Charmion von Wiegand
Charmion von Wiegand ( born March 4, 1896 in Chicago, † June 9, 1983 in New York) was an American journalist, art critic and painter, whose works of Piet Mondrian's painting style was inspired neoplastizistischem.
Life and work
Charmion von Wiegand was the second child after her brother Norman of Inez Royce and the American journalist of German origin, Karl von Wiegand. From 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 from 1915 a year Barnard College and then Columbia University to study journalism and art history.
In the 1920s, she married and moved to Darien. Since life as a housewife she was bored, she started in 1925 to deal with the self-taught painting on the advice of a therapist out. Your first images showed an apple tree and her estate in Darien. After divorcing her husband, she rented a studio in Greenwich Village, but it was still primarily a journalist.
In 1929 traveled from Wiegand to Moscow, where she worked as the only woman among the correspondents in Russia for the Hearst Corporation. During this time she painted churches on weekends Moscow. In 1932 she returned due to limitations by Stalinism back to New York and married the communist writer Joseph Freeman ( 1897-1965 ), the founder and editor of the New Masses was left leaf and later co-founder of Partisan Review. She continued her work as a journalist continued, visited art exhibitions and wrote for several art magazines. She made the acquaintance of avant-garde artists such as Mark Tobey, who shared her interest in the spirituality of the East.
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On April 12, 1941 interviewed by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian Wiegand, who lived in New York for six months in exile. That same day, she wrote in her diary: " Mondrian is a light, one thin, half- soon with the sharp ascetic features of a catholic priest or scientist. " ( Mondrian is a lanky, thin man, half bald, with the sharp ascetic features of a Catholic priest or a scientist. ) they befriended, and they edited his writings. In Mondrian's influence, she began to paint abstract paintings in the style of his Neo- intuitive. In the same year she joined the Artists' Association American Abstract Artists and placed there in 1948 for the first time out. For Mondrian's first solo exhibition in the United States, which took place in the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York in January 1942, 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 Victory Boogie Woogie gebliebenem image with discussions and drafts until his death on 1 February 1944.
After the death of Mondrian on 1 February 1944, she devoted herself entirely to painting and was informed about the teachings of Theosophy, a spiritual movement of the early 20th century, which had already inspired Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and many Surrealists. By reading the artist developed a strong interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Hans Richter led by Wiegand to experiments with automatism, as a result, they painted a series of works that have organic shapes.
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In 1945, she was involved with works at Peggy Guggenheim's exhibition "The Women " in her gallery Art of This Century, which showed exclusively works by artists. Other exhibits ancestral example, by Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner and Dorothea Tanning. Her works oriented to continue to Mondrian, but they not only used primary colors like this. An example is the color green in their work from the year 1954 The Ancestral Altar from I Ching.Außerdem she devoted herself to the work of collagen under the influence of Hans Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro and other artists. From 1952 to 1954 she was president of the Association of American Abstract Artists.
Your interest in Eastern religions grew, and in 1967 she became friends with the Buddhist monk Khyongla Rato, who had fled from Tibet, and in 1975 founded the Tibet Center in New York. In the 1970s, she has traveled to India and Tibet, where they had an audience with the Dalai Lama.
1980 was chosen by Wiegand as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and established in 1982, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida, in February and March, her first retrospective of 67 works from. 1983 Charmion von Wiegand died in New York.