Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen
"Toccata"

Name: "Toccata"
Brand: Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen
Price: 25000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Cut Paper Collage, Signed LR Hilla Rebay was an avant-garde artist who believed deeply in the power of intuition while creating art. She was the progenitor of The Museum of Non-Objective Art (which would become the Guggenheim Museum) and was instrumental in bringing abstract, modernism art to the United States. Hilla Rebay was born into nobility in Strasbourg, Alsace and had the full name of Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Her father, a career army officer from Bavaria, and her mother encouraged her obvious artistic talent from childhood. She studied locally and then enrolled in 1909 at the Academie Julian in Paris, France. There she was much influenced by avant-garde movements especially theosophist artists and writers led by Wassily Kandinsky "who helped formulate her lifelong belief in the power of intuition in art-making and other areas of life" (Glueck). In 1910, she spent time in Muenich where she was further exposed to modernist art, and she returned to Paris in 1913, having exhibited work in both German southern lands, Cologne and Muenich. In 1917, she med Rudolph Bauer, a German painter of non-objective styles who became her long-time lover, and in the future, the cause of controversy after she was accused of devoting disproportionate exhibition space to him at the Guggenheim Museum. It was said that her enthusiasm for him and his work was "unbounded" and that he inspired her paintings "alive with restless, jostling, organic forms" (Glueck). Hilla Rebay first visited the United States in 1927 and stayed for an extended time period, which included her giving painting lessons to Louise Nevelson, seeking portrait commissions, designing posters, and exhibiting her own personal works at venues including the Worcester Art Museum and Manhattan galleries. Among her portrait commission subjects was Solomon Guggenheim, whose wealthy family had extensive western mining interests. Rebay had met Solomon and his wife Irene when they purchased two of her paintings at the Manhattan show. To that time, the two were collectors of conventional art, but during the sittings, Hilla apprised him of what was going on in avant-garde art circles. She brought painters of leading-edge styles to meet Guggenheim and encouraged him to collect their art, which he did, filling his Plaza Hotel apartment. Rebay supervised the collection, and in 1937, she led the establishment of a Guggenheim foundation to build "The Museum of Non-Objective Art," achieved in 1939 in rented gallery space on 54th Street. The main focus of the collection was works of the Dutch group De Stijl that included Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and of Bauhaus artists from Germany such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Although she was committed to purely non-objective works, she added to the collection abstract works by George Seurat, Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and others in France, experimenting with Cubism, Futurism, and other forms In 1951, two years after Guggenheim's death, Hilla Rebay resigned as Director but remained a trustee of the collection, and lived in Greens Farms, Connecticut. During her career as an administrator, she continued her life as a painter and created canvases of geometric shapes and ones that expressed pure color and rhythm. She also authored several books including one titled Wassily Kandinsky, and wrote articles for the Carnegie Institute Magazine and Southern Literary Digest. However, her most enduring reputation is for her influence in bringing non-objective art to America.

Creator:

Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen (1890-1967, American)

Dimensions:

Height: 26 in (66.04 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Medium:

Paper

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

20th Century

Condition:

Ashley John is proud to offer this artwork by: Hilla Rebay (1890 - 1967).