RED WING, MINNESOTA.- American Modernist painter, sculptor and theorist Charles Biederman, 98, died. Biederman was born August 23, 1906, in Cleveland, Ohio. Interested in art since childhood, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1920s. Finding Chicago too limiting, he moved to New York in 1934, where he quickly established himself as one of the leading modernists of the United States. Preceded by his growing reputation, he moved to Paris in 1936, but soon became disillusioned with the bickering and inbreeding of the art world that he found there. He returned to New York after nine months, convinced that only in America, free of the weight of Europe’s cultural past, could a new art take root, an art that was, paradoxically, non-representational but based purely on visible nature. He worked toward this goal every waking moment for the rest of his long life.