Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983), Birth of a Planet, 1957. Oil on canvas, 11 x 11 in. (27.9 x 27.9 cm). Grey Art Gallery, New Yor University Art Collection. Gift of Dr. Arthur Ashman, 2004.2.22. © Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

The daughter of a foreign correspondent, Charmion von Wiegand grew up in San Francisco and Berlin. Excelling in foreign languages, journalism, art history, and psychoanalysis, she eventually settled in Greenwich Village, where she pursued a dual career as a journalist and a painter of biomorphic abstractions—a popular transatlantic style of the late 1930s.

Early in 1941, she met Piet Mondrian upon his arrival in New York and soon became one of his most ardent disciples, along with Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, and Harry Holtzmann. Later she studied Tibetan art and religion, extending the mystical beliefs she had held from an early age (her father, like Mondrian, was a Theosophist). In Birth of a Planet, Von Wiegand has abandoned Mondrian’s hard-edged precision in favor of centralized, ethereal imagery recalling the semi-abstract compositions of Tibetan thangkas and mandalas.