Rudolf Bauer

R U D O L F

B A U E R

RUDOLF BAUER

W E I N S T E I N G A L L E RY 383 Geary Street • San Francisco • California 94102

Published by Rowland Weinstein and Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, in cooperation with the Rudolf Bauer Estate and Archives, San Francisco Published on the occasion of the retrospective Rudolf Bauer at Weinstein Gallery, January 2007 © 2007 Weinstein Gallery.

Rudolf Bauer artworks and archive documentation © Rudolf Bauer Estate and Archives. Additional copyright notices below.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 0-9790207-0-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-9790207-0-4 Library of Congress Control Number 2006935637

Production and project direction by Briana Tarantino Edited by Jasmine Moorhead Designed by Linda Corwin Printed in the U.S.A. by California Lithographers

Weinstein Gallery 383 Geary Street San Francisco, California 94102 415-362-8151 www.weinstein.com

Artwork photography by Nick Pishvanov, Owen Salisbury, and Don Almac German translations by Bernhard Geyer

Essay “The Music of the Spheres” © Robert Rosenblum; reprinted with the permission of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Louise Bauer letter to Hilla Rebay, 1955; Hilla von Rebay Foundation papers; M0007; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York, NY; Rebay artworks and archive material © The Hilla von Rebay Foundation; used by permission. Rolph Scarlett artwork © 2006 Estate of Rolph Scarlett. Barnett Newman artwork © Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kandinsky artwork © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Front cover: Rudolf Bauer. Colored Swinging. Oil on canvas, 513⁄8 x 611⁄4 inches. 1935.

Back cover: Rudolf Bauer. Andante IV. Oil on canvas, 241⁄4 x 313⁄4 inches. 1917.

Inside covers and page 34: collages originally published in Rudolf Bauer: The Constructivist Years (New York: Leonard Hutton Galleries, 1976)

Though the truth be crushed to the earth, it shall rise again and to my mind has come the realization that the many years of silence must be broken. The world must and should know the truth of my husband’s life, his hopes, his labors, his honesty and his bitter betrayal.

Rudolf Bauer, artist of great spiritual scope, writer of vision, master thinker, Rudolf Bauer!

— Mrs. Louise Bauer, 1954

Rudolf Bauer, Deal, New Jersey, c. 1950

RUDOLF BAUER: A NON-OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW Steven Lowy

The main thing is that the picture be organic. . . . A decisive factor is whether the picture is simply a plane or a shaping of space. . . . When I limit myself to the plane I see nothing but the canvas, which is not what I see when I am working in the cosmic.

—Letter from Rudolf Bauer to Hilla Rebay, August 1917 1

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INTRODUCTION

arly in the twentieth century in Berlin, in the tradition of famed French illustrator and painter Honoré Daumier, a German caricaturist and political cartoonist named Rudolf

Bauer began to make his mark. While Bauer’s illustrations delighted his audience and paid the bills, it was his avant-garde experiments in Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism that stirred his soul. So accomplished was Bauer’s hand that he caught the attention of Herwarth Walden, founder of the famed Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. Walden mounted three solo shows of Bauer’s paintings amid exhibitions of works by Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and other modernist luminaries.

In America Bauer’s work was introduced to the American public in the early 1920s through Société Anonyme co-founder Katherine Dreier, one of America’s foremost collectors, whose curator was the legendary artist Marcel Duchamp. Bauer’s work was featured in the exhibition bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as early as 1933. Solomon R. Guggenheim became Bauer’s champion and patron and purchased more than three hundred works for his collection. A 1937 article in Time magazine cites a Bauer painting as Guggenheim’s favorite and pictures the copper magnate sitting proudly in front of it.2 Guggenheim established a foundation for Non-Objective painting and committed to the construction of the now-famous museum on Fifth Avenue, efforts that can be argued were the direct result of Bauer’s ideas.

Bauer’s work The Holy One (1936) was the inspiration for

the main attraction at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere buildings.3 Art historian Robert Rosenblum has also noted the striking similarity of Bauer’s Blue Triangle (1934) to Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionist sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963–69), one of the centerpieces of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. 4

Solomon R. Guggenheim and Rudolf Bauer, c. 1940

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The curator and art historian William Moritz has noted that “Bauer’s work during the thirties and forties . . . was very much seen and quite influential, so no responsible history of abstract art can fail to discuss his work.”5 Why then have the name Rudolf Bauer and his work disappeared into near oblivion? Was his erasure from the annals of art history intentional and malevolent? These are the questions that continue to stir debate, as the art world begins to rediscover the work of this visionary artist.

Clearly, an artist’s reputation is not cast in bronze. Fame can be as ephemeral as music and equally vulnerable to the vagaries of taste. Often the museum and the marketplace are slow to recognize the genius of an artist. Occasionally, historical corrections are made, and a person whose work was popular fades slowly into obscurity. Whether an artist’s body of work enjoys lasting esteem or disappears from view is a complex equation of luck, timing, patronage, and politics, as viewed through the mutable frame of art history.

Nor does the history of art take personality into its equation, which is fortunate. If it did, then we might not be familiar with works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, van Gogh, Gauguin, or Pollock, all of whom were possessed of notorious temperaments. Sensibly, an artist’s charm is not a primary criterion for inclusion in the great art collections of the world. What may be crucial to the fate of an artist’s work, or even an entire art movement, however, is the popularity of its champion, curator, or patron.

Bauer’s place in art history is linked to the lives of two people: Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, the Guggenheim Museum’s founding director. Bauer and Rebay had met in Berlin. Rebay, in turn, had come to America and introduced Bauer’s work to Guggenheim. The charismatic Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenweisen RUDOLF BAUER Caricature Self-Portrait Ink and pencil on paper 111⁄2 x 8 5⁄8 inches c. 1920

was an eccentric and passionate woman who alienated a number of people, some incredibly influential. No one disputes that she overpromoted herself and Bauer during her tenure as Guggenheim’s

personal curator, and aspects of her behavior would be deemed outrageous by today’s museum standards. That she was Guggenheim’s mistress during her ascendancy no doubt polarized opinion about her even further.

Yet Rebay’s conviction, coupled with Guggenheim’s financial resources, built her a prominent place in the history of art. Nearly single-handedly, she introduced “Non-Objective” art to the American public.6 Rebay was instrumental in establishing not only the Guggenheim collection but also the iconic building designed to house it, as she was the one to arrange for Frank Lloyd Wright to design this new “temple” of art on Fifth Avenue. Inside the helical walls, the spiral ramp was to be an educational timeline of Non-Objective art. Sadly, however, the opening of the museum in 1959 was colored by a purge of many of Solomon Guggenheim’s prized works.

This change of direction, in which much of the Non-Objective art was relegated to the basement, was enacted by Harry Guggenheim, Solomon's nephew, who helmed the Foundation following Solomon's death in 1949. It is a change that in retrospect appears to be personally motivated, as there is no artistic or art-historical precedent for such a wholesale omission. As

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one scholar stated, “Changing the focus of the museum appeared to Rebay as a betrayal, not only of her own designs but of the founder’s intentions as well.”7 No artist suffered a more dramatic rise and fall in this chapter of the Guggenheim’s history than Rudolf Bauer. He has long been portrayed as a “difficult personality,” whose arrogance was great and ingratitude to Rebay and Guggenheim even greater. The intention here is to correct the historical record through information found in the Rudolf Bauer Estate and Archives, the Hilla Rebay Archives, and newly found primary sources in order to fairly present the art and genius of Germany’s greatest abstract painter of the twentieth century—Rudolf Bauer.

EARLY YEARS Alexander Georg Rudolf Bauer was born in 1889 in Lindenwald, a town in a border region between Germany and Poland that is now part of Poland. Bauer’s family was of the Evangelical faith.

His father, Theodor Bauer, was an engine fitter, who likely moved his family to Berlin in the 1890s.

Anecdotal evidence and a large body of highly accomplished, realistic student works suggest that Bauer was an avid artist from an early age [see below]. When the moment arrived for the fledgling artist to discuss his desire to go to art school, his father, disapproving of this choice, beat him so brutally that Bauer ran away from home, never to return.8 Bauer did enter art school in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, in 1905, but he was never able to count on support from his family again.

RUDOLF BAUER Römisches Wagenrennen von Ulpiano Chéca Ink and gouache on board 111⁄4 x 19 5⁄ 8 inches 1905

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Opposite page and above: Early Rudolf Bauer illustrations from the tabloids Witzige Blätter, 1911, and Fliegende Blätter, 1912

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According to his hand-typed resume [see Appendix B], Bauer started working as a cartoonist at the age of twelve and over time became widely published. Between 1910 and 1914 the young artist was able to support himself by doing illustrations and caricatures for various magazines including Muskete, Fliegende Blätter, Ulk, Figaro, and many others. He created clever compositions and had a tremendous facility for visual satire [see previous pages].

DER STURM AND STIRRINGS OF NON-OBJECTIVISM Galerie Der Sturm was founded by Herwarth Walden in Berlin in 1912, two years after the founding of the magazine of the same name. Bauer was initiated into Der Sturm (The Storm) circle around 1915 and, with his participation in a number of group exhibitions, began to put aside his commercial illustration work in favor of painting.9 In addition to Bauer, gallery artists included Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, members of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, various French Cubists, and the Italian Futurists. It is likely that it was at Der Sturm that Bauer first saw the work of Kandinsky, an artist whose philosophy and approach would have a strong impact on Bauer’s artistic direction. In a letter of August 1917 he wrote: “The strongest and most advanced of all—theoretically and practically, synthetically and analytically—is Kandinsky.”10 Bauer would become a fixture at Der Sturm, working as Walden’s assistant and being given solo shows in 1917, 1918, and 1920. He taught at Walden’s Der Sturm School, where Klee was also an instructor. This was a prolific period for Bauer. The Austrian curator Susanne Neuburger described this period in Bauer’s artistic growth: He was very busy with his associations at the Sturm Gallery as well as his teaching activities at the Sturm School; that is to say, during this time he could probably follow his inclinations and exclusively VASILY KANDINSKY Rose im Grau (Rose in Gray) Oil on canvas 16 x 201⁄2 inches 1926

devote himself to the problem of NonObjective art. The periodical Der Sturm regularly featured drawings by Bauer,

often as cover illustrations. One can see more easily in the drawings than the paintings of that time that Bauer went through a Cubist/Futurist phase before he turned to the Expressionist vocabulary of form that characterizes his “Sturm” period.11 [See pages 8–9 for examples of his Der Sturm cover work.]

In addition to his Non-Objective work at Der Sturm, he completed a series of representational pastels depicting the horrors of World War I [see pages 162–63]. According to art historian and dealer Freerk Valentien, negative portrayals of war or the German army were forbidden during both world wars under threat of serious punishment. It is unknown whether any of these works

by Bauer were ever exhibited during his lifetime. Bauer’s conscientious objection to war is conveyed not only through the subject matter but often through the wordplay in his titles. A

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Right: Der Sturm brochures and artwork price list for the exhibition at Georg Kleis Kunsthandel, Copenhagen, 1918

caricature of two unhappylooking soldiers is titled Feldgraulich, a word coined by Bauer that translates as “miserable field gray.”

References to the war may also be found in his NonObjective art of the period.

Several paintings include floating crosses—symbols, perhaps, of casualties of war. Composition 32 (1918) [page 58] pictures what appears to be barbed wire running through the center of the composition. The masterpiece of this Expressionist period is White Cross (1919) [page 62], a painting that Bauer considered one of his finest.12 In this exuberant work a single small white cross floats in a sea of intense expressionistic energy.

ENTER HILLA REBAY The Baroness Hilla von Rebay, also a young artist, moved in 1917 to Berlin from Zurich, where she had been studying. Her former lover the sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp had given her an introduction to Der Sturm the previous year. No longer romantically involved with Arp, Rebay met Bauer at the gallery and was courted by him. Described by some of her male colleagues as the best “woman artist” they knew, Rebay was invited to join the Novembergruppe (of which Bauer was a co-founder) and exhibited with them in 1918.

For the next year and a half Rebay traveled outside Berlin, maintaining contact with Bauer through the post. During this period he was her champion at Der Sturm. In his letters Bauer mentions his efforts on her behalf, including having her works framed, setting prices, and arranging for favorable placement in group exhibitions.13 In 1919 one of Rebay’s engravings was published on the cover of Der Sturm, and she was featured in a two-person show at the gallery. That same year she returned to Berlin to move into the studio Bauer had found for them at 25 Ahornallee in Berlin’s fashionable Westend. This marked the beginning of their tempestuous lifelong relationship.

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Der Sturm magazine covers featuring work by Rudolf Bauer

DIE KRATER In 1919 Bauer, Rebay, and the artist Otto Nebel formed the short-lived group Die Krater, das Hochamt der Kunst, with a manifesto written by Bauer incorporating ideas contributed by Rebay and Nebel.14 They began publishing print editions intended as a series, whose guiding principle was to help educate the viewer about the history of modern art by rendering the subject matter in a progression of artistic styles. Their first print edition featured drawings of dancers

by Bauer: The prints “Step One” are the first portfolio in a cycle of portfolios intended to show how the figurative motif passes through the phases of the Impressionist, Secessionist, Caricaturist, Cubist, and Expressionist approach until it finally reaches the point where it severs its ties to the object, i.e., where art exists as art.15 Rebay would apply this concept of art history as a progression culminating in “Non-Objective” art to her curatorial program at the Guggenheim Foundation years later. Some of the most famous works purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim were earmarked for the “study collection,” meant to educate the museum visitor on the roots of abstraction and non-objectivity.

SOCIETE ANONYME Katherine Dreier, co-founder of the Société Anonyme (with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), visited Galerie Der Sturm in 1920 and purchased the Bauer oil Andante V (1915–17). Bauer was one of many European artists whose work was first introduced to the American public by Dreier.

Later Dreier would say of Bauer, “We had no artist in those early years whose work so appealed

Rudolf Bauer and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at Bauer’s Das Geistreich Museum in Berlin, 1930s

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to the public in general and which received so much response.”16 Dreier noted that Bauer’s work was unusually popular, because its quasi-organic forms and allusions to undersea life provided a handle to help the public grasp this new form of art. Inspired by the general public’s approval of Bauer, Dreier, whose reputation as an art collector is unsurpassed, acquired a large group of his watercolors and lithographs in 1923. She attempted to correspond with Bauer intermittently throughout his lifetime in an effort to purchase more work for the Société Anonyme collection.17 Sadly, her later attempts during the 1940s were unsuccessful, because by then Bauer was bound by exclusive agreements with the Guggenheim Foundation.18

FROM EXPRESSIONISM TO LYRICISM From 1921 until 1924 Bauer’s painting evolved from an expressionist to a more lyrical abstract style. The compositions became simpler, less biomorphic, and more elegant and uplifting as compared to the expressionistic work from the war-torn teens. The watercolor Improvisation (1924) [page 157] and the oil Composition 121 (1921) [page 69] are stunning examples from this period.

One senses that Bauer in his early thirties was shrugging off his expressionist vocabulary and allowing more room for the imagination of the viewer. Bauer had always acknowledged a debt to Vasily Kandinsky, the Russian master twenty years his senior, but in this period he began working in a very different direction. While the works from before 1920 tend to be dense with form and energy, the space opens up in the 1920s, and the non-objective forms float in a three-dimensional cosmos of his creation. It is Bauer’s exploration of deep abstract space that begins to differentiate his style from that of the elder artist. The

RUDOLF BAUER Allegro Mixed media on paper (watercolor, ink, and pencil) 18 7⁄ 8 x 14 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1925

pictures are clean yet airy and convey a much different feeling than do Kandinsky’s works, which focus on point, line, and plane.

By late 1925 or early 1926 Bauer became completely absorbed with a geometric style that would define the remainder of his career. The period seems to have been launched with the watercolor Allegro (c. 1925) [above and page 159] and a group of similarly sized works on paper. Paintings such as Colored Swinging (1935) [page 83], the four-paneled Tetraptychon series (1926–30), and his Symphony triptych (1930–34) [page 78] are typical of this period’s geometric forms and vibrant colorful compositions.

A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP Bauer’s early relationship with Rebay was affectionate but difficult. One of the factors straining the relationship was that Rebay’s parents did not find Bauer to be a suitable match for their daughter. If Bauer’s fabulous cabaret-themed output from the period is any indication, Bauer

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was a regular on the cabaret scene in the teens and 1920s. In these works naked ladies dance with men in white tie and tails. Scantily clad women sit on the laps of men, and fire emerges from the nether regions of a female performer [see Works on Paper section, beginning page 89]. Bauer documented the wild nightlife with wit, humor, and Germanic precision.

Other lifestyle preferences challenged the relationship early on. Runaway inflation and the high cost of living in Germany had a negative impact on art sales. And while Bauer was willing to suffer privation in order to focus on his Non-Objective art, the bohemian lifestyle of a struggling artist was not for Rebay. Rebay had the means to escape and, ultimately, she did. In the early 1920s, while Bauer was making breakthroughs in lyrical abstraction, Rebay embarked on a restless journey through Europe, staying at a spa-sanatorium, skiing in Switzerland, living with her parents in the country, and finally settling in Italy to paint. As late as 1926, when living in Rome doing society portraits and selling her “ballet pictures,” Rebay would exclaim upon receiving a letter from Bauer, “He is my boy. He was too poor to marry me.”19

HILLA REBAY IN NEW YORK In 1927 Rebay sailed to the United States armed with letters of introduction from Gertrude de Paats (Irene Rothschild Guggenheim’s sister) and other important European friends and colleagues. She established herself quickly as an avant-garde, and outspoken, New York artist.

Through her connections she met Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Irene Guggenheim, who was Mrs. Solomon Guggenheim. Both women purchased work from Rebay’s exhibition at the Marie Sterner Galleries. Eventually Rebay became friendly with the Guggenheims, and Solomon, charmed by her, asked her to paint his portrait.

Solomon Guggenheim probably first encountered Non-Objective art at Rebay’s studio in Carnegie Hall, which she had set up as an informal gallery.

Rebay owned watercolors by Bauer, Kandinsky, and Klee, and her own collages, of course, would have been plentiful in the studio. Rebay wrote to Bauer that Guggenheim had fallen in love with one of Bauer’s watercolors and wanted to buy it.

The opportunity for Rebay to prove that she was right about Bauer and Non-Objective art had arrived. Intrigued by and infatuated with her, Guggenheim hired Rebay as his personal curator.

Before Rebay entered his life, Guggenheim had Solomon R. Guggenheim’s apartment at the Plaza Hotel, showing two of Rudolf Bauer’s paintings, c. 1936

collected Old Masters, early Italian Renaissance, Barbizon, and work by Jean-Antoine Watteau.

Once inside his inner circle, the irrepressible

baroness did not waste any time telling the copper magnate that a man of his vision and means should seek out contemporary art and help living artists. Instead of the art of yesterday, he should collect the “art of tomorrow.”

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Over the next several years Rebay helped Guggenheim amass what would become one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art. Guggenheim collected predominantly works by Bauer and Kandinsky, many of them acquired directly through Bauer in Germany. As she described to Bauer, “Mr. Guggenheim likes the Kandinsky very much but [he likes] yours better. He would like all your most recent works. He is very excited and wants nothing else in his bedroom.”20

BAUER AS CURATOR Rarely has it been acknowledged that Bauer was a de facto co-curator of Guggenheim’s collection of modern art. When Rebay began her official role as advisor to Solomon Guggenheim she realized that Bauer, with his connections to Der Sturm artists and proximity to Kandinsky and the Bauhaus, would be a useful advocate to have working on her behalf in Berlin. The fact that Solomon Guggenheim loved Bauer’s work only served to deepen the trust Guggenheim would place in him to assist with the collection. The responsibility that Bauer felt toward Guggenheim to provide the finest work available cannot be underestimated, when one considers that Bauer himself was to become the focus of the collection.

