1. Charmion von Wiegand, The Ascent to Mt. Mery, 1962, Gouache
on paper, 59,4 x 46,7 cm, Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York
Until the end of the summer months, the Kunstmuseum Basel decided to present a series of two exhibitions dedicated to two American artists, one was born in the 1920s in New York before moving to France: Shirley Jaffe. While the other stayed in the United States but became friends with a European artist, who overcast her art: Charmion von Wiegand.
Both artists we're overcast by a series of individuals, some of them part of an artistic group, some by translating his art to enlarge his audience, but both of them tries to figure our their own style, and both succeed to become great artists, sadly their name don't connect to the cannon of western art.
Thus, the Kunstmuseum Basel makes a commitment to those two artists. Jafe's works were bought by the museum in preparation of the exhibition, hopefully Wiegman works will also find it's way into the collection, if not, this lasting effort will only be a small stone inside a big pot of exhibitions happening in the city of Basel, or even wider in Switzerland and Europe.
Jaffe - geometric, colourful and bold
2. Shirley Jaffe - Untitled - 1955 (© ProLitteris, Zürich), Shirley Jaffe - Arcueil Yellow - 1956 (© ProLitteris, Zürich and Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris), and Shirley Jaffe, Which in the World (© ProLitteris, Zürich), ©Julian Salinas
The first exhibition of this series is "Shirley Jaffe - Form as experiment" which is curated by my dear friend Olga Osadtschy and Frédéric Paul, curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition which was first presented at the Centre Pompidou is now travelling to Basel (in a different format), before travelling again at the end of the year to the Musée Matisse in Nice.
In Basel the exhibition showcases 113 works, most of them are paintings but also works on paper and works from artists Jaffe was friends with. With so much works on view, the Kunstmuseum present this artist for the first time in Switzerland, thus inviting the audience to explore her well-know geometric works but also her early works inspired by abstract expressionism and her circa of friends such as Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Kimber Smith, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The women
Shirley Jaffe or Shirley Sternstein was born on October 2, 1923, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, into a Jewish family. Her parent, Benjamin and Anna Sternstein, had three childrens, Jafffe, Jerry and Eliaine, and while her father ran a shirt factory until he died when Jaffe was 10, her mother decided to move her family to Brighton beach (Brooklyn) and Jaffe attend the Abraham Lincoln High School before attending the Cooper Union in New York City, where she graduated in 1945.
After her degree, she worked in the print department of the New York Public Library and in the department store Macy's, before moving to Washington D.C. and attend the Phillips Art School. After her second graduation, she married her husband, and they moved together in Paris in 1949. When she arrived, she became acquainted with the American artists living in Paris such as Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell, and to the dealer Jean Fournier who will represent Jaffe.
Her style and her experimentation:
gestural and geometrical
The style of Jaffe was deeply influenced by the Abstract Expressionist, mostly influenced by her friend Joan Mitchell and by impressionist pictures such as Renoir, who she made an hommage in "Which in the World", where she reflects her vision of "Le Déjeuner des canotiers" (1881) when she saw it at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.
But her life will change when the Ford Foundation gave her a grant to spend a year in Berlin, and she moved from her influence of the American artist living in Paris to new influences such as the music of contemporary composers Lannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. She also rediscovered the artist of the Bauhaus and her influence to Europe abstractions with important German figures such as Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wassily Kandinsky and Auguste Herbin.
In the end, she stated: "I had a feeling that my paintings were being read as landscapes, which was not my intention. I felt I had to clear out the woods", and Berlin will give her the power to do so.
When she received her grant, Berlin was in a chaotic state. At the time the Berlin Wall was just been built, and it coincides with the moment of Kennedy's death and the intention to counter Soviet cultural influences. To do so, the Ford Foundation artist-in-residence grants was merged with the German Academic Exchange Service program in 1964.
During one year, her style completely shifted from her gestural works to a flat and uninflected surface with single-colour shapes and predominantly straight lines. And when she returned to Paris, the public and her dealer were shocked, but her evolution was the key to different herself from other painters of the scene.
Her evolution from gestural painting to geometric shapes will even be more radical because she renounced the gestural dimension and relies on geometry and muted hues to produce arrangements of flat color fields. During those time she moved into a small studio on Rue Saint-Victor in the 5th arrondissement, where she lived and worked almost until her death in 2016.
