for these he deserves recognition not only as a master of the Cleveland School, but as a figure of noteworthy national and international standing as well.

Given the variety of his work, it often feels as though this retrospective is the product of several different modern artists, rather than just one.  Works such as Biehle’s  Fire Tug follow the precepts of the Ash Can School; his Kokoon Club posters reflect the influence of German Jugendstil; House in the Moor Near Munich, 1912, is surprisingly similar to the early work of Piet Mondrian; his landscapes of Berlin Heights have an impressionist/Post-Impressionist quality that reflects the teaching of Henry Keller; The Deposition of 1913 draws on the visionary abstraction of Kandinsky and Frans Marc; Chrysanthemums and Gerbera Daisies is a riff on Van Gogh (still a controversial artist, in this period); some of his late paintings such as Labyrinth, are biomorphic abstractions, and reflect the influence of Hans Hoffman, the mentor to many of the Abstract Expressionists, whose teachings Biehle  knew about through his fellow Cleveland artist, Clara Deike, who had studied with Hans Hoffman in Europe. 

Many of these modern artistic influences Biehle picked up while studying in Munich as a young man, and notably he attended both of the famous Blue Rider exhibitions in Munich—the first exhibitions to display an international gathering of key figures of modern art.  One of Biehle’s notable contributions was to bring back to Cleveland the catalogue of the Blue Rider exhibition, and this proved an important stimulant to modernist experiment in the city, notably in the work of William Sommer. 

What’s wonderful about  the show at Wolf’s for those of us who have admired Biehle’s work, but seen it only in a piecemeal way, is that it provides an opportunity to view work by Biehle spread across his entire career.  Such a gathering of so much of Biehle’s finest work is a remarkable accomplishment, the product of years of effort, and the catalogue essay by Bill Robinson does a splendid job of sorting through Biehle’s different phases and influences. 

Interestingly, what’s striking is that despite the range of styles Biehle explored, there’s a strongly personal quality to the ensemble as a whole.  Essentially, Biehle was a master of creating a dialogue between recognizable imagery and a mosaic of abstract shapes, which glow like fireflies.  He brought an ecstatic, abstract, visionary quality to the things we encounter in our daily lives.  And his work stands as a worthy compliment to other visionary figures of the Cleveland School, such as the painter William Sommer and the poet Hart Crane. 

August Frederich Biehl: Reckoning with Modernism
On view through December 30, 2025
Wolfs Gallery
23645 Mercantile Road
Cleveland, Ohio 44122