We are delighted to be the first gallery in the UK to show works by the German/American artist Hilla von Rebay (1890-1967) and to bring to London works by this outstanding artist and hugely influential character, without whom the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum would probably never have existed.

The exhibition includes examples of all periods of her artistic life including abstract watercolours and gouaches from the 1920's-50's under the influence of friends Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Arp. Hilla von Rebay was born in 1890 as a Baroness in Strasbourg, Alsace and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Cologne and at the Académie Julian in Paris. She spent many years living in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Munich and Paris, working with Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. In Berlin she was actively involved in the Dada movement around 1913-1919 alongside Hans Richter and Hans Arp, with whom she had an intimate relationship between 1916-17. Through Wassily Kandinsky she had contact to the Bauhaus and the artists teaching there, for example László Moholy-Nagy and Paul Klee.

In the late 1920's she went to America establishing a reputation as a portrait painter and in 1928 was commissioned to paint the portrait of Solomon R. Guggenheim. The sitting for his portrait took place in her studio at the Carnegie Hall in New York, where the works by Kandinsky and Bauer were on display next to her own. Guggenheim was impressed, their friendship developed and he found an art-adviser for his collection to be. He soon started buying paintings through Hilla von Rebay on their regular trips to Europe. In Paris they visited Léger and Moholy-Nagy in their studios, they met Arp and Chagall and travelled to the Bauhaus in Dessau to see Klee and Kandinsky. By 1937 the collection contained about 400 works and in 1939 they opened the ‘Museum of Non-Objective Painting' at 24 East 54th Street in Manhattan, with an exhibition titled ‘Art of Tomorrow'. Hilla von Rebay was the first director of what would later be known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In 1943 Hilla wrote to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who agreed to create a building for this unique collection. By then her reputation had earned her the title ‘Queen of Art' in New York society. A model of the new museum was presented to the public in 1945, but it took another fifteen years for the museum to finally open its doors in 1959.

Solomon R.Guggenheim, Hilla von rebay, Frank lloyd Wright 1945 (Rebay Archive Wessling)