Charmion Von Wiegand

Charmion Von Wiegand
The Ancestral Altar from I Ching, 1954, oil and pencil on canvas, 30 x 25in. (76.2 x 63.5cm). Brooklyn Museum[1]
Born	1896[2] Chicago, Illinois, U.S.[2]
Died	1983[2] New York, New York, U.S.[2]
Nationality	American[2]
Field	Painter, Journalist, Art critic[2]
Movement	Neo-Plasticism[2]
Influenced by	Piet Mondrian[2]

Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983) was an American journalist, abstract painter, and art critic. She was the daughter of Inez Royce and Karl Henry von Wiegand, the German-born journalist.^[3]

Von Wiegand was born in Chicago and grew up in Arizona, San Francisco, and Berlin, where as a teenager she lived for three years. When she returned to the United States, she attended Barnard College for a year and then transferred to Columbia University to study journalism, theater, and art history. She did not complete her bachelors degree and thought she may become a playwright; at this time she also began to paint landscapes.

In 1929, she traveled to Moscow where she became a correspondent for the Universal Service of the Hearst Press. She returned to the New York in 1932 and married communist activist and writer Joseph Freeman the same year^[2][4] or in 1934.^[5] She continued her work as an art critic, and in spring 1941 interviewed the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. She became close friends with Mondrian, who influenced her to start creating abstract art. She became an associate member of the American Abstract Artists in 1941, exhibiting with them from 1948.

See also

• Hard-edge painting
• Geometric abstraction

Notes

1. ^ "The Ancestral Altar from I Ching". Brooklyn Museum. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/luce/object.php?id=149511. Retrieved 22 April 2010. 
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} "Charmion Von Wiegand". Smithsonian Institution. http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?StartRow=1&ID=5179. Retrieved 22 April 2010. 
3. ^ "Charmion von Wiegand (1896 — 1983) chronology". Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC. http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/artists_represented.php?i=13&m=chronology. Retrieved 14 December 2010. 
4. ^ "Charmion von Wiegand (1896 — 1983)". Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC. http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/artists_represented.php?i=13&m=biography. Retrieved 14 December 2010. 
5. ^ Wald (p. 183.)

References

• Wald, Alan M. (2001). Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0807853498. 

Further reading

• Back to the Future: Alfred Jensen, Charmion von Wiegand, Simon Gouverneur, and the Cosmic Conversation, exhibition catalogue. Loyola University Chicago, 2009. ISBN 0-9815-8351-2
• Wiegand, Charmion (1943). "The Meaning of Mondrian". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics) 2 (8 (Autumn, 1943)): 62–70. http://1rhumb.com/1189/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/The-Meaning-of-Mondrian.pdf. 

External links

• American Abstract Artists
• Loyola University Museum of Art exhibition

Persondata
Name	Von Wiegand, Charmion
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1896
Place of birth	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Date of death	1983
Place of death	New York, New York, U.S.