Charmion Von Wiegand
- Biography
“I know that art will always change as life changes because it has one foot in life and the other in eternity.”
–– Charmion von Wiegand, 1968
Charmion von Wiegand was an artist who sought to infuse abstract painting with a spiritual essence. Across her career, she experimented with form and color while cultivating a deep engagement with East Asian artistic practices and cultures
The daughter of a journalist, von Wiegand grew up in Arizona, California, and Berlin. In 1915, she enrolled at Barnard College and then transferred to Columbia University. Von Wiegand studied journalism and art history, developing an interest in Chinese, Indian, and Persian cultures, and she also started drawing. A revelatory experience with a psychoanalyst in 1927 led von Wiegand to begin painting, though her primary focus remained journalism. In 1929, she relocated to Soviet Moscow and worked for an American news outlet. During this time, von Wiegand painted industrial landscapes, reflecting her engagements with socialism and its commitments to workers.
In 1932, von Wiegand returned to New York City. She began regularly writing art criticism and connecting with other modern artists, like Ukrainian-born American painter John Graham. In 1941, von Wiegand initiated a formative dialogue with the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian. “From that first meeting,” she recalled, “my eyes were transformed.” She went on to edit and translate many of Mondrian’s writings, largely uncredited. Von Wiegand also engaged with his geometric abstractions and their relationship to Theosophy—a late nineteenth-century religion combining aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism, esotericism, and occultism.
During the 1940s, von Wiegand began working in an abstract mode, joining the American Abstract Artists group in 1941. Early on, her paintings featured organic forms arranged using stream-of-consciousness methods central to the surrealist artists who were both subjects of her critical writings and her friends. After Mondrian’s 1944 death, von Wiegand expanded upon his geometric abstractions in compact and dynamic compositions. Around mid-decade, she began making collages like Transfer to Cathay (1948, SAAM), spurred in part by her growing familiarity with Kurt Schwitters and his collages.
By the early 1950s, von Wiegand increasingly yoked the act of painting to spiritual searching, turning especially to Theosophy and, in turn, its origins in Buddhism. During this decade, she traveled “extensively in the library and in my arm chair,” as she put it, studying a host of Theosophical, Taoist, and Tantric texts. She also attended lectures given by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism, and practiced with one of the first yogis in the West. Von Wiegand began to incorporate related iconography, like mandalas and stupas, into her painting. Initially operating primarily as motifs, this iconography came to be an expression of her own developing spiritual practices.
During the 1960s, von Wiegand organized one of the first exhibitions of Tibetan art in the United States (1969, American Federation for the Arts) and gained similar firsthand knowledge of Buddhist imagery during a transformative visit to a New Jersey monastery. She took up the brighter colors and Tibetan symbols encountered in these contexts in subsequent paintings, such as “Nothing that is wrong in principle can be right in practice.” –Carl Schurz, 1929-1906 (1966, SAAM), created for the Container Corporation of America's advertisement series Great Ideas of Western Man. By the 1970s, von Wiegand’s artistic output slowed, but journeys to Tibet and India deepened her spiritual practices.
As von Wiegand joined primarily East Asian spiritual traditions with tenets of Euro-American art, she forged an aesthetic system that was uniquely her own. In 1968, she claimed, “I don’t have any feeling of any theories anymore. . . . I just paint. Because I have a lot of theories behind me.”
Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024