The Dream of Non-Objectivity
"The Art of Tomorrow"
marks the rediscovery of Hilla von Rebay as artist and curator
"The Art of Tomorrow" is the title of the 1939 exhibition in which the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection introduced itself to the New York public
for the first time. The woman behind the collection was a baroness from
Germany; a close advisor to Guggenheim, Hilla von Rebay tirelessly worked
towards promoting non-objective art. The founding director of the
Guggenheim Museum, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, had long since been
forgotten; her work as a curator and an artist has now been rediscovered. Achim
Drucks introduces "The Art of Tomorrow – Hilla von Rebay and Solomon
R. Guggenheim" at the Deutsche Guggenheim.
Hilla
von Rebay in her studio
Kurfürstendamm
136, Berlin around 1913
©The
Hilla von Rebay Foundation.
Used
by permission.
All rights
reserved
"The breath of happiness is red,"
wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in
1945; he was referring to his vision for the outdoor color of his planned Guggenheim
Museum in New York, which he intended to be an "Archiseum" – the
perfect blend of avant-garde architecture and avant-garde art. For Hilla
von Rebay, however, this breath was a lighter one, the red too
"materialistic," and she asked whether they couldn’t have yellow marble,
or at least green. Hilla von Rebay is not only responsible for the fact
that 15 years later the Guggenheim went down in history as a brilliant
white spiral form; the modernist was a woman and an artist – and a highly
resolute one, to be sure. It was the German baroness who first dreamed of
a "temple of non-objective art" and who won over the likes of the "Copper
King" and collector Solomon
R. Guggenheim for its realization. She was the one who wrote to the
star architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 to say that she felt each of the
Guggenheim’s abstract masterpieces needed its own space and that only he,
Wright, could "work this out. The words she wrote at the time to a brother
in spirit could also have described her own character: "I need a fighter,
a lover of space, an agitator, a tester…"
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Hilla von Rebay
Freude,
n.d.
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York
Photo
David Heald
©The Hilla von
Rebay Foundation.
Used by
permission.
All rights
reserved
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Hilla Rebay, Ohne Titel, n.d.
Photo
: David Heald
©The Hilla von
Rebay Foundation.
Used by
permission. All rights reserved
When the
museum was finally opened in 1959, ten years after Guggenheim’s death, von
Rebay wasn’t present. The museum’s founding director hadn’t even been
invited; the independent-minded baroness had been disempowered following
Solomon R. Guggenheim’s death. Due to growing criticism of her
authoritarian style of leadership, she’d already had to relinquish her
position on the foundation’s board in 1952; this, together with her ill
health, led her to retreat to her homes in Connecticut and New Hampshire,
where she disappeared almost completely from public awareness until her
death in 1967. But now she has been rediscovered with the exhibition The
Art of Tomorrow – Hilla von Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim
– both as a curator and as an artist.
Following its premiere
at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and subsequent stations in Munich and
Murnau, the show, supported by Deutsche Bank, can now be seen at the Deutsche
Guggenheim in Berlin. The Art of Tomorrow shows von Rebay’s
watercolors, drawings, and collages as well as her non-objective
paintings; her portrait of Solomon R. Guggenheim, commissioned in 1928,
can also be seen, during the making of which the German artist got to know
the American patron. The works are juxtaposed with the works of friends
and colleagues that inspired von Rebay to dedicate herself to the art of
an emerging Modernism: Jean
Arp, Wassily
Kandinsky, Hans
Richter, and of course the love of her life – Rudolf
Bauer, with whom she had an unhappy relationship for many years.
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Wassily Kandinsky,
Ein
Zentrum, November-Dezember 1924
Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
Gift,
Solomon R. Guggenheim,
On
extended loan to Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
Photo:
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
©Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
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Von Rebay met the artist for the first time in 1916 at the
avant-garde Berlin gallery Der
Sturm, where she had gone to see a Kandinsky exhibition. The dandy
in a dark velvet suit, a Kandinsky epigone and passionate advocate of
non-objective art, drew her completely under his spell. To the day she
died, Rebay, the dedicated friend and patron that she was, considered
Bauer to be a misunderstood genius and the truly most important
representative of this new direction in art. She succeeded in convincing
Solomon Guggenheim of Bauer’s qualities, and Guggenheim bought – the
inventory catalogue of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the precursor
to the Guggenheim, lists 104 works by Kandinsky, and a total of 215 by
Bauer.
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