[2] Von Wiegand was born in Chicago in 1896, grew up in Arizona and California, attended a public school in San Francisco (where she initially became interested in Chinese culture when visiting Chinatown), and lived for three years in Berlin as a teenager.
Von Wiegand started to paint in 1926 while receiving psychoanalytic therapy and encouragement from her friend and painter, Joseph Stella.
In 1931[3]-1934, Von Wiegand became the second wife to the communist activist and co-founder of the journal New Masses Joseph Freeman,[1] to whom she remained married until his death.
As part of the cultural avant-garde, she developed a close circle of friends such as John Graham, Carl Holty, Hans Richter, Joseph Stella, and Mark Tobey, all artists who similarly shared a belief that art should be made from physical beauty and spirituality.
However, she was also heavily influenced into painting abstractly by Hans Richter, the German-born painter, filmmaker and member of the Zurich Dada group; Wassily Kandinsky; Jean Arp; and Joan Miró.
Charmion Von Wiegand became much more interested in Eastern religion and culture Theosophy, Buddhism in the 1950s, oriental styles and drawings such as Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Hindu Tantric images and she started painting in straight lines by using tape, especially after Mondrian's death in 1944.
Her paintings began to contain many more symbols and themes, evident in her geometric forms in symmetrical compositions after her 1972 exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.
She participated in 35 major group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Far East, including Peggy Guggenheim's 1945 Women's Show at the Art of this Century Gallery in New York.