Charmion Von Wiegand

Charmion Von Wiegand
File:The Ancestral Altar from I Ching.jpg The Ancestral Altar from I Ching, 1954, oil and pencil on canvas, 30 x 25in. (76.2 x 63.5cm). Brooklyn Museum
Born	1896 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	1983 New York, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Known for	Painter, Journalist, Art critic
Movement	Neo-Plasticism

File:Charmion Von Wiegand.jpg

Charmion Von Wiegand

Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983) was an American journalist, abstract painter, and art critic. She was the daughter of Inez Royce, an artist, and Karl Henry von Wiegand, the German-born journalist and known for wartime reporting.

Life and career

Von Wiegand was born in Chicago in 1900, grew up in Arizona and California, attended a public school in San Francisco, and lived for three years in Berlin as a teenager. The she attended Barnard College for a year and then transferred to Columbia University School of Journalism where she studied journalism, theater, archaeology, Greek, philopsphy and art history. She did not complete her bachelor's degree and thought she may become a playwright; at this time she also began to paint in 1926 while receiving psychoanalytic therapy.

File:Four direction.jpg

She Stayed in Moscow from 1929- 1932, Russia where she became a correspondent for the Universal Service of the Hearst Press where her father had been an editor and von Wiegand saw the Fauve paintings in the Morosof Collection; inspiring her imagination and desire to paint seriously while in Moscow.

When she returned to New York in 1932, she began painting landscapes and married communist activist and writer Joseph Freeman the same year or in 1934. She continued her work as an art critic, and in the Spring of 1941 interviewed the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who was seeking refuge in the United States during World War II, when she was commissioned to write the first English- language article about him by The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. She became close friends with Mondrian while helping him translate his essays into English. He influenced her to start creating abstract art and she moved towards Neo-Plasticism. However, heavily influenced into painting abstractly by Hans Richter, the German-born painter, filmmaker,and member of the Zurich Dada group.

She became an associate member of the American Abstract Artists in 1941, a full member in 1947 and exhibited with them from 1948.

Charmion Von Wiegand became much more interested in Eastern religion and culture Theosophy, Buddhism in the 1950's, oriental styles and drawings such as Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Hindu Tantric images and she started painting in straight lines by using tape, especially after Modrian's death. In the 1950s, von Wiegand turned away from lines, but still made use of the geometric shapes, which were mostly cut from decorative papers of a color range much greater than Mondrian's and often overlapped, varying in size, direction,and paper texture. Her paintings began to contain many more symbols and themes, evident in her geometric forms in symmetrical compositions after her 1972 exhibition at the Burmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

Von Wiegand's had more than 21 solo exhibitions, participated in 35 major group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Far East. In 1982, she received an Honor Award and was exhibited in the Honor Award Exhibition at the National Women's Caucus for Art Conference in New York. Her work is still represented in more than 25 museums and permanent collections including the Andre Zarre Gallery as well as the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, both in Manhattan, New York.

She lived in an apartment in New York which was covered with her own and her friends' artwork and worked until she became very sick and her friend, a Buddhist refugee with whom she left most of her artworks to, who cared for until her death in June 1983.

See also

• Hard-edge painting
• Geometric abstraction

References

• Wald, Alan M. (2001). Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-5349-8.

- Rembert, V. P.. (1983). Charmion von Wiegand's Way beyond Mondrian. Woman's Art Journal, 4(2), 30–34. http://doi.org/10.2307/1357943

- Birmelin, B. T. (1985). Charmion von Wiegand at Marilyn Pearl. Art In America, 73154.

- Virginia Pitts Rembert, “Review [Spirit and Form: Charmion von Wiegand, Collages],” Woman's Art Journal, v.20, n.2 (Autumn, 1999-Winter, 2000), 62.

Further reading

• Back to the Future: Alfred Jensen, Charmion von Wiegand, Simon Gouverneur, and the Cosmic Conversation, exhibition catalogue. Loyola University Chicago, 2009. ISBN 0-9815835-1-2
• Wiegand, Charmion (1943). "The Meaning of Mondrian" (PDF). The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 2 (8 (Autumn, 1943)). Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics: 62–70. doi:10.2307/425946.

External links

• American Abstract Artists
• Loyola University Museum of Art exhibition