Biography from AskART:
| A woman credited largely for the existence of the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York City, Hilla Rebay also was an accomplished artist in
modernist styles that included collage and biogmorphic-linear oil
paintings. She is remembered primarily for being the key person
in first exposing the American public to avant-garde art and creating
revolutionary museum environments for that art. To remind the
public that Rebay was an artist in her own right, curators at the
Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work in the spring and
summer of 2005.
Hilla Rebay (pronounced reh-bye) was born to
minor nobility in Strasbourg, Alsace and had the full name of Baroness
Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Her
father, a career army officer from Bavaria, and her mother encouraged
her obvious childhood art talent. She studied locally and then
enrolled in 1909 at the Academie Julian in Paris.
There she was
much influenced by avant-garde movements especially theosophist artists
and writers led by Wassily Kandinsky "who helped formulate her lifelong
belief in the power of intuition in art-making and other areas of life"
(Glueck). In 1910, she spent time in Munich where she was further
exposed to modern art, and she returned to Paris in 1913, having
exhibited work in Cologne and Munich. In Paris she studied at the
Academie Julian.
By 1914, she was exhibiting with the Secession
Group in Munich, the Salon des Independants in Paris, and the November
Gruppe in Berlin--all rebelling against prevalent realism and
traditional teaching methods. In Berlin, she associated with many
modernist artists including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Marc
Chagall. In 1917, she med Rudolph Bauer, a German painter in
non-objective styles who became her long-time lover and in the future
the cause of controversy because she was accused of devoting
disproportionate exhibition space to him at the Guggenheim
Museum. It was said that her enthusiasm for him and his work was
"unbounded" (Glueck) and that he inspired her paintings "alive with
restless, jostling, organic forms" (Glueck).
Hilla Rebay first
visited the United States in 1927 and stayed for an extended time
period, which included giving painting lessons to Louise Nevelson,
seeking portrait commissions, designing posters and exhibiting her own
work at venues including the Worcester Art Mluseum and a Manhattan
gallery. Among her portrait commission subjects was Solomon
Guggenheim, whose wealthy family had extensive western mining
interests. Rebay had met Solomon and his wife Irene when they
purchased two of her paintings at the Manhattan show. To that
time, the couple were collectors of conventional art, but during the
sittings, Hilla talked to him of what was going on in avant-garde art
circles. She brought painters of leading-edge styles to meet
Guggenheim and encouraged him to collect their art, which he
did--filling his Plaza Hotel apartment.
Rebay supervised the
collection, and in 1937, she led the establishment of a Guggenheim
foundation to build "The Museum of Non-Objective Art," achieved in 1939
in rented gallery space on 54th Street. The main focus of the
collection was works of the Dutch De Stijl Group that included Piet
Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and of Bauhaus artists from Germany
such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Although
she was committed to purely non-objective works, she added to the
collection abstract works by George Seurat, Henri Matisse, Henri
Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and others in France who were experimenting
with Cubism, Futurism, etc.
The Foundation directors bought land
between 88th and 89th Streets on Fifth Avenue and commissioned Frank
Lloyd Wright to design a museum building. The collection was
temporarily housed in a mansion on the grounds, and Hilla, who had a
strong interest in mysticism, "created an unforgettable, hushed, other
worldly atmosphere . . . People coming in from the noise and bustle of
the streets found themselves transported into a seemingly higher
spiritual dimension" (Rubinstein). There was gray fabric on the walls,
plain, minimal frames on the paintings, and Bach music in the
background---all creating a sense of quiet refinement and revolutionary
for a museum setting.
During this time, Rebay was reaching out
to many young non-objective American artists including Jackson Pollock
and Rudolf Bauer who had emigrated from Germany, by giving them money
and exhibiting their work.
She was also at the center of
controversy from a a variety of sources. Left-wing activists made fun
of her mysticism; reactionaries found her much too liberal; and most of
her critics thought she was way too autocratic. Of that era, she has
been described as "a complicated dynamic woman, take-charge and bossy,
who aroused jealousy in the art world by her closeness (though it was
probably not romantic) to Guggenheim." (Glueck). In addition, she was
disdained during World War II because she was German and was accused of
being a German spy, rumors that were promoted by Rudolf Bauer, whom she
and others thought was jealous of her position with Guggenheim.
In
1951, two years after Guggenheim's death, Hilla Rebay resigned as
Director but remained a trustee of the collection, and lived in Greens
Farms, Connecticut. During her career as an administrator, she had
continued as a painter and created canvases of geometric shapes and
ones that expressed pure color and rhythm. She also authored several
books including one titled "Wassily Kandinsky", and wrote articles for
the "Carnegie Institute Magazine" and "Southern Literary Digest. "
However, her enduring reputation is for her influence in bringing
non-objective art to America.
Sources:
American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein
Grace Glueck, 'Guiding Spirit of the Guggenheim Was An Artist in Her Own Right', The New York Times, May 20, 2005, B29
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