Zanis Waldheims

In 1985, at the age of 76, he enrolled in the Bachelors of Philosophy program at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He used this period to challenge and validate in an academic setting his own ideas with those of the philosophers he studied . He also used this period also to challenge the teachers with his method of geometrization. Some teachers were receptive to his approach, while others did not as they did not see the rapport between ideas and their geometrical abstractions. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1988. It is also at this time that he stopped drawing.

During this period, he applied himself full time to his research, the development of the schema being the superposition of layers of meanings. By 1963, he had a set of 214 black and white figures and an essay outlining his motives and geometrization. On October 15, 1970, the Office of Copyright in Ottawa registered (register number 132769) as an unpublished literary work La géométrisation de la pensée exhaustive (The Geometrization of Exhaustive Thought) in which he explains his ideas and theory along with a series of 314 figures to which many of the first 230 colored works of art can be associated.

Waldheims was inspired to geometrize the human psyche from his readings of Maine de Biran and Max Scheler who both proposed that the human psyche can be imagined as a pyramidal structure. He also integrated Jean Piaget's epistemology of intellectual development. The ideas of his 1970 thesis explore the multiple facets of this pyramid of the consciousness or Noosphere inspired from Pierre Theilard de Chardin and Rudolph Arnheim. With these foundations he produced hundreds of drawings and constructed a three-dimensional model, the Schéma de l'entendement (Schema of understanding) that synthesizes the many years of research into his process of geometrizing thought.

He undertook a self-directed research program in history, philosophy, psychology, physics, geometry, and mathematics. His earliest sketches are dated back to 1956 where they supplement his notes and interpretations of his readings. These became more complex and layered to construct the framework of a schema for thinking. He used technical drawing techniques and tools to enhance the regularity and intention in his schema. He found that a geometric framework provided a unifying intellectual structure upon which he could map a systematic approach to conflict resolution. He categorised relevant ideas with a set of geometric symbols. He later added colors with ink and eventually began to draw more complex and larger drawings with colored pencils. Beginning in 1963, he drew larger (600 mm x 600 mm) colorful geometric artwork for which he has become known.

He emigrated to Canada in February 1952 and settled in Montreal where he worked as a labourer in a goods and materials distribution warehouse. He was joined one year later by Bernadette Pekss, a Latvian compatriot he met in Paris and with whom he lived until his death. In 1961, he was laid off and dedicated the next ten years to the development of his ideas on geometrization. He returned to work in 1971 and continued to expand his ideas on geometrization and his art until his death.

Waldheims was motivated by the political impact of the conclusion of World War II. He revolted against the leading political leaders who negotiated the post-war agreements which left his country Latvia and the Baltic states under the occupation rule of the communist Soviet Union. By the late 1950s, his path led him to imagine and develop a visual language to address societal and political issues. His goal was to overcome the manipulation of words and ideologies through propaganda. This resulted in the development of a ‘map for human orientation' inspired by French philosopher and psychologist Maine de Biran.

Zanis Waldheims lived his early years in Latvia and experienced World War I and the subsequent declaration of independence from communist Russia in 1918. He married Irene Migla in 1938 and they had two children. He completed his studies in law at the Riga University in 1941 but never practiced because of the Russian and German occupations of Latvia. By the end of 1945, they lived in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) refugee camps in Bamberg, Germany. They separated in 1947. His wife and children moved to Michigan State in the United States, while he moved to France for the next five years.

Zanis Waldheims (Latvian: Žanis Valdheims; 19 September 1909 – 19 July 1993) was a Latvian geometric abstractionist artist who produced contemporary art from the 1950s until his death in 1993.