Vivian Endicott Barnett, in her essay titled “Rereading the Correspondence: Rebay and Kandinsky,” confirms that it was Bauer, in fact, who was the true architect

Solomon R. Guggenheim, Rebay’s mother, Irene Guggenheim, unidentified man, Rudolf Bauer, Rebay’s father, and Hilla Rebay in Germany, 1930

of Guggenheim’s Kandinsky collection. Kandinsky, who was teaching at the Bauhaus, had sold out his entire studio of paintings in 1929 to various collectors and, in so doing, decided to double his prices. When the stock market crashed a few months later, collectors desperate for cash (Guggenheim excepted) threw Kandinsky paintings back on the secondary market for pfennigs on the mark. When Rebay wrote Bauer to say that Guggenheim wanted a new Kandinsky, Bauer now had an intriguing choice. He could purchase a masterpiece in the secondary market at a greatly reduced price, or he could heed Rebay’s wishes, go to Kandinsky’s studio, and buy new paintings at substantially higher prices. Like a good curator, Bauer did both, favoring masterpieces from earlier periods. Rebay became annoyed with Bauer for buying earlier works, not fully understanding the historic opportunity in his arbitrage. 21 She decided that the Guggenheims must visit the artists’ studios themselves.

In July of 1930, as part of a studio tour of Europe organized by Rebay, the Guggenheims traveled to France, then on to Germany to meet Vasily Kandinsky and Rudolf Bauer for the first time.

During their stay the Guggenheims also met the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, as well as László Moholy-Nagy, the youngest instructor at the Bauhaus. While Guggenheim purchased works by Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Chagall, and others in Paris, this trip cemented the art patron’s appreciation of the work of Bauer and Kandinsky.

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DAS GEISTREICH In September of 1930, flush with money from sales of his work to Guggenheim, Bauer decided the time was right to establish a new art salon in Berlin. Named Das Geistreich (The Realm of the Spirit), Bauer conceived it as a “temple of non-objectivity,” a sanctuary where Guggenheim and other well-heeled buyers would congregate to choose works for their collections. It was the first museum in the world dedicated to NonObjective art, featuring primarily the works of Bauer and Kandinsky. As Neuburger has noted, “It was the first germ of the idea that was to become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.” 22 As passionate as ever, Bauer wrote Rebay: I consider the salon so important that I shall invest all my money in it, up to the last penny.

Therefore, as of October 15, I will be leasing a villa on the Heerstrasse, for three years. . . . It makes me happy to think of Guggi’s [Guggenheim’s] beaming face as he strolls through the salon. I like him so much that I enjoy the salon even more because he will enjoy it. 23

Das Geistreich Museum entrance (above) and interior, c. 1930

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Bauer’s painting Symphony on the cover of The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,1933

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The influx of money from Guggenheim went a long way for Bauer in the depressed Berlin economy. After all his struggles Bauer embarked on a lifestyle to which he had never been accustomed, with chauffeur and servants. Not only did Bauer hope to impress collectors, such as Guggenheim, but also artists in his circle, who hoped that they too might benefit from Guggenheim’s largesse. Bauer had become a conduit to the Guggenheim coffers.

Few people in Germany were buying art, which made Bauer especially reliant on collectors from other countries. What Bauer could not anticipate was that as the decade wore on, collectors, including Guggenheim, were less and less inclined to visit Germany because of the deteriorating political situation. By February 1932 Bauer had run through all of his Guggenheim monies and was put on a strict budget. True to his word, he had “invested” every penny.

PATRONAGE AND POWER During the early 1930s Rebay was bombarded by letters from artists and galleries throughout Europe with whom she had done business, all of them desperate for sales. Even the proud Kandinsky wrote Rebay in 1935 to ask whether Guggenheim would consider a stipend. Rebay continued to make major purchases that she believed made sense for the Guggenheim collection. With each Guggenheim acquisition came gifts of watercolors or small oils to Rebay from both Guggenheim and the artists themselves. As Guggenheim’s curator, Rebay began to amass her own large collection of modern art.

Guggenheim had discovered Non-Objective art through Bauer’s work and, according to his comments and letters from Rebay, liked Bauer’s work best. This fact has often been slanted to imply that Bauer’s work was foisted upon Guggenheim by Rebay, but it is significant to note that Rebay recognized other great artists, such as Piet Mondrian, whose work she was unable to persuade Solomon to purchase. 24 In spite of Guggenheim’s clear admiration for Bauer’s work and its inclusion in major exhibitions in Europe at Galerie Der Sturm and in the United States with the Société Anonyme, Rebay still felt compelled to trumpet his praises compulsively. Her overpromotion of the artist became notorious. Rebay featured Bauer’s work on the cover of all five Guggenheim Foundation catalogues and consistently opened and closed her catalogue essays about Non-Objective art with references to Bauer and his genius. Almost every advertisement for the collection pictured a sole work by Bauer. Rebay practically demanded fealty to Bauer’s work from the other artists she considered for the collection, which only served to diminish Bauer’s favor in the art world.

Contrary to her intentions, her determination to make him world-famous by the force of her will hurt Bauer’s reputation and created great resentment. Her overzealous letters of the period to Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and others were particularly overbearing and transactional in this regard. Bauer’s reputation would likely have withstood the test of time had she not insisted on this rarified position for his work.

Responses from these artists to Rebay’s letters highlight this problem clearly. Moholy-Nagy wrote, “You cannot blame me for not mentioning Bauer in my books. I am a painter, and not an art critic. I believe that you do him a disservice when you try to establish a privileged position for him by force.”25 He also wrote to her, “Your reproaches are motivated by your great love and

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admiration for Bauer’s work. That is why you are so surprisingly biased. You suspect rejection without grounds, even when one is prepared to support him—as I am.”26

THE GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION In contrast with Berlin, the art scene in New York in the mid-1930s was bustling. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had established the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Museum of Modern Art had been founded with large support from the Rockefeller family and Alfred Barr as its eminent director. Katherine Dreier and A. E. Gallatin were looking for homes for their respective art collections. 27 In this fertile atmosphere Rebay, inspired by Bauer’s Das Geistreich, lobbied Guggenheim to consider founding his own museum. In 1936 Guggenheim’s collection became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with Rebay as its director. The establishment of a not-for-profit foundation served as the first legal step toward creating a museum to house the collection.

While looking for suitable real estate and architects, Rebay began to organize exhibitions of the “Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings.” The colClipping from the New York Herald Tribune about the establishment of the Guggenheim Foundation, June 29, 1937

lection had its public debut in 1936 at the Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina (where Solomon spent the

winter months), followed by exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Arts Club of Chicago, and Baltimore Museum of Art. Each exhibition was accompanied by an ever-expanding color catalogue, with essays written by Rebay. On a mission to illuminate Bauer’s genius to a public who may never have seen Non-Objective art before, Rebay’s essays, like her letters, displeased other artists in the collection such as Robert Delaunay and Kandinsky. They felt that she was not only placing too much emphasis on Bauer but also rewriting art history to suit her purposes.

In 1936 Bauer traveled to the United States to attend the opening of the Guggenheim exhibition in Charleston. Since he spoke no English, Rebay served as his interpreter. This was Bauer’s first visit to the United States and the first time he saw his work installed so prominently outside Germany. He visited Charleston in April, attended an exhibition of his work in Chicago in May, and spent the rest of May in New York, before returning to Germany in early June. It is clear that this

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trip left a favorable impression on Bauer and led him to believe that his dream of a permanent museum for his work was possible through Guggenheim. 28

PRISON Back in Berlin, Das Geistreich had become a lonely island of individualism in a menacing sea of Nazism. The Bauhaus had been closed down by the government in 1933, and artists such as Bauer were increasingly ostracized. Many had already fled the country. Rebay wrote Bauer in August 1937 to report that she had visited the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, which featured many artists from their Der Sturm days, including works by Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, and, of course, Bauer. The intent of the exhibition was to display artwork that the Nazi government had deemed to be corrupt, decadent, and un-German. Among artists, however, it was likely an avant-garde badge of honor to be included. Ironically, the works in the Degenerate Art show were made available for sale. Rebay wisely arranged to purchase the best pieces for Guggenheim’s collection. Why Bauer lingered so long in this hostile environment remains a mystery. He was not Jewish, yet his patron was one of the richest Jews in the world. This association would not go unnoticed in Nazi Germany.

In July 1937 Bauer traveled to Paris because his work was included in an exhibition called Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant, organized by the Musée du Jeu de Paume. In this large survey of the period, his painting was shown alongside the work of Picasso, Georges Braque, Léger, Chagall, and Joan Miró. It is believed that while he was in Paris he received word from friends that it was too dangerous to return to Berlin; yet he ignored the warning. Soon after his return he was arrested for being a degenerate artist and for speculating on the black market with American dollars. 29 According to the Rebay documentarian Sigrid Faltin, it is likely that his sister, a Nazi zealot who had disowned him, turned him in to the authorities for his art. In an excerpt from a letter to him his sister stated: I am totally convinced that you are completely and entirely under the influence of Jews and Free-Masons. You called our dear Dr. Goebbels a little, crippled chap. It seems that you prefer all the money that the filthy Jewish pigs are paying you for your paint blotches to the money a German worker would pay for a decent picture. This is Ellie writing you, your former sister, as under the circumstances I am no longer one. 30 Bauer, who had been living like a prince for the past decade, was suddenly a prisoner in Berlin.

Defiant, he scavenged scraps of paper and pencils while in prison, so that he could continue to draw. There are many prison drawings that remain, studies for future canvases that he must have hoped to paint once released from jail [see page 164].

