August Biehle
American Modern Artist, 1885-1979
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Canton Museum of Art
Bohemian Chrysalis: Unveiling Cleveland’s Infamous Kokoon Klub
Exhibit, November 26, 2024, to March 2, 2025
Recorded Lecture December 14, 10:30 a.m. by Frederick Biehle, “The Kokoon Arts Klub: August Biehle, Jr., and the Becoming of a City”
UPCOMING LECTURE
Lecture January 18, 10:30 a.m. by Henry Adams, “From Kokoon to Butterfly: The Amazing Saga of the Kokoon Klub”
Get to Know August Biehle
February 1, 2021
ARTe, from the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce
“Sane people were not welcome.” Ticket chopper Maurice Cornell only allowed those who “knew no law save that of frolic” into the annual Kokoon Club Costume Ball at the old Hotel Cleveland. Through the doors came “a strange troupe of revelers dressed in fashions of all the known tribes of the earth, and some believed to have only existed on Mars.” Among the regular merry-makers was a quiet German-born wallpaper designer who was the hotwire igniting European-style modern art in northeast Ohio.
Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses: c. 1914-1917, 28” x 39-1/2”, oil on board.
Cleveland Museum of Art Acquires “Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses”
“Last year the CMA acquired two important American paintings, each gift augmenting a different area of our 20th-century holdings. Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses is August Biehle’s most significant early modern oil. Depicting houses nestled on a steep embankment, the painting features foreground and background forms united through a rhythmic pattern of fractured curvilinear shapes. These stylistic hallmarks are Biehle’s signature fusion of Art Nouveau and Cubist aesthetics, reflecting his exposure to avant-garde artistic trends while a student in Cleveland and Munich.
Supporting himself as a commercial lithographer, Biehle participated in several Cleveland gallery exhibitions of cutting-edge art and engaged with the Kokoon Klub, a local bohemian organization that promoted modernism. This impressive canvas is the gift of John and Susan Horseman, passionate American art collectors based in St. Louis, Missouri, who maintain strong family ties to northeast Ohio.”
Wild German Painter Visits Zoar
January 14, 2019
ARTe, from the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce
“In Munich he mixed with leading modernists like Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and the artists they attracted from across Europe. Biehle took their new style across the Atlantic as Cleveland and Munich became the hubs at either end of the Expressionist axle moving modern art forward. Biehle, the slight young Sherwin-Williams paint demonstrator became the messenger between the two camps as the Kokoon Arts Club became modern art’s American clubhouse.”
Brandywine Road, c. 1913, oil on board, signed lower right, private collection.
Wolfs gallery makes a case for taking Northeast Ohio regional art seriously in
"Cleveland: A Cultural Center"
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer, July 29, 2018
Show runs from July 12 to August 31, 2018
". . . On view at Wolfs are numerous paintings by Carl Gaertner, Clyde Singer, William Sommer, August Biehle, Frank Wilcox, Abel Warshawsky, Ora Coltman, Clarence Carter, George Adomeit, Clara Deike, Elsa Vick Shaw, Raphael Gleitsman, Paul Travis and Hughie Lee-Smith; plus ceramics or sculptures by Viktor Schreckengost, Edris Eckhardt, Walter Sinz, Max Kalish, Alexander Blazys, Emilie Scrivens, R.G. Cowan and William Zorach. . . .
"Artists such as Biehle and Schreckengost were influenced in the early 20th century by contemporary innovations such as the Cubist style unleashed in America by the 1913 Armory Show in New York.
"Biehle's radiantly powerful 'Brandywine Road,' a landscape painted that same year, turns a scene of sunlight bursting through clouds over farm country into an arrangement of geometric forms and rays of energy that look very much up to the minute."