Hilla Rebay’s life lends itself to biography. Rebay (1890–1967) was a colorful and controversial figure in the transatlantic art world, a modern woman well connected in avant-garde and society circles. As narratives about her life convey, she had first-hand knowledge of movements such as Jugendstil, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and trends in abstraction. Rebay was ambitious, and that drive resulted in the formation of a world-renowned assemblage of works by Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Chagall, and Moholy-Nagy—to name but a few of the modern masters—that would become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection. But it was her role as artist—modernist and portrait painter—that brought her into the Guggenheim milieu in 1927. A tireless spirit, she was driven by the belief that Non-Objective painting, in contrast to abstraction, was independent from a source in the natural world and had the potential to usher in a more spiritual ethos. She championed artists such as Kandinsky and Rudolph Bauer as exemplars, and sought out American painters who followed in their aims. Rebay’s convictions about Non-Objective painting, which she shared with Guggenheim, resulted in two cultural milestones in the advancement of modernism in America: the establishment of the Museum of Non-Objective Art in 1939 and her collaboration on the signature museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Two recent publications aim to move beyond her biography, the standard being the detailed monograph by Joan M. Lukach from 1983 (Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art, New York: George Braziller). These publications bring her own art back into focus by situating her in the context of a 1910s and 1920s European avant-garde, and in New York thereafter. Biography is nonetheless inescapable for these new approaches, which broaden the discussion of Rebay’s creative production and her professional career as curator and director of the Museum of Non-Objective Art. The two publications differ, however, in tone and emphasis. Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim serves as the catalogue for an exhibition that includes Rebay’s artworks from 1909–10 until c.1962, works by artists in her circle in Europe before 1920, and paintings she collected for the Guggenheim Foundation. The Guggenheim Museum in New York organized the exhibition in collaboration with the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, and the Schlossmuseum, Murnau. This publication includes five essays by curators and art historians that detail her early work in Europe between 1915–20; the development of her theory and practice of non-objectivity; her professional relationship with Kandinsky; her ambitions for a museum of Non-Objective painting; and the formal links between Non-Objective painting and other aspects of American visual culture and art into the 1960s. By contrast, Thalia Vrachopoulos and John Angeline’s Hilla Rebay: Art Patroness and Founder of the Guggenheim Museum of Art concentrates on Rebay’s professional reputation as artist, curator, and director, especially in the specific context of American art between the wars.

Rebay’s professional roles—“art expert, collector, lecturer, writer, educator, artist, and teacher”—by which she defined herself may have contributed to her diminished reputation as an artist, a point argued by Karole Vail in her Guggenheim catalogue essay entitled “Rhythmic Delight: A Quest for Non-Objectivity” (127). Neither recent publication tries to separate these roles; rather, they attempt to weigh the merits of Rebay’s endeavors in relation to her broader career. Brigitte Salmen, director of the Schlossmuseum, Murnau, asserts in her catalogue essay that “Rebay was herself an outstanding artist” (60). However, she limits the discussion of Rebay’s art until the 1920s. She convincingly establishes Rebay’s credentials as a talented young artist moving freely in the avant-garde circles of Germany, Switzerland, and France. Jugendstil and theosophy had a strong impact on Rebay’s early work. Though she spent time in Paris at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, her formal and compositional strategies seem closer to the decorative patterning of Jugendstil, and later to the improvisations of Zurich Dada. Her colleagues included Fritz Erler, designer and founding editor of Die Jugend, Hans Art, Hans Richter, Herwarth Walden, Rudolph Bauer, and Félix Fénéon.

Salmen emphasizes two major components of her art developed during her formative years in Europe—her move toward a greater reduction in form leading to abstraction and the “filigree-like structure of lines” that distinguishes her work in collage from others working in the medium. It was Arp who directed Rebay to Kandinsky via the latter’s influential publications, On the Spiritual in Art and Blue Rider Almanac. By 1917, Rebay exhibited and published her work at the Galerie Dada in Zurich; her print based on the Ballet Russe appeared on the cover of the journal Dada 2. At Arp’s urging, Rebay cultivated a closer connection with Walden’s Gallery Der Sturm beginning in 1916–17, where she would soon exhibit in group shows. It was here that in 1917 Rebay met the artist Rudolph Bauer, then employed by Walden; he would have a lifelong impact on her professional and personal life.