And for 50 years she develops her own style defined by marked contours, geometry and lines, the works are becoming larger, sometimes made with numerous canvas and the importance of the color white to separate the forms from each other in order to lend them greater independence.
Speaking of geometry and friendship - Charmion von Wiegand
While speaking of geometry, the second exhibition currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel present an important, and quite unknown figure of modern art: Charmion von Wiegand. During a few months, the American journalist art critic and painter is presented with works coming from every period of her oeuvre, marking the first retrospective of her oeuvre in almost four decades and her very first institutional exhibition in Europe.
While the exhibition includes forty-nine paintings, sketches and documents, that developed her style, first influenced by De Stijl and later made by her spiritual practice of Tibetan Buddhism.
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3. Portrait of American abstract painter Charmion von Wiegand (1896 - 1983) as she poses in her studio with several of her paintings, August 16, 1961. Photo: © Arnold Newman Properties / Getty Images
Born in 1896 in Chicago, Charmion grew up between New York and Berlin, and later Connecticut and Moscow. And while she attended to become a journalist due to her journalism study and art history at the Barnard College and Columbia University in New York, she also became an art critic, curator and painter due to her interest in non-European art especially the arts of Chinese, Indian and Persian cultures.
She first exhibited her painting during her studies in 1928, but to maintain her life and pay her rent she worked as a journalist and art critic for art magazines such as "Art Front", which gave her many opportunities and contacts with important curators and artists of the New York art scene.
In the 40s, she came back to painting and due to her influence of social writings and natural form which you can see in works such as "Ominous Form" (1946), and while she slowly shifted her style from curves to geometrics forms, she also met with Piet Mondrian in 1941. And while their friendship became important, she painted less and preferred to write articles about her artist friends and translates his writings from Dutch to English, until his death in 1944.
And after his death, she decided to focus on studying non-Western art and spiritual topics, sharing her interest in East Asian cultures and religion with the artist Mark Tobey (1890-1976). She became friends with the Buddhist teacher Khyongla Rato Rinpoche in 1967, which later founded the first Tibet Center in New York and one of the people in charge of the estate of the artist. Her late works showcase numerous influence to different cultures and religions, colors and geometrics shapes, while adding personal feelings and expressions to her works.
The layout and the goals of the exhibition
4. Exhibition view of "Charmion von Wiegand", Kunstmuseum
Basel I Neubau, 2023, Photo: Julian Salinas
The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to her earliest works and her relation with Piet Mondrian, especially when she visited the Soviet Union in 1929 after her study in New York as a journalist for the New York-based media group Hearsts Universal Service. She wrote for the English issue of Moscow Daily News, a Russian communist publication while being inspired by her trip in her painting titled "New Russia" (1929).
She only returned to New York in 1932 with Freeman, the editor of the New York magazine New Masses, while lead her to think and write about her personal interest between art and politics and discussions around abstract and figurative art. And while she met Piet Mondrian in 1941, an artist articulated between geometric abstraction and figuration, her friendship overpassed her art over a person she deeply admired for his art and his writings.
Under the influence of the artist, she returned to painting in October 1942, but Mondrian was quite harsh on her and Wiegand remained undaunted by the lack of support from her spiritual mentor.
In the second room, the curator showcase, her new research of perspectives with works influenced by urban scopes and abstraction mixed in one work. She was influenced by the filmmaker Hans Richter (1888–1976), and the scenographer Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) in her work "Ominous Form, The Nuptial Form" and "Disparate Forms" and the forms of nature.
In the last room, she described her influence of Buddhist after a lecture at the Church Peace Union in New York in 1951 by author and Zen Buddhist Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, and she subsequently delved deeply into philosophy of Zen.
Exhibitions catalogs
Both exhibitions are accompanied with a catalogue. Jaffe's catalogue includes writing from Svetlana Alpers, Claudine Grammont, Shirley Jaffe, Robert Kushner, Olga Osadtschy, Frédéric Paul, and Molly Warnock. And its published by Christoph Merian Verlag.
On the other hand, Wigan's catalogue is published by Prestel, and it includes writing from Maja Wismer, Martin Brauen, Lori Cole, Haema Sivanesan, Nancy J. Troy, and Felix Vogel.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau
Date: March - August 2023
Curator: Olga Osadtschy, Frédéric Paul, Martin Brauen and Maja Wismer
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch