German-American (1890-1967)

Hilla Rebay (born Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen) was an instrumental figure in the development of modernism in the United States, a bridge between the European and American avant-garde, instrumental in the development of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and played a role in saving European artists and "degenerate" art from the Nazis.  Finally, she was a non-objective artist of note. Hers is a story that deserves more attention.

Rebay was born into a minor aristocratic family in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Imperial Germany.

In 1908 she began formal artistic studies at Cologne’s Kunstgewerbeschule, moved to Paris a year later and enrolled at the Académie Julian, and the following year, to Munich to study at the progressive Debschitz-Schule.  The school had a strong relationship with avant-garde art, counting Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Sophie Taeuber (later Taeuber-Arp) among its former students and Paul Klee as an instructor for a brief period.

Munich in 1910–11 was a hub of creative activity; Rebay’s time there overlapped with the formation of the artist group Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), as well as the studies of fellow artist and collector Katherine S. Dreier and landmark exhibitions at the Moderne Galerie run by the Thannhauser family.

Rebay had her first  exhibition around 1912.   In 1915, with World War I raging, she traveled to Zurich, another hotbed of artistic life due to Switzerland’s neutrality. There she met fellow Alsa­tian artist Jean Arp, who, with his future wife Taeuber, was a central part of the Dada movement. Despite the fact that she had lived and worked in Munich and Cologne, it was Arp who shared with Rebay The Blue Rider Almanac (Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, 1911), edited by Vasily Kandinsky and Marc, and Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual nature of abstraction were hugely influential for Rebay and guided both her painting and dedication to nonobjectivity as a collector and museum director. Three decades later, she would translate and publish Kandinsky’s work for the Guggenheim.

 In 1915, with World War I raging, she traveled to Zurich, another hotbed of artistic life due to Switzerland’s neutrality. There she met fellow Alsa­tian artist Jean Arp, who, with his future wife Taeuber, was a central part of the Dada movement. Despite the fact that she had lived and worked in Munich and Cologne, it was Arp who shared with Rebay The Blue Rider Almanac (Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, 1911), edited by Vasily Kandinsky and Marc, and Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual nature of abstraction were hugely influential for Rebay and guided both her painting and dedication to nonobjectivity as a collector and museum director. Three decades later, she would translate and publish Kandinsky’s work for the Guggenheim.

It was her association with and patronage of Bauer that eventually led Rebay to her other defining partnership, withb Solomon Guggenheim. When she immigrated to the United States in 1927 with the goal of establishing a public gallery for nonobjective art, Rebay brought some of Bauer’s work with her. They were hanging on the walls of her studio when Guggenheim sat for a portrait by her around 1928, and he took an interest in the work. The two formed a friendship, and Rebay convinced him to collect some works by Bauer. This was the starting point of a lifelong personal and professional relationship. She  would later advise Guggenheim on the purchase of works by Kandinsky, Klee and the American Rolph Scarlett. These works and artists would go on to constitute the founding collection of the Guggenheim Museum.

For Rebay, abstract art—or nonobjective art, as she referred to that without ties to the natural world—was a higher calling. Her own work in this genre was inventive and dynamic—she was particularly prolific in her work as a collagist, creating works such as Con Brio (1931) and Composition (for a very happy birthday) (1938). She fervently believed that the translation of spiritual impulses and wordless feelings into nonfigurative art was the creation of a visual language that would transcend boundaries for the betterment of humankind. “Non-Objectivity will be the religion of the future,” she wrote in 1937. “Very soon the nations on earth will turn to it in thought and feeling and develop such intuitive powers which lead them to harmony.”