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. Von Wiegand continued her work as an art critic, and in the Spring of 1941, Carl Holty arranged for her to interview the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who was seeking refuge in the United States during World War II and whose work she was familiar with from the Gallatin Collection. She was commissioned to write the first English- language article about Mondrian by "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism". She became close friends with him while helping him translate his essays into English. She watched Mondrian work on both Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, he influenced her to start creating abstract art and she moved towards Neo-Plasticism. 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. Kurt Schwitter's styles, much different from Cubism or Neo- plasticism, was evident around 1946, where she began making collages. She also organized an important show of Schwitter's collages with Naum Gabo and Katherine Dreiser in 1948.