In 1928 in Manhattan, Hilla Rebay, a then little-known artist and recent emigrant from Germany, received the artistic commission of her life. She was hired to paint a portrait of American industrialist and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim. Not long after the portrait was complete, Rebay managed to convince her sitter that the height of art was not the representational works of the old masters, French Barbizon School, and American landscapes he had collected since the 1890s, but something new and daring termed the “non-objective.”
Hilla Rebay in her Berlin studio, circa 1915. The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archives.
M0007, Series 1, A2002.70. Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York.
© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
For Rebay, the non-objective was the art of the future. With no reference to nature or the material world entirely, it employed what she believed to be the creative-spiritual powers of the artist to bring forth new worlds through spatial relationships between shapes, lines, and colors. In line with the thinking of German artist Rudolf Bauer and Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky as outlined in the latter’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Rebay believed the non-objective served as a new universal language with the potential to redeem humanity from its prevailing materialism and usher in a new spiritual future.
Earlier, in 1927, Rebay had left a successful career and her avant-garde networks in Europe that included friends Bauer, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, and the Waldens of the modernist magazine and gallery Der Sturm in search of greater opportunity in the United States. She was one of many emigrants who, during the interwar years, departed Europe for the glimmering promise of America, yet was one of few so fortunate to have quickly connected with someone of not only great financial power but an open mind. When Rebay arrived in New York, the United States was still slow in its embrace of modern art, abstraction especially. However, Guggenheim’s background in business and his own discovery of a new copper mining technique as a young boy taught him that unconventional ideas were often the very ones with the power to change the world. Thus, by 1929, Guggenheim began working with Rebay to build a collection of non-objective art. When Rebay became the founding director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and curator of the collection in 1937, it held approximately 400 works. Two years later, in 1939, when Rebay opened its very first museum, The Museum of Non-Objective Painting (a precursor to the current Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), the collection had nearly doubled in size. Its inaugural exhibition, The Art of Tomorrow, featured works by Kandinsky, Bauer, Rolph Scarlett, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and Rebay herself, among others. As she wrote in the corresponding catalogue, the museum was a utopia “come true,” bringing forth “the bright millennium of cooperation and spirituality with its love for order and rhythm.”
Rolph Scarlett, Red Form, 1946, oil on canvas, 52 x 62 1/4 inches (132.1 x 158.1 cm).
Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.
Several presentations at Independent 20th Century foreground histories of abstraction as a modernist vehicle for a reimagining of the world. Hilla Rebay and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting is the focus of an exhibition at Weinstein Gallery that highlights Rebay’s influence as both an artist and a curator. It features her works in dialogue with those she showed at her museum, including Bauer, Kandinsky, Scarlett, Moholy-Nagy, Irene Rice Pereira, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Dwinell Grant. Rebay’s Con Fuoco #10 (1943–45), is a dynamic composition in which curvilinear shapes interweave with more rigid, gridded lines. The effect is fiery, energized, and loud in a symphonic overload of deep violets, yellows, reds, and greens. While Rebay’s works in this presentation appear more intuitive and free-flowing, others privilege restraint and precision. Canadian artist Rolph Scarlett’s Red Form (1946), for instance, features floating geometric forms stacked like architecture. Top-heavy, they hang precariously in balance. Scarlett was a favorite of Rebay’s, a recipient of a scholarship from Guggenheim’s foundation, and between 1940 and 1946, served as one of the museum’s chief lecturers on art. His works were exhibited often and purchased for the collection.
Emil Bisttram, Creative Forces, 1936, oil on canvas, 59 x 39 inches
(149.9 x 99.1 cm). Courtesy of Addison Rowe Fine Art.
Rebay worked tirelessly to campaign for a new form of art that was not always understood or accepted by the public. Her task was made more difficult by her eccentricity, quick temper, and the persistent discrimination she received on account of not only being a woman but also German. To Rebay’s critics and admirers alike, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting was “highly esoteric,” “cultish” and an “occult place in which a mystic language was spoken.” Over the course of her life, many attempts were made to have her ousted from the very museum and foundation she created. By the time the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum for the collection was completed in 1959—the result of nearly 15 years of planning by Rebay for a permanent home for the collection—neither Rebay nor Guggenheim were present at its opening party. After Guggenheim passed away in 1949, the foundation gradually shifted its focus from non-objectivity and Rebay was asked to resign in 1952.
While Rebay continues to remain in the shadows of art history today, she was incredibly influential on both established and emerging artists alike. American artist Emil Bisttram is one example, whose work is the subject of a presentation at Addison Rowe Gallery. Sharing Rebay’s beliefs in the spiritual in art, Bisttram exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting three times. He was a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) with artist Raymond Jonson in New Mexico. Its goal, as expressed in a manifesto, was to “carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” A painting by Bisttram titled Creative Forces (1936), part of his cosmic egg series, depicts seven overlaid colored circles from which a prism of rainbow light penetrates the space below. For Bisttram, the cosmic egg symbolized the origin of all life and consciousness. Like Rebay, Bisttram believed that artmaking was a redemptive force for both the artist and humanity.