Salmen points out that at the same time Kandinsky’s work was beginning to have a bearing on Rebay’s pictorial language, her relationship with Bauer led to her withdrawal from actively exhibiting her work in Europe. Even her status within Die Krater—a publishing and exhibition venture founded by Bauer, Rebay, and Otto Nebel—was undermined by Bauer. But Salmen importantly notes that “it was the first artist group to propose a museum of non-objective art” (71), and it was with Bauer that Rebay established the personal connection for the purchase of Kandinsky’s work in 1929. She concludes by suggesting that Rebay’s figurative works of the mid-1920s, based on African American and fashion themes, points to the possible impact of Neue Sachlichkeit—an often critical realism associated with Weimar Germany. Rebay’s realism, however, seems to indicate her interest in the physical and cultural differences of African Americans, while her images of fashionable women allowed her to elaborate on her decorative impulses.

In her catalogue essay “Rereading the Correspondence: Rebay and Kandinsky,” Kandinsky scholar Vivian Endicott Barnett focuses on primary material collected in the Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archives, the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the Guggenheim Foundation Archives in New York to probe the sequence of events that brought Rebay, Kandinsky, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and Bauer together in forming the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky collection. Despite the economic collapse of 1929, Guggenheim was prepared to acquire works by Kandinsky and Bauer en masse to launch his collection. It proved an advantageous moment, since the fall of the German market led Kandinsky to lower his prices and enabled Bauer to purchase others by Kandinsky from his colleague at the Bauhaus, August Muche. Kandinsky’s Bauhaus-period geometric abstractions were favored by Rebay, in contrast to the Museum of Modern Art’s interest in his earlier expressionist-inspired abstraction. What is striking about the correspondence brought to light by Barnett is the manner in which Rebay lodges accusations against Kandinsky beginning in 1931 for his lack of support of her work and that of Bauer. Kandinsky considered Rebay a “negative agent” operating on his behalf in the United States, and their relationship continued to deteriorate over the next seven years, even while Guggenheim continued to purchase his work—though through art dealers Karl Nierendorf and Ferdinand Möller, rather than from the artist.

Vail looks at Rebay’s crusading efforts on behalf of German art in the larger context of the American “prejudicial” tastes against it. While she does not examine in any detail the policy of the Museum of Modern Art or the profile of influential New York galleries, it is clear that beginning in the nineteenth century Parisian modernism informed the choices of leading U.S. collectors. Barnett’s essay gives support to this view, as she notes that even after Katherine Dreier organized a Kandinsky exhibition in 1923, the artist sensed that he did not have much of a public audience in New York (93).

Vail also observes how Rebay has been overlooked in the art historical literature despite revisionist scholarship on women’s art and feminist theory. She examines Rebay’s drawings and cut-paper and watercolor images of African Americans made in South Carolina (where Guggenheim summered and would later exhibit his collection at the Gibbes Gallery in 1936) and in the clubs of Harlem. Rebay exhibited these works in Paris and New York between 1930 and 1935, noting, “I will have a big exhibition in May in Paris at the Carmine, of Negroes, because the French are very enthusiastic” (133, n. 33). Vail proceeds to situate these images in the context of Rebay’s interest in dance, especially the Ballet Russe drawings and prints she had earlier made in Berlin. But Rebay was also likely responding to the increased “visibility of black culture,” a phenomenon that was an important element of Parisian culture in the 1920s, as argued by Catherine Bernard in “Confluence: Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, and Negritude: Paris in the 1920s–1930s” (in Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945–1965, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996, 22). Of course, the mid-1920s in New York saw the jazz craze ushered in by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, which drew large white audiences to Harlem clubs.

