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What would she do if she might do something, Charmion von Wiegand’s psychoanalyst requested her in 1927. “Why, paint, after all,” she answered. When he requested why she wasn’t doing that, she lamented, “It’s too late in life to be a painter.” On the time, Von Wiegand was a 31-year-old author dwelling in Connecticut who had already began establishing herself as a journalist. She would nonetheless write, principally about artwork and social points, for a couple of extra many years. However regardless of what she advised her analyst, she began portray round then as effectively.
She created landscapes at first, and in the end geometric abstractions that integrated Asian iconography, particularly Buddhist symbols. Now her first institutional solo exhibition in additional than 40 years, on the Kunstmuseum Basel, shows the complete breadth of her work.
“Her completely different phases of working look fairly completely different from one another, which I believe is a part of the rationale she’s been fairly overshadowed as an artist,” says Maja Wismer, the exhibition curator and head of latest artwork at Kunstmuseum Basel. “She didn’t develop that one signature fashion. You may actually hint the completely different phases.”
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Nineteen Twenties and Thirties
Von Wiegand and her hard-to-categorize work emerged from a writerly background. Born in 1896 in Chicago, she was the daughter of journalist Karl von Wiegand, and he or she started to comply with in his footsteps when she studied journalism at Columbia College. Whereas there she additionally studied artwork historical past however obtained no formal artwork coaching.
After writing professionally for a couple of years, she moved to Moscow in 1929 as the one feminine correspondent for Common Service (a Hearst-owned American information company); there she grew to become all in favour of socialist propaganda artwork in addition to European modernist work. When she returned to America, in 1932, she began portray industrial landscapes, partly motivated by socialist beliefs. That yr she additionally started writing about artwork, principally for magazines akin to Artwork Entrance, ArtNews, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Artwork Criticism. “The most effective critics have all the time been creators,” wrote Von Wiegand in an article revealed in 1936.
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Mondrian
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Property of Charmion von Wiegand. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York. It was via her work as an artwork critic that she met Piet Mondrian in 1941, an expertise she credited as life-changing. “From that first assembly,” she stated in a later interview, “my eyes have been remodeled.” She had reviewed Herbert Learn’s pamphlet “5 on Revolutionary Artwork,” which made her inquisitive about this Dutch summary painter who had simply moved to New York to flee wartime Europe. Impressed by Learn’s evaluation that Mondrian was one in every of just a few actually revolutionary artists, she determined she needed to meet him. The encounter was essential to each folks: Von Wiegand was uncovered to a brand new visible language, one which inspired her to experiment with abstraction. And Mondrian discovered a author with a sensitivity to artwork who might assist translate his essays into English for American readers.
He was not, nonetheless, as supportive of her artwork as she might have hoped. When Von Weigand excitedly wrote to Mondrian that she’d purchased supplies and “ultimately discovered a composition,” his response was merciless. As she recorded in her diary throughout the fall of 1942, Mondrian curtly replied that “you’re a author and I don’t wish to learn about your portray. You discover your individual method.” As harm as she was, she in the end did precisely that. Although she’d drawn and painted for the reason that Nineteen Twenties, the works that sign the start of her devoted artwork profession date to the time of that alternate.
“What Mondrian made accessible to her was that summary artwork doesn’t must be formalistic, that there’s a method to make use of summary artwork to precise a vital,” says Wismer. “She caught with that.” Von Wiegand’s work from that point are crammed with natural types in a palette of black, white, and first colours, exhibiting the affect of Mondrian and her good friend Hans Richter, who inspired her to experiment with automatism. By 1945 she’d shifted totally from landscapes to biomorphic abstractions.
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Geometric Abstraction
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Walker Artwork Middle Exhausting-edged geometric shapes got here slowly into Von Wiegand’s work, linked to her curiosity in theosophy. Within the late Forties and mid Fifties she seemed towards East Asian artwork as an extension of her seek for religious fashions. She studied the writings and drawings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a founding father of the Theosophical Society, and related texts with diagrams and illustrations of chakras, mandalas, and cosmograms. Round 1957 she began courses with one of many first trendy yoga academics within the West, Yogi Vithaldas, and anatomy chakras grew to become a significant theme in her work.
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Hinduism and Buddhism
Picture Credit score: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York/Kristopher McKay By the early Nineteen Sixties, Von Wiegand and her work have been identified to the Tibetan refugee group in the US, resulting in a gathering with the Dalai Lama’s New York consultant and an invite to a Buddhist temple in Freehold, New Jersey. (She would meet the Dalai Lama himself a couple of years later, in India.) “I used to be spell-bound—knocked out by the colour. That’s the reason my photos modified,” Von Wiegand later shared about going to Freehold. “You may’t change your shade and never your format, so that’s the reason my format modified.”
Her work grew to become crammed with dots, strains, and shapes that in conventional Tibetan artwork can symbolize deities and non secular tenets. Her vibrant colours—a stretch from the restricted major shade palette of Mondrian—might be seen as representing sound and light-weight. Von Wiegand was additionally impressed by artwork of Hindu tantrics, utilizing an equilateral triangle, for instance, to signify the thoughts’s three features (energy of will, energy of information, and energy of motion), or, when its apex was pointed down, the feminine precept.
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Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties
Picture Credit score: Museum of Fashionable Artwork/The Riklis Assortment of McCrory Company/Scala Archives When Von Wiegand’s works have been exhibited in a 1975 solo present, “The Paradox of Transformation,”at New York’s Andre Zarre Gallery, her good friend Sonia Delaunay wrote within the catalog that she was “one of many only a few artists who perceive shade theories and make the most of them to perfection. Her accomplishment on this space is gigantic and shouldn’t be missed.”
Delaunay acknowledged Von Wiegand’s ability, however her work was out of step with the Summary Expressionists and Pop artists energetic throughout her time. Nonetheless, Von Wiegand’s work was exhibited, and he or she did earn recognition in her lifetime. In 1980 she was one in every of 20 girls featured in an ArtNews problem about gender disparity, below the headline “The place Are the Nice Ladies Artists?” And in 1982, one yr earlier than her loss of life at age 87, she had her first museum retrospective on the Bass Museum of Artwork in Miami Seashore. The present present on the Kunstmuseum Basel is her first solo institutional present since then; it follows different retrospectives for missed girls whose summary works leaned into the religious, akin to Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton.
Von Wiegand’s abstraction fused hard-edged geometric shapes with tender shade and introduced a deep spirituality to abstraction. “It is a looking out lady, a looking out artist,” concludes Wismer, “who discovered a method of expressing herself.”
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Picture Credit score: Arnold Newman Assortment by way of Getty Photos
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