Hilla Rebay
and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting
May 18 - June 24, 2005

List of Artists:

Hilla Rebay, Rudolf Bauer, Harry Bertoia
Ilya Bolotowsky, Penrod Centurion, John Ferren
Oskar Fischinger, Dwinell Grant, Balcomb Greene
Raymond Jonson, Maude Kerns, Medard Klein
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Irene Rice Pereira, Rolph Scarlett
John Sennhauser, Charles Shaw, John Von Wicht
Jean Xceron, Wilfred Zogbaum

Hilla Rebay and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting focuses on Hilla Rebay (1890 - 1967), the pioneering artist and first director of what is now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition coincides with the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective exhibition of Hilla Rebay, which opens to the public on May 20th, 2005, travels to the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and the Schlossmuseum in Murnau in the fall of 2005, and then to the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in May of 2006.

The exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, curated by Gary Snyder, will feature paintings by Rebay, Rudolf Bauer, Ilya Bolotowsky, John Ferren, Rolph Scarlett, Charles Shaw, Jean Xceron, and others. DC Moore’s East Gallery will also present an exhibition of Hilla Rebay’s work on paper, including early abstractions from the late teens, figurative collages of the 1920s, and abstract watercolors from the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Snyder and color plates of selected works.

Hilla Rebay was a strong advocate of “Non-Objective Painting,” which had its roots in the paintings and writings of Vassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s 1912 book On the Spiritual in Art is a treatise for this style of painting, with its emphasis on the spiritual nature of art and art as a visual form of music. Rebay wrote (in an essay, Non-Objectivity is the Realm of the Spirit, 1945):

Like music these [non-objective] paintings are harmonious, beautiful, and restful. They elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater ñ the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty. They help one to forget the earth and its troubles as most people do when they are looking up into the vastness of the star lit sky. One does not ask there, either, for meanings, symbols, titles, sense or intellectual explanation. One looks up and feels a vast beauty, and when the eye returns to the ground, its troubles seem to be much smaller...

What is now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum began in the late 1920s as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Painting. In 1928 the German expatriate painter Hilla Rebay was commissioned to paint a portrait of the philanthropist and industrialist Solomon Guggenheim. When Guggenheim entered Rebay’s studio, he was surprised to find virtually no examples of representational art. Instead he discovered that Rebay’s studio was a modest exhibition space with abstract works by Bauer, Rebay, Kandinsky and Klee. The portrait sittings were Rebay’s opportunity to woo Guggenheim away from the old masters and cultivate his interest in what she would later dub The Art of Tomorrow.

Within a few months, Rebay was Guggenheim’s art advisor and confidante. With the aid of her former lover and mentor Rudolf Bauer, whom Rebay met at “Der Sturm” in Berlin, the two artists guided Guggenheim to the studios of the most important “non-objective” artists of the day. Ten years later with the publishing of its fifth catalogue, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection could boast 415 non-objective works of art, as well as another 310 more representational paintings.

Although the Guggenheim Collection’s primary focus was modern European painting, the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective painting led to an increase in the acquisition and exhibition of American work. In her detailed biography of Hilla Rebay, Joan M. Lukach states:

The most conspicuous activity of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting was its exhibition program. Though Rebay intended that selected works from the collection would be installed permanently once a new museum was built, in the rented quarters her exhibitions changed regularly. One gallery was devoted to her favorite non-objective artists: Kandinsky, Bauer, Moholy-Nagy and selected others. Other galleries were given over to changing exhibitions of borrowed works; for the most part these were by Americans.

...a program of formally planned exhibitions by American artists was soon initiated: the first of these took place before the museum was a year old. This was Three American Non-objective Painters: I. Rice Pereira, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene (3 January to 14 February 1940). Other exhibitions on this theme followed, with titles such as Eight American Non-objective Painters or Twelve American Non-objective Painters...

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DC Moore Gallery specializes in twentieth century and contemporary art. The gallery is located on the eighth floor of 724 Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5:30 during May and Monday through Friday from 10 to 5:30 during June. Press viewings can be arranged prior to the exhibition. For more information, for photographs, or to arrange a viewing, please call Sandra Paci at 212-247-2111.

Images can be viewed online by going to www.ModernAmericanArt.com and selecting “Upcoming Exhibitions.”