Similarly, Rebay’s collages of fashionable women comprise a rich and surprising area of her work that recalls her Jugendstil roots, and even suggests exaggerated versions of fashion studies by Christian Bérard. Although Vail points out that Rebay did have a specific interest in fashion, as, for example, did Sonia Delaunay, she created collage and watercolor studies for stage costumes in the 1920s. These works bridge the avant-garde strategy of collage with design and popular culture—an area of cross-fertilization that looks promising for further research. Rebay’s work with collage and ethnographic images also recalls Hannah Höch’s Dada collages of the 1920s, although none of the authors suggest any association between the two despite Rebay’s connections with Dada artists in Berlin and Zurich.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker’s essay, “The Art of Tomorrow,” traces the history of the collection and the almost evangelical zeal that Rebay and Guggenheim shared in creating a Foundation for Non-Objective art. Rebay’s fervor served the collection well, but it also proved, at times, to be a flaw. Danzker describes the opening of the exhibition Art of Tomorrow (June 1939) to be the high point of Rebay’s career, and a “utopian moment, an act of defiance in the face of impending war and holocaust” (184). She conveys a sense of Rebay’s unflagging energy in building Guggenheim’s collection by enabling financial support to artists in the forms of stipends and supplies and by seeking out collectors to expand the market for the artists she and Guggenheim patronized. Danzker emphasizes the “political dimension” of Rebay’s activity during this period. Rebay experienced personal and professional attacks due to her nationality and promotion of German artists in the United States; she was briefly interned as an enemy alien in 1942, and her movement was restricted. However, she managed to accomplished a great deal throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including the acquisition of the Nierendorf collection of seven hundred modernist works (1947); institutionalization of Guggenheim’s private collection of over eight-hundred works (1939); planning for a signature museum to house the collection beginning in 1943; curating numerous exhibitions, including memorial exhibitions for Kandinsky (1944) and Moholy-Nagy (1947); and organizing exhibitions of the Guggenheim collection, which were sent to Europe in the immediate postwar period. Despite personal and political adversity, her accomplishments are remarkable, even while her dogmatic views drew criticism.

In his catalogue essay, Robert Rosenblum recounts his experience of visiting the Museum of Non-Objective Art and the impact her installation had on him as a young art enthusiast. He points out the links between the thematic and formal basis of the Guggenheim collection, and that of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Rebay had wanted to install a pavilion of Non-Objective Art on the fairgrounds. To illustrate the visual connections and similar views of the aesthetics of the future, Rosenblum pairs Bauers’s 1936 painting The Holy One (Red Point) with the emblematic Trylon and Perisphere. He concludes by showing that Rebay’s “parallel universe of painting” has a context that “keeps growing,” and he includes among her legacy Disney (the film Fantasia, 1942), Frank Lloyd Wright and his follower Bruce Goff, Whistler, Hilma af Klint, the Lithuanian Mikolajus Ciurlionis, and Barnett Newman, among others.

Overall, the Guggenheim catalogue and accompanying exhibition are celebratory while acknowledging the strength of her collages and the mixed reception to her views on Non-Objectivity and her later paintings. The public reception of her work was most positive in relation to her collages exhibited in New York, Boston, and Paris, even though, as Vail indicates, she did paint significant larger-scale works such as Rhythmic Delight, from the 1950s. Nonetheless, her accomplishments as an artist have been overshadowed by her commitment and success in establishing the Museum of Non-Objective Art. However, placing her work in the context of a 1910–20 European milieu and the United States after 1927 enables the reader to better grasp the diversity and adventurousness of her work. And the color reproductions capture the decorative quality that distinguishes her palette and compositions. It is clear from the photographs of Rebay that accompany the text that she was a charismatic personality with a clear sense of personal mission.

In Hilla Rebay: Art Patroness and Founder of the Guggenheim Museum, Vrachopoulos and Angeline “examine Rebay’s contribution to American visual culture as a woman, artist/designer, curator, patroness of American Art, and museum director, from a critical perspective” (1). While they also seek to move beyond Rebay’s biography, their interest in her “complex personality” leads them to frequently rehearse her life narrative. The authors consider four key points: the impact of Rebay’s gender on the historical assessment of her role as director of a museum, Rebay’s historical place as an artist, her role in establishing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and her impact on museology today. While each of these sub-themes is well founded, the intersections of Rebay’s careers as artist, curator, director, and philanthropist complicate the organization of the text and results in some redundancy.

