ABSTRACT
In the contribution to a 1957 anthology edited by the American Abstract Artist group, Charmion von Wiegand clearly grasped the relationships between abstraction's psychological, scientific, and religious developments in the Western world and its aesthetic syncretism with Eastern ideas and philosophies. Von Wiegand's departure from Neo-Plasticism offers a new spatial vision implicit in geometric structure but liberated through the interplay of spirituality and corporeality. Through von Wiegand's critical writing on Tobey, she elucidated her own otherworldly aesthetic and, in part, identified with his negotiation of postwar abstract expressionism. Drawing on Buddhist yogic traditions and sacred meditative and sexual rituals that posit the body as a central link to enlightenment, her continual exploration of the Tantric chakras clarified her relationship to symbolic "female-identified attributes." Mediating the spatial plane's Neo-Plastic constructions, she favored a geometric equilibrium– founded on the circle–between female and male forms, and a balance receptive to new gender readings in her art.
