6 Facts About Hilla von Rebay: The Mastermind Behind the Guggenheim

Baroness Hilla von Rebay was the principal force behind one of the most famous museums in the world—the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was a talented artist and an experienced art curator in the years when such an occupation did not even exist. However, after the death of Solomon R. Guggenheim, she was erased from the institution’s history. She only recently began to receive praise. Here are six facts about Hilla von Rebay, the artist and the curatorial genius.

Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elizabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen came from a noble German family with roots traced at least to the eleventh century. Her parents were interested in arts and eagerly invited creatives of all kinds into their home in Alsace-Lorraine. Hildegard herself demonstrated great interest and talent in arts and allegedly painted portraits since she was five years old. However, professional art education in prestigious institutions was unavailable to her as a woman, so she had to rely on private experimental schools. Her father, who himself had a hobby of keeping sketchbooks as diaries, was not too happy about his daughter’s occupation, stating that he allowed her to paint only until she turned eighteen.

Parental concerns did not stop the future artist. In 1906, the sixteen-year-old moved to Paris to study at Academie Julian, France’s most progressive and experimental art school. Unlike other academies, they eagerly accepted women and quickly became home to ambitious women artists from all over Europe. Paris was the center of free thought and creativity, which impressed Hilla deeply. She developed an interest in avant-garde art and the slowly developing abstract art. To learn more about it, she moved to Munich.

2. She Rejected the Term Modern Art 

Despite the status of Paris as the cultural capital, Munich was the place for those who went one step ahead. There, the bold and shocking movement of German Expressionism was on the rise, and Wassily Kandinsky presented his first abstract works. Although Rebay started as a figurative painter, in Munich she quickly moved to abstraction. Later, she said that she had become disillusioned with paintings that tried to copy nature and its marvels, inventing new tricks to enhance realism but never getting close enough. For her, abstract art was a new religion and the only possible way of expression. There, she started to use the name Hilla von Rebay to sign her works. She also made many important friends, including Kandinsky, Hans Arp, and Rudolf Bauer, who became her partner and protege. From Arp, she adopted the collage technique, typical for her early works.

The beginning of World War I interrupted Hilla’s experiments. Her mother converted their family home into a hospital, with both her and Hilla caring for the wounded soldiers. As the French army advanced to the German territory, they had to flee, hiding in a haystack on a cart driven by a local priest. However, the dramatic experience of terror and bloodshed led Hilla to re-evaluate the meaning of art. She came to reject the term modern art—in her opinion, it was a force of nature that could not be categorized in such terms.

In 1927, Hilla von Rebay moved to New York after a terrible break-up with fellow artist Rudolf Bauer. There, she worked as an art teacher, decorated display windows, and painted on commission. Everything changed after her gallery owner friend arranged an exhibition of Hilla’s work. Rebay sold almost all paintings from the show and gained many new admirers, including the ultra-wealthy couple of art collectors Irene and Solomon Guggenheim. Solomon

Guggenheim was so impressed that he started their relationship by commissioning a portrait from her. Soon, the three of them started to travel and attend museums together. During one of the visits to Rebay’s home, Guggenheim noticed an abstract painting by Rudolf Bauer and was astonished by it. Curiously, at first, Rebay tried to discourage Guggenheim from buying abstract art, believing it was too progressive for a man his age and that it could tarnish his reputation as a collector.

Still, Guggenheim was hooked, and in the years that followed, Hilla von Rebay would curate his collection and meet with the most progressive and fashionable abstract artists at the time. Together, they went to meet Kandinsky in Germany. Guggenheim adored Picasso, Chagall, Mondriaan, and others, and eagerly promoted modern art to the American public. After the German Nazi regime proclaimed abstract art to be degenerate, art collecting for Guggenheim became a political matter as well as a personal one.

4. She Was an Avid Spiritualist 

In the early twentieth century, many intellectuals showed a deep interest in spiritualism and occultism, and Hilla was no exception. Her first exposure to spiritualist ideas happened during her years in Paris, where she studied theosophy and Eastern religions. Later on, she applied that knowledge to art, believing artists to be the interpreters of higher knowledge.

Rebay’s own artistic and curatorial practice extended her quest for spiritual salvation. One of the arguments in favor of non-objective art, as she preferred to call abstraction, was its apparent possibility to transform and elevate human relationships, providing a way out of the cultural crisis. During exhibitions in her first curatorial project called The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, she burnt incense and played music. Paintings were specifically hung lower to the floor so the visitors would have to sit down and relax to interact with them.

Her most ambitious and daring project, the museum building that would later wear the name of Solomon Guggenheim, was entirely Rebay’s creation that reflected her stance on the function of non-objective art. She specifically asked Frank Lloyd Wright, the project’s architect, to create a spiral structure without interruptions, sharp angles, or stairs. The visitor had to be carried upwards by the sheer force of art and emotion conveyed by it. Curiously, the same approach to art was shared by the Swedish mystic and abstract artist Hilma af Klint, whose works were shown at the Guggenheim in 2018.

Today, the artist Rudolf Bauer is almost forgotten, yet, in the years of Hilla von Rebay’s career, he was one of the most promising avant-garde artists and one of the pioneers of abstract art. They met in the 1910s when young Hilla von Rebay became a part of the German avant-garde. Bauer was a tremendously successful illustrator at the time, working mostly with caricatures and political cartoons. Well paid for his primary occupation, Bauer devoted his free time to experiments with cubist and abstract art, with the same astonishing degree of success. Hilla von Rebay thought of him as a genius and even claimed Kandinsky was deeply jealous of Bauer.

When it came to jealousy, Bauer could hardly stand Hilla’s success, often discouraging her from painting. Their arguments often turned violent, and the relationship became too hard to bear. Desperate to get away from Bauer, Hilla von Rebay moved overseas. Despite the dramatic breakup, she continued to promote Bauer’s work, leading Guggenheim to amass a vast collection of his works. However, this became overwhelming, with collectors and the public quickly getting tired of seeing the same artist over and over again.

In 1940, Rebay forced the unsuspecting Bauer to sign a contract, transferring all his present and future work to the Guggenheim Foundation for a meager compensation. Outraged, Bauer took his revenge by reporting his ex-lover to the FBI as a suspected Nazi spy. However, the only crime she was found guilty of was hoarding coffee and sugar during wartime rationing.

Despite her warm and trustful relationship with Solomon Guggenheim, other members of the family resented Hilla. Irene Guggenheim never understood her husband’s obsession with abstract art and insisted on buying more works made by the Old Masters. She could not help but be annoyed by the amount of time he spent with Rebay and by the importance of her judgment to him. Irene’s annoyance was so obvious and intense that it provoked rumors of a possible love affair between the collector and his curator. Moreover, in professional relationships, Hilla von Rebay was notoriously hard to deal with, aggressively pushing her agenda.

The Wright’s museum building and the collection housed in it were entirely her creations. However, her efforts were unappreciated, and after the death of Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1949, his family members abruptly fired her from the museum. Subsequently, they named the museum after its patron and took a more conservative approach to exhibiting. Hilla von Rebay was not invited to the museum opening and never set foot inside the Guggenheim again. She died alone and unknown at her Connecticut farm.