Vrachopoulos and Angeline begin by focusing on the “woman question,” suggesting that her relationships with Bauer and Guggenheim, in particular, led to sexual innuendo that did not serve her career well. They argue that such speculation would not have existed—or at least not to such a damaging degree—had she been a man. And while Rebay has an unquestionable place in the roster of individuals who established modern art in the United States, her reputation has suffered since her death in 1967. Rebay is portrayed in this study as both an aristocrat comfortable in the milieu of U.S. society circles and a working curator and artist arriving in New York with an avant-garde reputation and a pragmatic disposition associated with the Weimar New Woman. The authors suggest that Rebay recognized that moneyed society had an interest in establishing museums, and that there was an opportunity for leadership roles for women, especially in the riskier area of modern art. One of the most interesting aspects of this discussion is Rebay’s relationship with Katherine Dreier, founder with Marcel Duchamp of the Société Anonyme. Both Rebay and Dreier supported European and American artists including Kandinsky and Bauer, and both recognized the importance of organizing exhibitions to increase support for modern art. As the authors note, they differed in their approach to art and the artists they collected. While Dreier is described as inclusive and more interested in art rather than personality, Rebay is concerned with the “genius” factor and a more doctrinaire collection policy (although Vrachopoulos and Angeline suggest earlier that her dogmatism was not really evident in the actual collection where a more “idiosyncratic” approach exists).

Since this study aims to open up other research on Rebay, future scholars might probe the relationship between Dreier and Rebay as artists, compare their collecting strategies, and their commitment to museum education. While the authors attempt to clarify Rebay’s role in acquisitions for and with Guggenheim and to dispel any rumors of impropriety, the narrow focus on Rebay as a woman ironically highlights the personal, including her troubling relationship with Bauer. To expand their context, Vrachopoulos and Angeline might have considered the impact of the Museum of Modern Art in emphasizing Parisian–based modernism, a topic Vail also raises, but that could be explored more deeply. As to the rise of the male museum professional—how did this phenomenon challenge Rebay’s historical significance? Even more to the point, could gender bias in art history have played a role in sidelining Rebay and her aesthetic interest in a contextual approach to modernism and its display, one that included interior design and music?

In their chapter on Rebay as an artist, the authors state that Rebay has been “eclipsed” due to her larger reputation as a museum director, and because she was a woman artist in an age of heroic male figures. The authors rightly emphasize that her Jugendstil-inspired whiplash line and intuitive use of color distinguish her paintings from Kandinsky and Bauer, both of whom turned to geometry in the 1920s and early 1930s. There has been systematic neglect of her dance-inspired prints made in the Dada milieu around 1916–17. One egregious example is found in Motherwell’s landmark publication The Dada Painters and Poets, where her cover for Dada 2 is referred to as one of “Arp’s remarkable cover designs” (Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, second edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 129). In New York, Rebay described her “plastic paper,” a term she used to describe her collages, as related to Art Deco. According to Vrachopoulos and Angeline, Rebay considered the latter style “a popular version of the avant-garde” that could “help modern art become comprehensible to the masses” (46)—an important ideological dimension to her artistic practice that the authors raise. Whether in her images of fashionable women or in her collages of African Americans, the dominant influence of Art Deco is evident. In future studies on Rebay, her use of Art Deco, her populist impulse, and even the possible influence of “Afro Deco” as associated with Harlem cabarets and the “New Negro” (cf., Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History, 2nd edition, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 44–45) are areas that deserve more attention.

Like other scholars, Vrachopoulos and Angeline look at Rebay’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s in relation to her life-long interest in classical music. But more comparative analysis of her work in relation to pre-war and postwar abstraction might elucidate the issue of synaesthesia as an ongoing influence on her creative production. Her decorative inclinations are evident in these paintings and specifically visible in an ornamental curve painted in the hat of an early Self-Portrait of 1911 that reappears in a later work, Delicate, from 1950. It is precisely the verve of her surface decoration that sets her apart and that is most successfully applied in her figurative and abstract collages. As Rosenblum begins to suggest, a consideration of her work in relation to European and American design in the postwar period needs to take into account the revival of the Bauhaus aesthetic under Max Bill at the Ulm School of Design in Germany and Joseph Albers in American art education.

