What would she do if she could do anything, Charmion von Wiegand’s psychoanalyst asked her in 1927. “Why, paint, of course,” she answered. When he asked why she wasn’t doing that, she lamented, “It’s too late in life to be a painter.” At the time, Von Wiegand was a 31-year-old writer living in Connecticut who had already started establishing herself as a journalist. She would still write, mostly about art and social issues, for a few more decades. But despite what she told her analyst, she started painting around then as well.
She created landscapes at first, and ultimately geometric abstractions that incorporated Asian iconography, especially Buddhist symbols. Now her first institutional solo exhibition in more than 40 years, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, displays the full breadth of her work. It is open now until August 13.
“Her different phases of working look quite different from each other, which I think is part of the reason she’s been quite overshadowed as an artist,” says Maja Wismer, the exhibition curator and head of contemporary art at Kunstmuseum Basel. “She didn’t develop that one signature style. You can really trace the different phases.”
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1920s and 1930s
Von Wiegand and her hard-to-categorize paintings emerged from a writerly background. Born in 1896 in Chicago, she was the daughter of journalist Karl von Wiegand, and she began to follow in his footsteps when she studied journalism at Columbia University. While there she also studied art history but received no formal art training.
After writing professionally for a few years, she moved to Moscow in 1929 as the only female correspondent for Universal Service (a Hearst-owned American news agency); there she became interested in socialist propaganda art as well as European modernist paintings. When she returned to America, in 1932, she started painting industrial landscapes, partly motivated by socialist ideals. That year she also began writing about art, mostly for magazines such as Art Front, ArtNews, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. “The best critics have always been creators,” wrote Von Wiegand in an article published in 1936.
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Mondrian
Image Credit: Copyright © Estate of Charmion von Wiegand. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York. It was through her work as an art critic that she met Piet Mondrian in 1941, an experience she credited as life-changing. “From that first meeting,” she said in a later interview, “my eyes were transformed.” She had reviewed Herbert Read’s pamphlet “Five on Revolutionary Art,” which made her curious about this Dutch abstract painter who had just moved to New York to flee wartime Europe. Impressed by Read’s assessment that Mondrian was one of only a few truly revolutionary artists, she decided she had to meet him. The encounter was important to both people: Von Wiegand was exposed to a new visual language, one that encouraged her to experiment with abstraction. And Mondrian found a writer with a sensitivity to art who could help translate his essays into English for American readers.
He was not, however, as supportive of her art as she may have hoped. When Von Weigand excitedly wrote to Mondrian that she’d bought materials and “at last found a composition,” his response was cruel. As she recorded in her diary during the fall of 1942, Mondrian curtly replied that “you are a writer and I don’t want to know about your painting. You find your own way.” As hurt as she was, she ultimately did exactly that. Though she’d drawn and painted since the 1920s, the works that signal the beginning of her dedicated art career date to the time of that exchange.
“What Mondrian made available to her was that abstract art doesn’t need to be formalistic, that there is a way to use abstract art to express an essential,” says Wismer. “She stuck with that.” Von Wiegand’s paintings from that time are filled with organic forms in a palette of black, white, and primary colors, showing the influence of Mondrian and her friend Hans Richter, who encouraged her to experiment with automatism. By 1945 she’d shifted entirely from landscapes to biomorphic abstractions.
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Geometric Abstraction
Image Credit: Copyright © Walker Art Center Hard-edged geometric shapes came slowly into Von Wiegand’s work, linked to her interest in theosophy. In the late 1940s and mid 1950s she looked toward East Asian art as an extension of her search for spiritual models. She studied the writings and drawings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society, and similar texts with diagrams and illustrations of chakras, mandalas, and cosmograms. Around 1957 she started classes with one of the first modern yoga teachers in the West, Yogi Vithaldas, and anatomy chakras became a major theme in her paintings.
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Hinduism and Buddhism
Image Credit: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York/Kristopher McKay By the early 1960s, Von Wiegand and her work were known to the Tibetan refugee community in the United States, leading to a meeting with the Dalai Lama’s New York representative and an invitation to a Buddhist temple in Freehold, New Jersey. (She would meet the Dalai Lama himself a few years later, in India.) “I was spell-bound—knocked out by the color. That is why my pictures changed,” Von Wiegand later shared about going to Freehold. “You can’t change your color and not your format, so that is why my format changed.”
Her paintings became filled with dots, lines, and shapes that in traditional Tibetan art can symbolize deities and religious tenets. Her bright colors—a stretch from the limited primary color palette of Mondrian—could be seen as representing sound and light. Von Wiegand was also inspired by art of Hindu tantrics, using an equilateral triangle, for example, to represent the mind’s three functions (power of will, power of knowledge, and power of action), or, when its apex was pointed down, the female principle.
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1970s and 1980s
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art/The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation/Scala Archives When Von Wiegand’s works were exhibited in a 1975 solo show, “The Paradox of Transformation,”at New York’s Andre Zarre Gallery, her friend Sonia Delaunay wrote in the catalog that she was “one of the very few artists who understand color theories and utilize them to perfection. Her accomplishment in this area is enormous and should not be overlooked.”
Delaunay recognized Von Wiegand’s skill, but her work was out of step with the Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists active during her time. Still, Von Wiegand’s work was exhibited, and she did earn recognition in her lifetime. In 1980 she was one of 20 women featured in an ArtNews issue about gender disparity, under the headline “Where Are the Great Women Artists?” And in 1982, one year before her death at age 87, she had her first museum retrospective at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The current show at the Kunstmuseum Basel is her first solo institutional show since then; it follows other retrospectives for overlooked women whose abstract works leaned into the spiritual, such as Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton.
Von Wiegand’s abstraction fused hard-edged geometric shapes with soft color and brought a deep spirituality to abstraction. “This is a searching woman, a searching artist,” concludes Wismer, “who found a way of expressing herself.”
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Image Credit: Arnold Newman Collection via Getty Images