Charmion Von Wiegand (American, 1896–1983) is a De Stijl style painter. She began her art career as a writer and art critic in New York. Von Wiegand studied journalism, theatre, and art history at Columbia University. She served as editor of Art Front and wrote articles for The New Masses, New Theatre, ARTnews, and Arts Magazine. Apart from writing, she also made landscape paintings.
When Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944) arrived in the United States, von Wiegand arranged to interview him for an article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. A close relationship formed between the two artists, and von Wiegand began to change her painting style completely. She believed that there was an intuitive and spiritual aspect of Neoplasticism explored by Mondrian that she wanted to explore as well. She became a member of the American Abstract Artists in 1941 and exhibited with them in 1948. She began making collages, such as Transfer to Cathay, using colored paper, tickets, menus, matchbooks, and handwritten notes arranged in a geometrical composition. This work is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
During the 1960s, von Wiegand moved away from De Stijl and became interested in Buddhism. Although she still believed in the principals she learned from Mondrian, she began to make paintings using spiritual symbols and experimenting with automatic drawing. The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, FL, presented her first retrospective in 1982. In 2007, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibited Offering of the Universe–An Artist’s Path from Mondrian to Mantra, which served as a survey of von Wiegand’s spiritual paintings and works on paper from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Her works can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of Art. The artist died in 1983. Von Wiegand’s estate is represented by the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.