Hilla von Rebay

After receiving a letter of introduction from Nina Kandinsky, widow of his former master at the Bauhaus, Bill got to know Hilla von Rebay, herself an artist as well as director of the seminal Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. Rebay and Bill started corresponding with each other. It wasn’t long before Bill was able to tell his friend Georges Vantongerloo in Paris that he had succeeded in convincing Rebay, despite all odds, of the caliber of the art by that other former Bauhaus master of his, Josef Albers. This was all the more remarkable because just one year previously Rebay had declared having not the slightest interest in Albers as an artist. 13

Bill’s powers of persuasion did not stop there, however. During a studio visit in 1950, he also managed to win over Baroness von Rebay when it came to Vantongerloo’s own works. At this point she was unfamiliar with his art and was quite taken by the examples of his work that Bill had in his Zurich studio. 14 He immediately suggested that she pay Vantongerloo a visit in Paris. And so it came to be that Rebay went to Paris and acquired four Vantongerloo paintings — n° 101, n° 116, n° 182, and n° 189—for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 15

Interestingly, Rebay purposefully declined buying any of Bill’s own art, because she (wrongly)16 suspected him of being a communist. Her reasoning is recorded in various letters she subsequently wrote to Vantongerloo, which reflect the climate of fear and the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era.17

In 1956, Bill succeeded in organizing the first exhibition of works by Josef Albers, Fritz Glarner, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart at the Kunsthaus Zürich (April–July 1956). The show led to the “rediscovery” of Josef Albers’s art in Europe, which Hilla von Rebay, as mentioned above, had initially rejected and only decided was worth exhibiting after hearing Bill make the case for his work.