Distraught by the news that Bauer had been imprisoned, Rebay implored Guggenheim to help free him. The baroness traveled to Germany with a suitcase filled with cash to rescue the “king” of Non-Objective art.31 To help broker a deal with the Gestapo, Rebay asked her brother, General Franz-Hugo von Rebay, to meet with Bauer’s captors, and he agreed to do so.32 Rebay’s nephew, Roland von Rebay (who lives in Bavaria and helped organize the 2005 Rebay exhibition, Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, at the Guggenheim Museum), traveled with his father for this fateful appointment with the prison warden. According to

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Roland, who was very young at the time, he was seated outside the warden’s office atop the suitcase of money as if on a high chair, while his father debated the warden behind a closed door. After what seemed to be hours of unsuccessful debate, the venerable general revealed the suitcase, which would help secure Bauer’s freedom. 33 Two months later Bauer was still not free, necessitating a return visit to the prison by Franz-Hugo. This time a new Gestapo official, a fellow Bavarian, was more sympathetic to Bauer’s case and released him unconditionally a few days later. Unwelcome and unsafe at home, Bauer made the choice to emigrate to the United States. Beset by bureaucratic difficulties in securing an exit visa and by the challenge, both emotional and physical, of packing up the contents of his home and studio, Bauer finally set sail for New York a year later in August 1939. 34

THE MUSEUM OF NON-OBJECTIVE PAINTING Two months before Rudolf Bauer arrived in the United States from Germany, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting showcasing the Guggenheim collection opened in New York City on June 1. The exhibition, titled Art of Tomorrow, was displayed in a former automobile showroom at 24 East 54th Street, a welcoming, comfortable, even luxurious environment where one could escape from the hubbub of New York, listen to classical music, and see the new art. 35 The sole image adorning the invitation for the opening exhibition of the museum was a color reproduction of Bauer’s c. 1929–31 masterwork Orange Accent [page 76]. Bauer’s and Kandinsky’s work continued to dominate the collection, with 215 works by Bauer and 103 works by Kandinsky.

One important newcomer included in the exhibition was the Canadian-born artist Rolph Scarlett, who was living in New York. Scarlett’s memoirs provide much of the information we have about the inner workings of the Guggenheim Foundation during Rebay’s Invitation for the opening exhibition of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 1939, featuring Orange Accent, shown on page 76 of this monograph

20

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tenure. Once Bauer was settled in the United States, he and Scarlett would become great friends. Armed

with a stack of preparatory drawings on paper, Scarlett would visit Bauer for critiques of his work. According to Scarlett, Bauer provided sensitive and insightful criticism, which helped him tremendously. Scarlett’s memoirs are filled with laudatory passages about Bauer, the man and his art. There is no question that Scarlett agreed with Rebay that Bauer’s work held the stamp of genius. His descriptions of the somewhat shy and retiring painter reflect the respect that each artist had for the other: [Bauer] used to visit me often when I went to lecture in the museum on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Often when my lectures were going full swing I would suddenly discover him sitting there smiling as if he was enjoying the efforts I made to make the visitors feel at home with his and Kandinsky’s works. Afterwards when the visitors had dispersed, he would seek me out, grasp my hand, pat me on the back and say, “Gut, gut. Tell me more I did not know.” Then he would laugh with glee. I think it was great fun for him to hear me trying to explain his brain children. 36 This joyful aspect of Bauer’s time in the United States would be severely compromised by a fateful decision in fall 1939.

BAUER’S FOLLY: THE CONTRACT Bauer arrived in America in August 1939 to a hero’s welcome. The newly freed artist stayed with Rebay at her home in Connecticut during his first four months in the U.S., after which time he suggested, probably to Rebay’s dismay, that

ROLPH SCARLETT Abstraction in Yellow Gouache and ink on paper 22 x 16 inches c. 1940

he would like a home of his own. In order to make his wish a reality, it was necessary for Bauer to settle his accounts with Solomon Guggenheim and the Foundation. Guggenheim conveyed to Rebay and Bauer the financial support he was willing to provide. In a letter from Bauer to Guggenheim, responding to Guggenheim’s letter dated November 14, 1939 [see Appendices E and F], Bauer outlined some concerns he had regarding the purchase of his work by the Guggenheim Foundation. “It is not clear to me whether the capital invested for this purpose is to be considered the purchase price of the pictures and is to belong to me or whether I am merely to enjoy the interest.” Bauer went on to discuss block discounts, leaving his estate to the Foundation in the event he was paid the cash price requested, and other matters. Perhaps the most critical point that the artist made in his letter concerned the word “output,” which Bauer was unable to find in his dictionary but “the translation of which sounds bad.” The implication of this wording, which Bauer sensed but did not fully grasp, was that Guggenheim was planning to lay claim to the artist’s future work as well.

A few weeks later, on December 9, 1939, Bauer signed the contract, which “he believed, because of Rebay’s solemn vow, was as had been outlined verbally to him.” 37 Not speaking the language and perhaps not wanting to insult his patron, who had just saved him from night

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22

RUDOLF BAUER

Opposite: Pages from Rudolf Bauer’s passport showing exit and entry stamps for his 1936 trip to the United States, reentry into Germany after visiting an exhibition in France in 1937, his departure from Hamburg on July 25, 1939, and his admission to the U.S. on August 3, 1939. Above: Bauer photographed in New York, c. 1941

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and fog, Bauer signed the document, even though it had not been translated into German. In it Bauer agreed to relinquish ownership of the 110 works of art listed in Schedule A of the contract, mostly major oils, to Guggenheim in exchange for the following: Payment of $41,000 to purchase a grand beach house in Deal, New Jersey; Cancellation of a debt of $12,400; Payment of the $7,000 balance due on a modernist body for Bauer’s Duesenberg automobile; Interest on a trust fund of $300,000 in Chilean Nitrate Sinking Debentures, paying 5% per annum.

The contract further dictated that Bauer was to leave his entire estate to the Foundation upon his death. It also appears that as part of this negotiation the artist was obligated to produce “ten extra large pictures special to the museum.” 38 Bauer, trusting Rebay, signed the document, purchased the mansion in Deal, and began a new life in America, complete with an attractive, Austrian-born maid named Louise Huber hired for him by the Foundation. Shortly thereafter Bauer began translating the contract himself. He discovered that instead of a lump-sum payment of $300,000, which he had expected, the contract provided him with only $15,000 a year in interest on bonds that Guggenheim had placed in trust for him. While this was a lot of money in 1939, it is decidedly not what the artist had expected. (At this Rudolf Bauer’s modernized Duesenberg

rate he would not receive the equivalent $300,000 for twenty years.) More-

over, at the end of Bauer’s lifetime these debentures, along with the house, would revert back to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

While one might speculate that Guggenheim and Rebay considered this trust fund approach a good idea, the fact that Bauer had signed away his life’s work for $15,000 a year, a house, and a car was too much for Bauer to bear. So began a frustrating and fruitless stage of Bauer’s life.

Crushed by what he perceived to be a terrible betrayal, he lost his will to paint. 39 At the age of fifty, at the height of his artistic powers, instead of focusing on painting, Bauer became a man obsessed with protecting his creative legacy.

Bauer disputed the contract, but details of the dispute and settlement are not clear. What we do know is that Bauer incurred a substantial tax burden ($40,000) based, ironically, on the assessed “selling” price of $300,000 for his work. The tax and resultant penalties alone represented nearly three years of interest from the trust. 40 We also know that long after Bauer’s death his widow left behind an estate containing mostly early paintings and a large body of works on paper, contrary to Section 3 of the contract. Mrs. Bauer and the Guggenheim Foundation

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Above: Rudolf Bauer and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti viewing Bauer’s oil painting Top Point Efficiency from 1931, at Das Geistreich Museum, Berlin. Left: Same painting pictured in a Baltimore Evening Sun cartoon, 1939

reached a settlement after Bauer’s death in which Mrs. Bauer paid the Foundation $20,000 to keep the pieces that remained in the artist’s estate. 41 Bauer’s library and some of his personal papers were eventually donated to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

We can conjecture that Bauer’s attorneys were paid in barter, as another substantial portion of his estate not in his widow’s possession was sold at auction in the 1980s. This group of works consisted mostly of representational prints and early drawings, with one small, highly sophisticated, unsigned oil painting titled Black Accents [page 88]. Its skewed horizon line evokes the surface of a faraway planet, and two ovals in red and purple suggest craters. A cold winter sun hangs over the horizon of this alien planet. What is most intriguing about this late work is that a circle with a cross in the lower-left corner remains unfinished. It is likely that Bauer executed Black Accents in the United States and, in light of his onerous contract with Guggenheim, left it unsigned and unfinished intentionally.

THE 1940S For more than a decade Bauer had been Guggenheim’s favorite artist and had played a prominent role as advisor to both Rebay and Guggenheim on what to collect. He was their man on the front lines, finding and purchasing some of the most important paintings in the collection. Numerous letters exist discussing how Bauer and Rebay would “share” advisory duties to Guggenheim. The museum was to be “erected under the personal direction and plans of

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Rudolf Bauer as the mastermind of the new era plan.”42 In spite of these plans, as his relationship with Rebay began to deteriorate, it became clear that Bauer was to have no say in the running of the Foundation that now controlled his art.

He began writing letters to Rebay and the Foundation, which were at first thoughtful and polite, but over time became less lucid, very dense, and more like James Joyce prose than business letters. Most of these stream of consciousness letters are written to Rebay and the Foundation, although he addressed a couple of them to Frank Lloyd Wright. 43 Below is an excerpt of a letter from Bauer to Rebay dated November 10, 1943 [see Appendix G]: Dear Missfoundation, It shall be drilled into your neglectful knowingness, that, after I worked almost thirty years now for the mission of Das Geistreich, which is my Creation and whose purposes, plans and ideas have been not only used, but also misused and spoiled and sabotaged and degraded and cheapened demonstrably by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Commission, I have been honoured and solemnized by said personification as a “poor simpleton”. . .