Rebay’s relationships with the Association of Abstract Artists and the Transcendental artist community in Taos, New Mexico, were fraught with conflicts over the terms abstraction and Non-Objective, and Rebay’s fervor about spiritual aspects of non-objectivity led to ongoing disagreements. There were numerous artists and collectors interested in promoting abstraction, including A.E. Gallatin, the Nierendorf Gallery, the Societé Anonyme, and the Museum of Modern Art, but their role here is understated. The authors focus narrowly on Rebay’s agency in advancing American abstraction, and they tend to frame their argument about her singular importance by referring to artists she personally supported. It should be noted that her role in the larger context of the inter-war American art world has been documented in two previous publications, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (edited by John R. Lane and Susan C. Larson, Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1983) and Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky & the American Avant-Garde (by Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Dayton, OH: Dayton Art Museum, 1992). For their part, Vrachopoulos and Angeline ascribe these groups’ conflicts to more than aesthetic matters: they suggest that those opposed to abstraction based their antipathy on a “resentment of the wealthy” in the 1930s (64). As evidence, they offer the negative commentary about Rebay published in Art Front (edited by Stuart Davis beginning 1935) and Art Digest. This is an argument that deserves a more thorough treatment, and raises the issue of these artists’ political leanings in relation to their commitment to abstraction. In the end the authors rightly credit Rebay with backing a number of American artists, some of whom disagreed with her views. And they note that she supported artists living under Fascism in Germany with subsidies, art supplies, and purchases. Rebay also had an important role in sponsoring and collecting experimental and avant-garde film, including that of her longtime friend, Richter. Moreover, her links to the California film industry and the works of filmmakers Charles Dockum and Harry Smith are an important contribution to her legacy and deserving of further study.

In the final chapter, Vrachopoulos and Angeline discuss Rebay’s role in selecting and championing Wright in the realization of a museum building tailored to the theme of the Guggenheim collection. They point out that the timing of this commission was beneficial to Wright since “there were not many commissions coming into or out of Wright’s Taliessen [sic] headquarters in 1942” (76). They continue: “Having just lost a potentially lucrative government contract, Wright was in particular need of a new assignment” (76). However, the business matters of Wright’s office had nothing to do with Rebay’s interest in the architect. Rather, as Lukach details, it was his views on architecture that attracted Rebay. Both Rebay and Wright were intrigued by the notion of a spiral building. In contrast to what the authors call the “palace-temple”-style building “run by the power class of male ‘robber-barons’ of the day,” Rebay’s museum was to “transcend such worldly concerns” (77). The seventeen-year project resulted in what the authors call a “museum-as-spectacle” (82). The many compromises, about which Rebay had reservations, included the alterations authorized by her successor James Johnson Sweeney. At the inauguration of the museum in 1959, none of the key originators were present.

Vrachopoulos and Angeline briefly trace structural alterations to the building and changes in collections policy and mission under subsequent Guggenheim directors Thomas Messer and Thomas Krens, describing the latter as the “poster child” for the new ideology in museum management. They lament the addition of the Gwathmey Siegel and Associates addition that has penetrated the “womb-like structure” with a “tall limestone shaft” (88). While they apologize for sounding essentialist, this description is hardly even-handed, and does not suggest that the authors have delved into the numerous alternative plans Wright produced during the extended years of negotiations. Despite missteps in programming, Kren’s recognition of the Wright building as a mutable space, which functions in relation to diverse works in time and place, has become an asset to both historical and contemporary exhibitions.

Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay: Art Patroness and Founder of the Guggenheim Museum of Art enliven an understanding of Rebay by pointing to her importance both as an artist (especially early in her career) and as a powerful force in the effort to position the Guggenheim’s collection on an international stage. As her nephew Roland von Rebay writes in the museum’s catalogue, Rebay told Guggenheim, “I will make you famous” (237). That she did; and these studies emphasize how she, a woman, provided the initial vision and driving force behind what is now a full-fledged global museum venture.