Charmion of Wiegand

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Charmion von Wiegand (born March 4, 1896 in Chicago , † June 9, 1983 in New York ) was an American journalist, art critic and painter whose work was inspired by Piet Mondrian's neoplastic painting style.

life and work

Charmion von Wiegand was the second child after her brother Norman von Inez Royce and the American journalist of German origin, Karl von Wiegand . Von Wiegand was born in Chicago and grew up in Arizona , San Francisco and Berlin , where the family lived from 1911. After returning to the United States, she attended Barnard College for a year from 1915 and then Columbia University to study journalism and art history.

In the 1920s she married and moved to Darien . Since she was bored with life as a housewife, on the advice of a therapist, she began to do self-taught painting in 1925 . Her first pictures showed an apple tree and her property in Darien. After the divorce from her husband, she rented a studio in Greenwich Village , but she continued to work primarily as a journalist.

In 1929 von Wiegand traveled to Moscow , where she was the only woman among the correspondents in Russia to work for the Hearst Corporation . During this time she painted Moscow's churches on weekends. In 1932 she returned to New York because of the restrictions imposed by Stalinism and married the communist writer Joseph Freeman (1897-1965), who was the founder and editor of the left newspaper New Masses and later co-founder of the Partisan Review . She continued her work as a journalist, attended art exhibitions and wrote for several art magazines. She made the acquaintance of avant-garde artists like Mark Tobey , who shared her interest in the spirituality of the East.

Untitled
Charmion von Wiegand , 1946/7
Oil on canvas
50.8 x 40.8 cm
Privately owned

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

On April 12, 1941, von Wiegand interviewed the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian , who had been in exile in New York for six months. On the same day she wrote in her diary: “Mondrian is a light, thin man, half-bald with the sharp ascetic features of a catholic priest or scientist.” (Mondrian is a thin, thin man, half bald, with the sharp ascetic features of a Catholic priest or scientist.) They became friends, and she edited his writings. Under Mondrian's influence, she began to paint abstract pictures in the style of his intuitive neo-plasticism . In the same year she joined the artist association American Abstract Artists and exhibited there for the first time in 1948. For Mondrian's first solo exhibition in the United States, which took place in January 1942 in the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York, she edited its accompanying text Toward a True Vision of Reality ( On the way to the true view of reality ). She accompanied the work of Mondrian's last, unfinished picture Victory Boogie Woogie with discussions and drafts until his death on February 1, 1944.

After Mondrian's death, she devoted herself entirely to painting and learned about the teachings of theosophy , a spiritual movement of the early 20th century that had already inspired Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and many surrealists . By reading it, the artist developed a strong interest in Tibetan Buddhism . Hans Richter led von Wiegand to experiments with automatism , as a result she painted a series of works with organic forms.

Invocation to the Adi-Buddha
Charmion von Wiegand , 1968–70
Oil on canvas

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

In 1945 she took part in Peggy Guggenheim's exhibition “The Women” in her gallery Art of This Century , which only showed works by women artists. Other exhibits came from, for example, Louise Bourgeois , Lee Krasner and Dorothea Tanning . Her work continued to be based on Mondrian, but she didn't just use primary colors like this one. An example is the color green in her 1954 work The Ancestral Altar from I Ching . She also worked on collages under the influence of Hans Arp , Wassily Kandinsky , Joan Miró and other artists. From 1952 to 1954 she was president of the American Abstract Artists Association.

Her interest in Eastern religions grew and in 1967 she became friends with the Buddhist monk Khyongla Rato, who had fled Tibet and who founded the Tibet Center in New York in 1975. In the 1970s she made trips to India and Tibet, where she had an audience with the Dalai Lama .

In 1980 von Wiegand was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , and in 1982 the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida held its first retrospective of 67 works in February and March . In 1983 Charmion von Wiegand died in New York.

Works (selection)

  • 1945: Abstract , watercolor on paper, Seattle Art Museum , Seattle Washington
  • 1946: The Terrace of Jade , oil on canvas, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
  • 1946: Ominous Form , oil on canvas, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
  • 1948: City Rhythm , oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts , Boston, Massachusetts
  • 1953/4: Composition , oil on canvas, Arithmeum , Bonn
  • 1957–59: Night Intersection , oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum , Washington DC
  • Circa 1958: Advancing Magic Squares , oil on canvas, National Museum of Women in the Arts , Washington, DC
  • 1966: Nothing that is wrong in principle can be right in practice - Carl Schurz, 1829-1906 . From the Great Ideas of Western Man series , oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
  • 1968–70: Invocation to the Adi-Buddha , oil on canvas, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

literature

  • Charmion von Wiegand, her art and life. Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida 1982
  • Back to the Future: Alfred Jensen, Charmion von Wiegand, Simon Gouverneur, and the Cosmic Conversation , exhibition catalog. Loyola University Chicago, 2009, ISBN 0-9815-8351-2
  • Alan M. Wald: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left . The University of North Carolina Press 2001, ISBN 978-0807853498

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from web link: Interview with Charmion von Wiegand
  2. ↑ Michel Seuphor : Piet Mondrian. Life and Work , Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1957, p. 62
  3. ^ The Ancestral Altar from I Ching , www.brooklynmuseum.org, accessed February 22, 2019
  4. ↑ Arithmeum ( memento of July 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de, accessed on November 8, 2011
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personal data
SURNAME Wiegand, Charmion of
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Freeman, Charmion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1983
Place of death Chicago