The intrigue between Bauer and Rebay, triggered by Bauer’s contract with Guggenheim and Rebay’s unwillingness to share administration of the Foundation with Bauer, reached Shakespearean

Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, and Rudolf Bauer at Hilla Rebay’s home in Greens Farms, Connecticut, c. 1941

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proportions around 1942. Bauer intimated to the FBI that Rebay was a Nazi spy. Rebay was investigated by the FBI and ultimately placed under arrest for hoarding coffee and sugar in her garage—the only crime they could unearth. Four days after Rebay was arrested, Bauer tried to “start a putsch” to remove the baroness from her position through an onslaught of letters to Guggenheim. This “declaration of war” was backed by members of the Foundation staff, many of whom were struggling artists too fearful previously to speak up against Rebay for fear of losing their jobs. 44 Lonely and isolated, Bauer found a sympathetic and willing companion in Louise Huber, his maid, and a relationship ensued. They married in 1944. This relationship provoked scathing letters and comments from Hilla, who referred to Louise in writing as a streetwalker and a whore. On behalf of Huber, Bauer sued Rebay for slander for the sum of $250,000. 45 According to Scarlett, when Rebay won the suit in 1945, primarily through the eloquence and connections of her attorney, Bauer lost the “struggle for power.” 46 The battle for control of the Foundation between Bauer and Rebay coupled with Rebay’s intimate relationship with her boss were no doubt an embarrassment to the extended Guggenheim family. Peter Lawson-Johnston,

Louise Huber, who married Rudolf Bauer in 1944

Solomon’s grandson and honorary chairman of the Guggenheim Foundation, has discussed openly his uncle’s relationship with Rebay. He stated that family members used to refer to Hilla as “the B” when he was a child, and that “B” did not stand for baroness. Lawson-Johnston appreciates Bauer’s work and purchased a Bauer watercolor for his private collection upon its deaccession from the Guggenheim Museum. 47 When Guggenheim died in 1949, the collection that Rebay and Bauer helped shape for over twenty years, and the legacy that Guggenheim had sought to establish through its exhibition, was at the mercy of the Foundation’s trustees. In an effort to emphasize his wishes, Guggenheim had included an adjunct but—critically—unbinding letter to his will. In it he stated very clearly: “It is my further wish that during the lifetime of Miss Rebay the Foundation accept no gifts and make no purchases of paintings without her approval, and that after her death the Foundation make no addition to its collection of paintings, unless they come from Mr. Bauer.”48 From the beginning of recorded history, men of power have sought to secure immortality through the art and architecture they commission during their period of influence. And yet projects not completed during their lifetimes are often abridged or cancelled by their successors.

This was the case in part with Guggenheim’s Foundation.

The creative legacy left by Solomon Guggenheim, while expanded since his death to an empire of five museums throughout the world, was shaped and shifted by his successors into a program at odds with his vision. There is strong evidence that the resentment held by so many against his curator, Hilla Rebay, and the jealousy leveled against his favorite artist—Rudolf

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Bauer—were influential in instigating a dramatic change in curatorial program. Three years before construction of Wright’s building began, Rebay was asked to step down as director and resign from the board of trustees.

Concerned about the trustees’ plans for the museum itself, Wright wrote to Harry Guggenheim, Solomon’s nephew and the new president of the Foundation: His [Solomon’s] fate seems to be to get what his trustees wanted him to want to get. The elimination of the curator he had in mind I sympathized with because it was only too evident she could not handle, with good sense, the affairs of the bequest. . . . But to eliminate the building also would leave his memory a matter for the jokesters and the I-told-you-so-ers. Instead of the far-sighted unusually gifted man he truly was, he will become a sad warning to the philanthropist. 49 The building plans were thus preserved, but the name on the structure’s facade would be different—perhaps the clearest signal of the museum’s about-face. Upon Solomon’s death, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

While one could assume the reason was to expand the mission of the museum to better and more broadly serve the public through both art and education, another, less altruistic and more personal, agenda was at play. Staffers reported a clear mandate issued

by Harry Guggenheim to downplay the significance of the museum’s founding director, Rebay, as well as Bauer and the movement they had dubbed the “Art of Tomorrow.” Only the work of Kandinsky would be exempt from this abrupt change in curatorial Film still from a 1941 newsreel of the celebration of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s 80th birthday, promoting the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Left to right: Hilla Rebay, Guggenheim, and Rudolf Bauer

direction. 50 We learn more from Scarlett’s memoirs: “When the new museum opened, I wasn’t invited, but I went anyway. I stopped at the desk to get a catalog and went

through it page by page. I saw there were no Non-Objective paintings.” 51 Scarlett continued, describing that Bauer’s works “had literally changed the face of art in the world. Yet they were put away in storage in the basement [of the Guggenheim Museum] where nobody could see them. Not because they are not good art, but because Harry Guggenheim hated Hilla Rebay.” 52 Bauer died in November 1953, spared the humiliation of witnessing the total suppression of his work from the collection he had helped to define. 53

THE ART OF TOMORROW, TODAY Art history is able to self-correct, as subsequent generations of curators, dealers, and collectors are uninfluenced by the power struggles that may have preceded them. 54 If the recent acceleration in the number of exhibitions that have included works by Bauer is any indication, then

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this generation is bearing witness to just such a correction. In the mid-1980s the Moderner Kunst Museum in Vienna partnered with the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin to mount a solo show of Bauer’s work. That exhibition led the Moderner Kunst Museum to add a 1924 Bauer oil to its permanent collection, where it has remained on continuous display. Since 1990 works by Bauer and other Guggenheim artists removed from view in the 1950s have been included in dozens of museum exhibitions and gallery shows. In 2005 the Boca Raton Museum of Art mounted a solo survey exhibition of Bauer’s drawings and prints, which included oils lent by local collectors. As we go to press, there are major oils by Bauer hanging in the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Thomas M. Messer, director emeritus of the Guggenheim Foundation, may have been prophetic when he said in 1987: “There was a time when the works of Rudolf Bauer

HILLA REBAY Rondo Oil on canvas 94 3⁄8 x 781⁄2 inches c. 1943

were exhibited too often at this institution. I believe we are now coming out of a time when his work has been exhibited too little.” 55

Louise and Rudolf Bauer, Deal, New Jersey, c. 1945

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Nearly three generations after Bauer’s banishment, the Guggenheim Museum has begun to reassess. In 2005–06 the museum on Fifth Avenue mounted a show titled Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, which traveled to museums in Munich and Murnau, as well as the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. A large group of works by Rebay and Bauer and an oil by Scarlett were hung with choice works by Kandinsky and many of the original selections from the 1939 Art of Tomorrow exhibition. Numerous major Bauer oils were added and given prominent placement at the Munich venue, Museum Villa Stuck, by museum director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. This show marked the first time that the Guggenheim Museum had exhibited this material on such a grand scale, giving hope that Solomon Guggenheim’s vision of NonObjective art might still be realized on the helical ramp in the museum that bears his name.

An artist and independent curator living in New York City, Steven Lowy has studied the work of Rudolf Bauer since 1988. He credits his mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Leo Steinberg, for opening his eyes to the mutable nature of art history.

Rudolf Bauer, Deal, New Jersey, c. 1940s

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NOTES 1. Quoted in Joan M. Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York: George Braziller, 1983), p. 29. Subsequent general biographical references to Rebay come largely from this source and will not be cited.

2. “Non-Objects,” Time, February 15, 1937, pp. 36, 38.

3. In a statement written c. 1954, Louise Bauer, Rudolf Bauer’s wife, references the fact that Bauer’s painting was the model for these two signature buildings of the 1939 World’s Fair. Bauer was never credited by the building designers. Louise Bauer’s statement is found in the Rudolf Bauer Archives, San Francisco, and is reproduced as Appendix L in this volume. In his essay “The Music of the Spheres,” Robert Rosenblum points out this striking correspondence. Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2005). Essay is reprinted in this monograph, see pp. 35–42. A 1939 Art of Tomorrow catalogue includes an image of The Holy One with a caption that cites it as the inspiration for the World’s Fair buildings.

4. Robert Rosenblum, “The Music of the Spheres,” pp. 224–25.

5. William Moritz, “You Can’t Get Then from Now,” Journal: Southern California Art Magazine 29 (summer 1981), p. 31.

6. The term non-objective derives from the German word gegenstandslos, an adjective often used by Bauer and Vasily Kandinsky to describe work not abstracted from nature but derived strictly from the artist’s imagination. See Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. xii.

7. Ibid., p. 296.

8. This incident was recalled by the artist’s sister and relayed to the author by Bauer’s great-niece, Patricia M. Geib, around 2003.

9. There may have also been less demand for caricature during the war because of strict wartime censorship.

10. Letter from Bauer to Rebay, quoted in Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 29.

11. Susanne Neuburger, “From ‘Sturm’ to ‘Geistreich’: Rudolf Bauer in Berlin,” in Rudolf Bauer: Centennial Exhibition (New York: Portico New York, 1989), p. 3.

12. See Bauer’s undated letter to Solomon R. Guggenheim (Appendix F) from the Rudolf Bauer Archives, San Francisco.

13. Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 28.

14. Krater has a double meaning, either crater (the Greek drinking vessel) or cauldron. It is unclear which meaning was preferred by the group. The entirety of the phrase then means approximately: The Craters, the High Mass of Art. Translation by Bernhard Geyer.

15. From Die Krater Portfolio. Translation by Bernhard Geyer.

16. Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, eds., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 56.

17. These letters are in the Rudolf Bauer Archives in San Francisco and are also alluded to in the Société Anonyme catalogue raisonné.

Two of them are reprinted in this volume, Appendices I and K. 18. This point remains a speculation based on what we have been able to learn from the various documents available.

19. Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 43.

20. Ibid., p. 58.

21. Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Rereading the Correspondence: Rebay and Kandinsky,” in Art of Tomorrow, pp. 88–91.

22. Neuburger, in “From ‘Sturm’ to ‘Geistreich,’” p. 5.

33. Conversation between Roland von Rebay and the author, 2005.

34. Faltin, Die Baroness, pp. 169–73.

35. At an opening of his work at Leo Castelli Gallery in the early 1990s, the artist Roy Lichtenstein confided to the author that he and his friends often visited the museum. They loved the quiet, the art, and the fact that the place was, in his words, “a little weird.”

36. Rolph Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul, and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum As Told by One Who Was There (New York: Midmarch Art Press, 2003), pp. 31–32.

37. Written statement from Louise Bauer, c. 1954, see Appendix L. 38. Ibid. This statement and the contract itself are in the Rudolf Bauer Archives.

