The Legacy of Hilla von Rebay’s Mission to New York

In early January 1927, Baroness Hilla von Rebay set sail from Trieste aboard the President Wilson 1 2 , a passenger ship bound for New York, taking with her paintings by her lover and protege Rudolf Bauer. She was on a momentous mission to establish no less than a museum for non-objective art in New York. Von Rebay had become enamoured with non-objective art ten years earlier in Zurich when her compatriot Hans Arp introduced her to works by the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the German Paul Klee, and the Russian-Frenchman Marc Chagall, amongst others. Non-objective art was groundbreaking in its use of geometrical shapes and line to depict non-figurative forms (objects not found in the natural world). The theoretical foundations for the movement were provided by Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910). Kandinsky, an expressionist, heralded the art form as offering a window into an inner reality. Von Rebay was captivated by this notion. Referring to non-objective art as a ‘higher calling’ 3 , she began to intensify her own commitment to the genre, both as an artist and as a patron. In New York, she met with industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim upon her arrival, a meeting that edged von Rebay closer to her goal. Under her artistic guidance, Guggenheim began collecting non-objective art and developed the same passions for the paintings. The collaboration culminated with the establishment of the Museum of Non-Objective Art in 1939 to house the collection; von Rebay became its first director. Following Guggenheim’s death in 1949, the museum was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum . The Guggenheim foundation would later go on to open several museums around the world.

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