Alice Trumbull Mason, City Twilight, 1956, oil on canvas, 19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm).
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.
Wassily Kandinsky, Ténèbres (Darkness), 1943, oil on board, 22 7/8 x 16 1/2 inches (58.1 x 41.9 cm).
Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.
Rudolf Bauer, Allegro, 1928, oil on canvas, 30 x 41 inches (76.2 x 104.1 cm).
Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.
Sue Fuller, String Composition #333, 1965, Lucite and polypropylene thread, 25 x 25 x 1 inches (63.5 x 63.5 x 2.5 cm). Photo by Richard Ivey. Courtesy of Luxembourg + Co.
Alice Trumbull Mason painting Mobile Tensions, 1954. Photo by John D. Schiff. © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.
In 1937, the artists’ group American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in New York. While some of its members did not agree with Rebay’s assertion that abstraction was intrinsically spiritual, publicly objecting to her ideas in an October 1937 issue of Art Front, many of its artists were aligned with, and supported by, Rebay. One example is Russian-born Esphyr Slobodkina, whose work is on view at Rosenberg & Co. Slobodinka received financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation through Rebay and exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in the early 1940s. Another founding member, American artist Alice Trumbull Mason, found in Rebay a continual and important ally. Mason painted non-objective compositions as early as 1929, and like Rebay, was fundamental to the development of abstraction in the United States. She believed that the abstract offered a sense of wonder, writing in a 1938 AAA catalogue that the artist “deals in the magic of textures, colors juxtaposed to force intensities which thus show movement somewhat as the sculptor shapes the air with his constructions.” Her City Twilight, 1955–56, for instance, part of a solo presentation of Mason’s work at Galerie Lelong, evokes a sense of softness characteristic of the fading day through a muted palette and spaced vertical lines, even as angular forms suggestive of city lights cut across this harmony.
While not necessarily subscribing to Rebay’s mysticism, Mason employed order and rhythm in a manner that could be seen to embody what Rebay termed the beneficial effects of non-objective art, best encapsulated by a slogan used in her museum advertisement: “the ordered mind is the happier mind through non-objective paintings.” While Mason was not as concerned with spiritual futurity as others in Rebay’s circle, her minimalist abstractions reward close looking, offering respite to a busy mind through a visual spaciousness. Mason received financial support from Rebay and her works were purchased for the collection. Recognizing the value her museum held for young artists, Mason wrote to Rebay in 1944 that it was “the only one to show new, unknown, and experimental work, consistently.”
Sue Fuller, Collage for Cacophony, 1944, thread on paper, 11 x 8 inches (27.9 x 20.3 cm).
Photo by Richard Ivey. Courtesy of Luxembourg + Co.
While another artist, Sue Fuller, was aware of the non-objective movement around Rebay and her museum in New York, her path to abstraction was instead rooted in the possibilities of materiality and technology. Her small-scale sculptures, string compositions, and abstract woven works created between the 1940s and ‘80s sit at the intersection of fine art, craft, science, and industry. She collaborated with manufacturers to produce the colored, polypropylene “fishing line” monofilament that she believed was best suited for her woven work. Fuller, however, was not alone in her pursuit. A presentation at Luxembourg + Co. places Fuller’s work in dialogue with the émigré artists who shaped her practice, including Anni Albers, Naum Gabo, and László Moholy-Nagy. Fuller’s early works such as Collage for Cacophony (1944), made of threads on paper, is suggestive of the influence someone like Albers may have had on the artist during her study at Black Mountain College. Later works, such as her String Compositions series, while reminiscent of Gabo’s sculptures, employ the more colorful polypropylene she developed in the factory, thus interweaving art, technology, and craft in a manner so sought after by those at the Bauhaus and its leading figures, Moholy-Nagy included.
Spiritual or not, abstraction for many modern artists reflected a search for something greater, whether it be clarity of expression, a new tomorrow, or better future. Rebay’s recent resurfacing in the canon of art history is part of a greater effort towards widening our understanding of abstraction and modernism more broadly. Rebay should be situated amongst other previously underrecognized figures who have recently come to light including Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and Swiss healer Emma Kunz, whose work is the subject of a presentation by Hauser & Wirth. While Rebay struggled during her lifetime to receive the recognition she deserved, it may be that her art of tomorrow has finally become the art of today.
Rachel Denniston is an art historian, writer, and curator based in London. She is currently a Tavolozza Foundation PhD Scholar at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and the inaugural non-residential fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