39. There exists no evidence that Bauer ever painted again. Although Bauer never stated explicitly, the documents and circumstantial evidence point strongly to the fact that he “abandoned painting in 1940 to prevent Guggenheim from acquiring all his future work through a disputed contract.” See The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, edited by Jennifer Gross (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 168. Donald Karshan also comes to this conclusion in his Chronology in Rudolf Bauer: The Art of Tomorrow (New York: Borghi & Co., 1984), p. 45. In actual fact it was probably Bauer’s contractual obligations paired with his extreme displeasure in the running of the Guggenheim Foundation which together probably prompted this drastic course. Rolph Scarlett writes tellingly, “I do think Bauer was never happy or at home in America. To the best of my knowledge, he never painted anything here, I have no answer as to why, not even a guess, and he never spoke of it, but he must have felt storm clouds gathering.” He goes on to talk about Bauer’s careful response to Scarlett’s own work: “He took his time with each piece, looking carefully and at each commenting in German which the delightful young woman who was his housekeeper [Louise Huber, to become Mrs. Bauer] would translate. . . . He never suggested or even hinted at anything that might alter the spirit of the study, but with uncanny sureness pointed out some detail. . . . The deftness of his analysis and acuteness of his eye were wizardly. Later when I had finished the large painting from the study, how splendid it was, based on his suggestions.” Scarlett, The Baroness, p. 33. We might postulate that these pictures by Scarlett somehow function as the last paintings of Bauer.

40. Though there is no single source spelling out the exact circumstances of the Treasury Department’s case with Bauer, there is enough evidence in the Rudolf Bauer Archives, including an extensive summary written by Bauer, that allows us to have a sense of the circumstances and facts.

41. Faltin, Die Baroness, p. 249.

42. See statement from Louise Bauer, c. 1954, Appendix L. 43. It is unclear whether these quite lengthy letters were ever mailed.

44. Faltin, Die Baroness, p. 196.

45. Cf. Faltin, Die Baroness, who cites $250,000, as does Scarlett, The Baroness. Various other accounts, including Rebay’s obituary, cite $100,000 as the lawsuit amount.

46. Faltin, Die Baroness, pp. 202–08. For description of the trial, see also Scarlett, pp. 46–47.

47. Conversation between Peter Lawson-Johnston and the author.

48. Letter dated March 19, 1949, cited in Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 290.

Present author’s emphasis.

24. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, “The Art of Tomorrow,” in Art of Tomorrow, p. 179.

49. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Guggenheim Correspondence, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Fresno: The Press at California State University; Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 204.

25. Letter from László Moholy-Nagy to Rebay, May 1, 1938, in Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 112.

50. Obtained through conversations the author had with Ward Jackson and other staff members. See also Scarlett, The Baroness, passim.

26. Danzker, “The Art of Tomorrow,” p. 180.

51. Scarlett, The Baroness, p. 62.

27. Dreier’s Société Anonyme collection, including fourteen Bauer pieces, was eventually donated to Yale University Art Gallery.

52. Ibid., p. 43.

23. Lukach, Hilla Rebay, p. 80.

28. Lukach, Hilla Rebay, pp. 83–86.

29. Ibid., pp. 166–67.

30. Quoted in Sigrid Faltin’s film The Guggenheim and the Baroness: The Story of Hilla Rebay, 73 minutes, 2004.

31. Lukach, p. 166. For information on this event, see also Rudolf Bauer: The Art of Tomorrow (New York: Borghi & Co., 1986), p. 44.

32. Sigrid Faltin, Die Baroness und das Guggenheim: Hilla von Rebay, eine deutsche Künstlerin in New York (Lengwil, Switzerland: LibelleVerlag, 2005), pp. 164–65.

53. At least a dozen additional artists, including Scarlett, suffered from this restructuring of the collection.

54. One artist who has already benefited from this kind of reconsideration is Moholy-Nagy, whose work was collected in modest quantity by Guggenheim and who suffered a fate similar to Bauer. Ironically Moholy-Nagy’s career was resuscitated by photography curators and dealers, although the artist considered himself a painter primarily.

55. Conversation between Thomas M. Messer and the author, 1987.

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It is my further wish that during the lifetime of Miss Rebay the Foundation accept no gifts and make no purchases of paintings without her approval, and that after her death the Foundation make no addition to its collection of paintings, unless they come from Mr. Bauer.

— Solomon R. Guggenheim, March 19, 1949 (adjunct letter to his will)

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Opposite: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum catalogue covers, 1936 to 1939. Above: Bauer’s painting Points, 1936, on the cover of the catalogue for Innovation, une nouvelle Êre artistique at the Galerie Chanth, Paris, 1937

THE

MUSIC

OF

THE

SPHERES

excerpted with minor adaptation from The Music of the Spheres by Robert Rosenblum, originally published in Art of Robert Rosenblum Tomorrow: Hilla von Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, © 2003 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. excerpted with minor adaptation from “The Music of the Spheres” by Robert Rosenblum, originally published in Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim © 2005 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

A

s a teenager in Manhattan in the 1940s, I roamed from one museum to another. When it

came to the thrilling adventures of “modern art”—a phrase that then had the power of a

religious faith demanding either conversion or scorn—I was intoxicated by my first experiences, as if I had discovered a gleaming future that would shed the moribund weight of history. For one, there was the central shrine of this brand-new vision, the Museum of Modern Art, where I remember being overwhelmed with excitement by simultaneous retrospectives, of Salvador Dalí and of Joan Miró, held from November 1941 to January 1942. For another, there was the Museum of Living Art at New York University, where I was stunned by Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921) and Fernand Léger’s The City (1919).

Unfamiliar vistas opened, and as soon as I could, I began to read about twentieth-century art and listen to lectures about it.

In the midst of this rush of modernity, whose disciples’ names—Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Paul Klee—were becoming as familiar to me as the signature styles of their work, I happened one day to cross Fifth Avenue from the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street, and then walked one block north. There, at 24 East 54th Street, I stumbled into the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which looked and felt like nothing I had ever seen before.

With its inaugural exhibition titled Art of Tomorrow, this museum had opened on June 1, 1939, just a month after the April 30 opening of the New York

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, c. 1940. Painting at the far right is Bauer’s Composition 115 (1939), shown on page 87 of this monograph.

World’s Fair, a utopian fantasy in Flushing Meadows, Queens.1 Much later, I was to learn that Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay had been planning to put up an art pavilion at the Fair, in which a survey of earlier art would conclude with a vision of the “art of tomorrow.”2 This concept was in perfect harmony with the Fair’s own mission, whose leitmotif was summed up in what felt like an incantation of the words “future” and “tomorrow.” Prospective visions of every kind of mechanical and technological progress were perfectly synthesized in General Motors’ spectacular “Futurama” pavilion. There, like space-age Gullivers gliding weightlessly above a model of the future, visitors could see airplanes, skyways, monorails, elevators, and skyscrapers rendered in what looked like dustproof and germproof synthetic materials. The message was clear: this seemingly extraterrestrial civilization was soon to land on Planet Earth. After burying the centuries-old past, we would greet a

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thrilling new epoch, when the human race, once slaves of work and gravity, would be liberated. In every shattering way, and at virtually the same time, history destroyed these optimistic blueprints. Across the Atlantic, the summer months would become the ultimate prelude to the official outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Premonitions of this disaster may have been in some part responsible for Guggenheim’s and Rebay’s decision to withdraw their plans for an art pavilion at the Fair, where, like the other buildings, it would be destined for a short life.3 Instead, the public should be initiated to “the art of tomorrow” in a more secure, permanent, and already “futuristic” environment, namely midtown Manhattan. There, the Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller Center provided beacons from the 1930s that might guide the way to a new kind of architecture, art, and society. 4 It was amid a world of such myths and dreams that I first crossed the threshold of Rebay’s sanctuary for the “art of tomorrow.” Everything about the Museum of Non-Objective Painting was strange. The atmosphere was solemn, even pious, as if one had entered a house of worship. Fluorescent lighting, emanating from troughs in the ceiling, produced, especially in contrast to the spotlights on the paintings, a skyward drift. And the shocks continued. The paintings, usually in a square format that defied gravity, were enclosed like precious relics in wide silver frames, each one a shrine. Moreover, they were hung just above floor level, creating an almost physical sensation of being able to walk into cosmic dreams. The low hanging made them look as if they were miraculously beginning to levitate from the pull of the earth, poised on their way to a higher realm. This transcendental ambience was further enhanced by the rectangular sofas in the center of the galleries, comfortable enough to invite prolonged meditation and low enough to

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Rudolf Bauer exhibition,1939. Center painting on right wall is Allegro (1938), shown on page 86 of this monograph.

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make one aware of the tug between body and spirit, gravity and weightlessness. But then, as a further surprise, there was the music. I was sophisticated enough as a teenager to recognize that the two composers piped into the sound system were Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric Chopin, a pair that, in truth, still puzzles me. Bach, of course, was perfect, since he fit into one of the most often repeated theories that would justify purely abstract painting, namely, that if music could exist without reference to the real world, why couldn’t art? And for the paintings on view, with their total rejection of recognizable objects and their insistence on disembodied geometries that evoked infinite relationships of shape and space, who could be more appropriate than Bach, the venerated master of fugue, counterpoint, and thematic variations that musicians themselves often called “abstract”? Chopin seemed to evoke an opposing aesthetic of impulse and passion, an emotional scenario like revelations from private journals. Perhaps, I later wondered, Chopin’s music might have been deemed appropriate to the more molten, fluid style that, before World War I, had led Vasily Kandinsky to destroy matter with what look like heated emotions, finally emerging into a world without objects that would later crystallize into pure geometry. This early tempestuous style was, in fact, shared in the first abstract works of Rebay and Rudolf Bauer, who, during the war years, used the same launching pad for their own later voyages to the outer spaces of unpolluted geometry.

