Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen

Entering through the swivel glass doors at the Guggenheim Museum on 89h St. and looking up at the grand ivory spiral walk way, the polished marble floors and soaring ceiling, it feels as if walking into some kind of Goetheanum cathedral. It is interesting to note that this New York art institution was conceived as a temple, of sorts; a temple for contemporary fine art and the spiritual beliefs of the high societal priestess of non-objective paintings Hilla Von Rebay . Her religion was made up of paint, canvas and an interest in Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, Buddhism , Ballet and a love of Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Rudolf Bauer, just to mention a few.

Hilla Rebay's earlier works mostly reveal the influence of Kandinsky and Bauer. These works are delicate, airy, atmospheric and loose. Many have washy grounds covered with of cross-hatchings, curving lines and curving organic shapes.

The highlights of this ReBay exhibition are the idiosyncratic small and extraordinary water color collages from the '20s to the '40s, of which some manifest a dichotomy between semi figuration and abstraction. The minute saturated Chagall-esque colorations and abstractions remain loose and intentional, Zen-like in execution and detail while simultaneously fast and gestural. Some are made with fine delicate cut oriental rice paper which is skillfully used to make lines and patterns of figurative and organic shapes.

Most of Rebay's larger scale paintings also have a similar multi-dimensional, biomorphic and a metabolical characteristic. Some with a sweeping circular archetypical serpentine kundalinic energy, that is superimposed over geometric triangular patterns and forms that points to her palpable interest in cosmic nature, Rudolf Stiener and Vasily Kandinsky. With one in particular that appears to be a precursor to American abstract paintings by Brice Marden by the way of Jackson Pollock. .

Other works which were meticulously selected and harmoniously arranged in order by curators Karole Vail and Jo Ann - Birnie Danzker from figuration to abstraction, were a small group of ballet and dance drawings that indicate Rebay's love of ballet , music, theater and performance.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Karole Vail, Curators of
"Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim"

The exhibition also features important European and American paintings�including works by Bauer, Penrod Centurion, John Ferren, Juan Gris, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, L�ger, Moholy-Nagy, Otto Nebel, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Rolph Scarlett, Georges Valmier, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and Jean Xceron.

Hillla Rabay was a missionary, educator, an avant gard and spokesperson for many of the above mentioned artists.

Rebay's pioneering mission and undertaking can not be underestimated and like Kandinsky before her, Rebay also seems to be fascinated by classical music's emotional power which expresses itself through sound rhyme and time.

It is in the intrinsic nature of classical music that gives the listener pure freedom to imagine, interpret and emotionally respond to that which is not based on the literal or the descriptive, but rather on the non objective quality that painting, still dependent on representing the visible world, does not necessarily provide.

Hilla ReBay was born into a catholic protestant German aristocratic family and met Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1928 when he commissioned her to paint his portrait.

Hilla ReBay was vibrant , eccentric ,witty and 38 when she met Guggenheim. He was 66 and a wealthy powerful industrialist and it has been speculated that during the portrait painting process they became lovers and not just passionate collectors of her work and a group of avant gard artists like Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst .

Hilla ReBay age 45

At the time Rebay was especially interested in influencing Guggenheim to acquire the paintings of artists Rudolph Bauer and Vasily Kandinsky and others who worked in her Non-Objective style of painting.

Kandinsky studied of folk art in the region of Vologda, north of Moscow. In particular the use of bright colors on a dark background was reflected in his early work. Kandinsky would write a few years later that 'Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with the strings'.

It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich Germany.

Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of Monet and was particularly taken with a depiction of a haystack which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the object itself. Kandinsky may have also had a peculiar condition known as synaethesaia which is the neurological mixing of the senses. A synaesthete may for example, hear colors or feel sounds, taste touch. See Art and Synaesthsia by Dr Hugo

Paul Klee, 'Abstract Trio' 1923, Watercolor and transferred printing ink on paper

The other major influence in her work was the Austrian born philosopher, architect, Rudolf Steiner. He spoke about artists breaking through to new modes of perception and expression in their quest for the spiritual in art. His research, building on Goethe's color theory, offers the painter a way to penetrate the objective laws of color and discover how form grows out of the inherent gesture and dynamic interplay of colors. This entering into and working out of color becomes a meditative and therapeutic process enlivening and inspiring the artist.

Stiener was a university student of science , mathematics and philosophy in Vienna, he later earned a doctorate from the University of Rostock. He was also very influenced and edited the scientific writings of Goethe, whose approach, based on intensified, selfless, ancient Taoist and Zen like observations of nature, became a source of inspiration for his own work. Steiner's doctoral dissertation dealing with Fichte's theory of knowledge was later expanded and published as Truth and Science. In 1894, he published The Philosophy of Freedom, which he felt to be his most important philosophical work

"Non-Ojective Art" is an esthetically pleasing art form of the intuitive metaphysical manifested through color, light, form, line and shape. It is intended to be absolutely non derivative and devoid of narration.

There is a subtle distinction with abstract painting, in the sense that the artist may be closer to a channeler of something other than the psyche, emotions, subconscious, etc. as in automatic writings of scrubbings of surrealism, or gestural and emotive abstract action painting. It may be more about the artist than the art, technique or methodology. The result maybe closer to an infinitely captured alchemical painterly imprint of the infinite nature of the ethereal human spirit, and also the macro nature of the infinite cosmos, and by the harmonious merging of the two. Maybe it's question of semantics, or a matter of degrees, or it may also be the philosophical and mystical element that gives it this definition of non objectivity.

"From the metaphysical point of view there

is nothing that can touch the formless except

the art of music which in itself is formless."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Reminiscent of the writings of Stiener , ReBay said that the art she admired was to "elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater--the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty." According to Rebay, �Non-Objective painting represents no object or subject known to us on earth. It is simply a beautiful organization of colors and forms to be enjoyed for beauty�s sake and arranged in rhythmic order. The culmination of spiritual power made intuitively visible. The forms and colors we see are secondary to their spiritual rhythm which we feel.�

Hilla Rebay
Orange Cross, 1947

ReBay was known to be a difficult and complex character and probably very misunderstood at that time. . She has been described by some art historians as mercurial, eccentric, scornful, rageful but also tremendously kind and generous to artists in need. In her later years she claimed to have given Jackson Pollock his start by providing him a job at the museum mopping the floors.

Brice Marden

Her esoteric and bizarre health practices have also been documented. She once persuaded the Guggenheim Museum architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, to have his wisdom teeth removed to ward off bad humors. Rebay was the influential force behind Guggenheim's decision to hire Wright to design what is still one of the greatest art museums in New York if not the world.

Rudolf Steiner - Organic architecture, The Goetheanum

Goetheanum, Rudolf Stiener's emphasis in his architectural work was not simply to create atmosphere which is conducive to this or that human experience, but to actively draw into shape and space, the activities of the higher worlds. This, he maintains, was achieved in ages past, such as in the design of Greek temples. As foreign as this concept is to the habits of modern thought, these temples became the abode of actual Beings of a stature beyond the human. An echo of this still lived on in medieval cathedrals.