These cosmic reaches, in fact, were often documented by the museum’s visitors, who, I recall, had the opportunity to inscribe in a large open book their experiences of the “art of tomorrow.” I remember reading many of these testimonials and smirking about the holy tone of the converted, who, the scales having fallen from their eyes, could at last enter a purer, more spiritual environment suitable to their now heaven-bound souls. Visiting the Museum of Non-Objective Painting felt like a serene purification rite, sealed off entirely from the coarse encounters with the harsh and noisy material world that lay outside. Here, we may refer to Rebay’s own grandiose words on the occasion of the 1936 exhibition of the Guggenheim col-

HILLA REBAY Cheerfulness Oil on canvas 411⁄2 x 491⁄2 inches c.1949

lection at the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina, where not only “non-objective” painters such as Bauer, Rebay, and Kandinsky were shown but also such “non-non-objective” painters as Georges Seurat, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani. Her catalogue essay proclaimed: “Because it is our destiny to be creative and our fate to become spiritual, humanity will come to develop and enjoy greater intuitive power through creations of great art, the glorious masterpieces of non-objectivity.” 5 These non-objective paintings posed a challenge. At first and even at second and third glance, these looked very odd to me, since their vocabulary was light-years away from the kind of abstract art I was familiar with from the Museum of Modern Art. At the time, in fact, the Modern owned no Kandinsky later than 1915, and his later profusions of hard-edge geometries were

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rarely included in the growingly orthodox histories of twentieth-century art. In his foundationstone masterpiece, Cubism and Abstract Art, the catalogue for the Modern’s 1936 exhibition, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., usually the most tolerant and least negative of historians and curators, included only one postwar Kandinsky of 1921. After commenting on the influence of Kazimir Malevich’s and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s simple circles and straight lines, Barr went on, most uncharacteristically, to complain about Kandinsky’s new direction: “Subsequently, his work became more drily geometrical.” 6 Barr, however, then added that recently Kandinsky “has turned to more organic forms, perhaps under the influence of the younger Parisians, Miró and Arp, to whom he pointed the way twenty years before.” The clear implication was that with this new twist, Kandinsky might be resuscitated from a sterile land of abstract geometry.

In the 1940s, Kandinsky seemed to be divided into two parts: the early, fiery pioneer, soon to be the harbinger of New York’s “Abstract Expressionism” (the very phrase Barr used to describe Kandinsky’s early work 7 ) , and the later, passionless inventor of nothing more than decorative, ruler-and-compass patterns. In 1941, Clement Greenberg, whose papal authority in matters of good and bad was second to none, sounded the death knoll for the later Kandinsky. Reviewing an exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery, he wrote in The Nation that “the Slavic peasant colors which Kandinsky favors are rich and strong when brushed with the vigor and freedom of his earlier manner, but they become superficial when fixed with draftsman’s precision in dry, careful, spic-and-span diagrams resembling nothing so much as astronomical charts and patterns for dirndl dresses.”8 This, of course, elaborated on Barr’s terse judgment, but it also speaks for the negative view of late Kandinsky prevailing in New York from the late 1930s on. What was seen, then, at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting was completely against the grain, an expanding pictoral universe that mirrored Kandinsky’s late style, an unfamiliar language shared by, among others, Bauer, Rebay, Jean Xceron, and Rolph Scarlett. Bauer’s Orange Accent (1929–31) [page 76], used for the flyer that announced the opening of Art of Tomorrow, pinpointed this science-fiction world. Completely untethered from the Earth’s pull, it bubbled upward into solar systems invisible to astronomers, a territory these artists believed to be an extension of their creative and spiritual forces. This free-floating pictoral cosmos was so remote that one struggled to find one’s bearings. A galaxy of crosses, circles, targets, lightning bolts, squares, triangles, rectangles, ovals, L-shapes, plus-and-minus signs, concentric swirls, vectors— none to be calibrated by terrestrial systems of measurement—had been sighted through an imaginary telescope. The shapes suggested a cryptic vocabulary, new hieroglyphs that for initiates might be decoded as a key to a parallel universe.

This Brave New World, however, was virtually censored out of orthodox histories and museums of twentieth-century art. It would have been inconceivable, for example, to find a Bauer or a Rebay on the Museum of Modern Art’s walls. If such work, in fact, was ever discussed seriously, a rare event outside Guggenheim circles, the argument generally followed Greenberg’s complaints about the late Kandinsky, namely, that this was an art totally disconnected from earthbound experience or, as he put it in a damning obituary review prompted by a commemorative exhibition of 1944, that it “represents a misconception, not only of cubism and its antecedents, but of the very art of putting paint on canvas to make a picture.” 9 The more advanced styles of the Cubists or Mondrian, it was said, may have dematerialized our world but were nevertheless

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rooted to it. But Kandinsky’s “non-objectivity” was premised on nothing. Rather than being nourished by reality before ending in a distillation of empirical experience, it was created in so sterile a realm as to be still-born. Whatever judgments are implied by this argument, they at least underline Rebay’s faith in the “non-objective,” an awkward adjective that, as often pointed out,10 is a mistranslation of Kandinsky’s word “gegenstandslos,” first used in 1913 to describe, literally, the experience of a world without objects. “Non-objective,” in fact, would be more clearly rendered as “objectless” or perhaps “dematerialized,” especially since the word confusingly implies the opposite of “objective,” that is, “subjective.” But semantics apart, the difference between the artists enshrined as inventing the “art of tomorrow” becomes very clear by contrast, say, to the few Cubist paintings that were included in the Guggenheim collection by 1939. For instance, Picasso’s miniature still life of 1918, now titled Glass and Pipe, but then abstractly titled Composition, 11 might have looked, through non-objective eyes, like an exercise in weightless geometry, akin to Bauer’s and Rebay’s work. But as the language of Cubism became more legible, it also became clear that there was nothing that abstract, let alone cosmic, about Picasso’s little canvas. It was, in fact, rooted to a very material world, namely a hexagonal table that supports a pipe and a wineglass, objects that locate the painting among ordinary realities, here the ambience of a cafe.

However, it was not Cubism but the “art of tomorrow” that rapidly expired. Astonishingly, the works of Bauer and Rebay have gone almost entirely unmentioned in histories of modern art. As recently as 1996, Bauer did not even have an entry in the all-inclusive Grove Dictionary of Art. So it is that not only Rebay’s “art of tomorrow” is making a comeback but also the visual world of other artists who shared her transcendental goals. This long-lived style, in fact, was perfectly pinpointed in 1966 by Roy Lichtenstein, who, in his deathblow anthology of comic strip translations of modern art’s sacrosanct moments (Mondrian, Picasso, Abstract Expressionism, etc.), Modern Painting with Bolt, included a send-up of the non-objective look. Embalmed as a period style rather than as a living contender, this pre–World War II vocabulary of high-minded geometries is suddenly given, like Art Deco, the nostalgic perspective of history, a time capsule of another age that, gone forever, can be cherished from the vantage point of a new era.

1939 United States postage stamp depicting the Trylon and Perisphere. Stamp was found in the Rudolf Bauer Archives.

Looking backward to 1939, new constellations were then forming around Rebay’s religion of art. For instance, its vocabulary was shared by the utopian geometry that, for the vast public, marked the symbolic centerpiece of the New York World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere, one evoking a heavenward

Trylon and Perisphere, New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, 1939–40

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Original lithograph featuring The Holy One by Rudolf Bauer (1936), published in 1938 as educational material for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings. The Holy One was the inspiration for the Trylon and Perisphere buildings at the 1939 World’s Fair.

ascent to the future, the other, our planet in its purist celestial form. Rebay herself claimed, in the Art of Tomorrow catalogue, that this paired motif was inspired by Bauer’s The Holy One and although this specific influence has been contested, 13 the larger point is the community of form and vision that marks this vintage comparison from 1939. Here, it is also worth noting that Bauer’s spiritual geometries may later be reflected, in lofty ambition if not in direct influence, in an icon from the spiritual domain of Abstract Expressionism, Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963–69), in which the point of an upside-down obelisk touches that of a pyramid. This astonishing wedding of Egyptian archetypes of transcendental geometry already appears in Bauer’s Blue Triangle (1934), a fact which, if only coincidental, establishes a richer genealogical table for Bauer’s spiritual goals.

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Bauer and Rebay also expand into another abiding theme in modern art, the fusion of painting and music, a topic ranging from James Abbott MacNeill Whistler’s “symphony” paintings through Kandinsky’s color opera The Yellow Sound (1912) and beyond. 14 In particular, both Bauer and Rebay constantly chose musical titles—for example, Rebay’s Scherzo (1924), and Bauer’s Symphony in Three Movements (1930–34) [page 78], among many other works—as if they could capture the disembodied tempos, structures, and rhythms of the most abstract of the arts. Here, too, such elitist goals joined forces with another spectacle as populist as the New York World’s Fair, namely Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which premiered in Manhattan at the Broadway Theatre. This adventurous effort to bring the more occult traditions of synesthesia into the public domain fused the experience of program music—for example, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (1867)—with cartoon narratives. In the full version of the film, however, the more abstract music of Bach, also heard east of Broadway at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, was used as an educational introduction to this all-embracing marriage of sight and sound. Although this episode was subsequently cut— apparently deemed too arty for most audiences—it was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor with which the original Fantasia began, a fantasy that posed an unfamiliar challenge.15 Here the narrative was not about Mickey Mouse or dinosaurs, but simply about abstract colors and shapes floating magically on a giant screen, as if a painting by Bauer or Rebay had come to life. For that matter, much of the basic vocabulary of the still unborn art of the Abstract Expressionists was previewed in this theatrical fusion of abstract art and music, where Newman’s vertical zips and Mark Rothko’s vaporous color fields make brief appearances.

If already in 1940 Rebay’s and Bauer’s non-objective world could make their popular debut on the screen in Fantasia, it also began to reach backward and forward into histories of modern painting from which it had been excommunicated.

Top: Rudolf Bauer, Blue Triangle, Oil on canvas, 51 x 50 inches, 1934. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bottom: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963–69, Cor-ten steel, in two parts, 24 feet 10 inches x 10 feet 11 inches x 10 feet 11 inches. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and installed in the museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium

It is worth remembering, for example, that with all the recent research about Madame Blavatsky’s and Rudolf Steiner’s decisive impact on the origins of abstract painting, Rebay herself was usually omitted from studies of this occult flock, even though as a teenager, she was quite as immersed in these ethereal speculations as were Mondrian and Kandinsky.17 But the broader issue is that once Rebay and Bauer return from historical oblivion, they will become part of an ongoing dynasty.

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The context for Bauer and Rebay keeps growing. In recent decades, there have been important rediscoveries of the spiritualist impulse in the work of many forgotten American and Canadian painters of the interwar years, especially in Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–1950, the pathbreaking exhibition about Kandinsky and American abstraction that unearthed dozens of artists who followed the lure of an otherwordly art.19 Their tribes were legion, particularly in the American Southwest, where, in the same time and place as Georgia O’Keeffe’s distillations of a prehistoric nature light-years from the modern city, they sought inspiration in sublime skies and unreachable horizons. These mystics included Emil Bisstram, Dwinell Grant, Lawren Harris, and Raymond Jonson, some of whom formed, in summer 1938, the Transcendental Painting Group. Many of their paintings, in fact, were exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1940. 20 However, Rebay, with her passion for Bauer and her faith that he was the movement’s unique genius, soon turned against these mainly regional artists, who were gradually expelled from her sanctuary.21 As often happens in retrospect, totally different artists who live at the same time, here the interwar years, merge into a period style, whether worshipping the Four Elements or the Wheels of Progress.

The style promoted in Rebay’s exclusive community keeps expanding in every direction, including, most appropriately, the obsessive geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright, who began working on the museum’s spiraling, heaven-bound plan in 1944, five years after the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective Art. Today, revisionist trends continue to rewrite art history. Works from Rebay’s world are now sought out . . . revisiting the style of the “art of tomorrow” in its postmodern guise of “neo” and “retro.”

Following Rebay’s faith in eternal spirits, the once buried “art of tomorrow” may soon be resurrected as the “art of the future.”

Weinstein Gallery extends its appreciation to Mr. Rosenblum for use of his scholarship.

NOTES 1. For an excellent survey of the 1939–40 Fair, see Remembering the Future: The New York World’s Fairs, 1939 to 1964, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum, 1989).

11. See Angelica Zander Rudenstine, The Guggenheim Museum Collection: Paintings 1880–1945, 2 vols. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1976), entry for object no. 215.

2. See Joan M. Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York: George Braziller, 1983), p. 139.

13. Ibid., p. 12.

3. Ibid.

4. The architect of Rockefeller Center, Wallace K. Harrison, had initially contemplated including in this urban complex a building to house the Guggenheim collection. See ibid., p. 37.

5. Rebay, quoted ibid., p. 84.

6. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p. 68.

14. This major topic is surveyed in the important Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (Munich: Prestel–Verlag, 1985). For once Bauer, but not Rebay, was included. The theme is also being taken up in 2005 in the exhibition Visual Music: 1905–2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 15. The film was restored to its full, original length in 1990.

17. See Lukach, Hilla Rebay, pp. 1–4.

7. Ibid., p. 64.

8. Greenberg, review from The Nation, April 19, 1941, reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 64.

9. Greenberg, review from The Nation, January 13, 1945, reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose,1945–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6.

10. See, for instance, “Non-Objective” entry by Rose-Carol Washton Long in Nancy Spector, ed., Guggenheim Museum Collection A to Z (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001), p. 256.

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19. See Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–1950, exh. cat.

(Dayton: Dayton Art Institute, 1992).

20. Rudenstine, The Guggenheim Museum Collection, p. 701, exhibition no. 1940 (12).

21. Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, p. 115.

S E L E C T E D PA I N T I N G S

Untitled (RB0911) Oil on canvas 7 x 14 inches c. 1900–10

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In art, everything depends on the great, decisive moment of inspiration; to find the beginning, to divine the image without squinting aside. . . . The spirit of non-objectivity survives the non-spirit of objectivity, because it is in harmony with the rhythms of eternal life. . . . Rising higher and higher, man arrives at the plateau of the inexplicable, where he experiences the essence of non-objectivity. . . . For man, art has the same value as man has for himself.

— Rudolf Bauer

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Untitled (RB0362) Oil on board 191â „2 x 25 inches c. 1915

PAINTINGS

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Fugue II (RB0908) Oil on board 20 x 263⁄4 inches 1915–16

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Untitled (RB0196) Oil on paper on canvas 25 x 20 inches c. 1916

PAINTINGS

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Andante II (RB0188) Oil on board 241⁄4 x 33 inches 1915–16

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Andante IV (RB0380) Oil on canvas 241⁄4 x 313⁄4 inches 1917

PAINTINGS

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Con Brio IV (RB0907) Oil on board 191⁄2 x 27 inches 1917

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Furioso X (RB0919) Oil on panel 301⁄4 x 44 7⁄ 8 inches 1917–18

PAINTINGS

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Fugale VI (RB0915) Oil on board 291⁄4 x 37 3⁄4 inches 1918

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Allegretto VII (RB0905) Oil on board 241⁄2 x 311⁄2 inches 1918

PAINTINGS

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Con Brio IX (RB0906) Oil on board 28 x 401⁄2 inches 1918

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Con Brio VII (RB0914) Oil on board 291⁄4 x 37 3⁄4 inches 1918

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Allegro V (RB0902) Oil on board 231⁄2 x 331⁄2 inches c. 1918

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Allegro IV (RB0900) Oil on board 24 x 34 inches 1918

PAINTINGS

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Composition 32 (RB0917) Oil on panel 24 x 33 inches 1918

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Furioso (RB0909) Oil on board 241⁄8 x 331⁄2 x inches 1918

PAINTINGS

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Symphony 28 (RB0918) Oil on panel 29 3â „4 x 38 inches 1918

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Larghetto I (RB0913) Oil on board 241⁄8 x 331⁄4 inches 1918

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White Cross (RB0242) Oil on canvas 431â „2 x 58 inches 1919

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Untitled (RB0910) Oil on canvas 34 x 38 3â „4 inches c. 1920

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Larghetto III (RB0197) Oil on board 241⁄ 8 x 33 7⁄ 8 inches 1919

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Untitled (RB0360) Oil on paper on canvas 24 x 18 inches c. 1920

PAINTINGS

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1001 Punkt (RB0904) Oil on canvas 313⁄4 x 26 3⁄4 inches c. 1920–21

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Blaues Bild (RB0903) Oil on canvas 381⁄2 x 313⁄4 inches c. 1920

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Untitled (Yellow Cross) (RB0901) Oil on canvas 23 x 23 inches c. 1920

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Composition 121 (RB0007) Oil on canvas 36 x 30 inches 1921

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Untitled (RB0916) Oil and collage on board 25 1⁄4 x 311⁄ 2 inches 1922

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Untitled (RB0912) Oil on board 25 1â „4 x 31 inches 1924

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Presto (RB0001) Oil on canvas 37 1⁄ 2 x 431⁄ 2 inches 1923

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Circles (RB0357) Oil on canvas 301⁄ 2 x 411⁄ 2 inches 1929

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Tetraptychon IV (RB0243) Oil on canvas 511⁄2 x 511⁄2 inches c. 1926–30

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Tetraptychon II (RB0002) Oil on canvas 511⁄ 2 x 511⁄ 2 inches 1930

PAINTINGS

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Orange Accent (RB0509) Oil on canvas 511⁄ 2 x 511⁄ 2 inches c. 1929–31

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Purple Accent (RB0004) Oil on canvas 211⁄4 x 26 inches c. 1929–31

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Symphony in Three Movements (center panel) (RB0388) Oil on canvas 513⁄ 8 x 611⁄4 inches c. 1930–34

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Triptych 3 Allegro (RB0381) Oil on canvas 51 x 27 inches 1932

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Untitled (RB0376) Oil on canvas 511⁄4 x 511⁄4 inches c. 1930–32

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Fuguetto (RB0254) Oil on canvas 31 x 58 inches 1935

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Yellow and Green (RB0006) Oil on canvas 511⁄2 x 511⁄2 inches c. 1930–32

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Colored Swinging (RB0361) Oil on canvas 513⁄ 8 x 611⁄4 inches 1935

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Light Circle (RB0008) Oil on canvas 47 3⁄ 8 x 47 3⁄ 8 inches 1936

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Light Fugue (RB0005) Oil on canvas 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄2 inches 1937

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Allegro (RB0247) Oil on canvas 513⁄4 x 513⁄4 inches 1938

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Composition 115 (RB0009) Oil on canvas 51 x 451â „ 2 inches 1939

PAINTINGS

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Black Accents (RB0255) Oil on canvas 28 x 32 1⁄2 inches c. 1938–40

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SELECTED WORKS O N PA P E R

WORKS

ON

PAPER

Student Works Rudolf Bauer’s student works primarily fall into two subject categories: portraits and cityscapes (with the notable exception of an imagined chariot race). These pieces were executed with an attempt at heightened realism and an emphasis on detail. There also exist energetic sketches drawn from live models or in cafés and other public places, possibly as studies for future illustrations. The sketches evince a youthful spontaneity.

Caricature From the age of twelve until his mid-twenties, Bauer earned his living from caricatures and illustrations. Caricature drawings always exaggerate the features of their subject in order to mock or parody them, but Bauer’s caricature work is notably complex. Many are multiple figure compositions creating complicated situations that are quite humorous. These works, like his illustrations, appeared in many Berlin magazines and newspapers of the day.

Illustration There are many works by Bauer that, while they stand on their own as works of art, were originally published in conjunction with accompanying text. The text was generally printed below and, like today’s newspaper cartoons, worked with the image to offer commentary on contemporary culture. Bauer returned to illustration following a seven-year hiatus around 1922, when he was in his mid-thirties, stopping for good around 1929.

Café Society There is a decided difference between Bauer’s café society and the cabaret work. Less bawdy, the café scenes depict sophisticated and elegantly dressed characters. People drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and socialize. These works, many of which exhibit a German Expressionist influence, most likely served as source material for the artist’s caricatures and illustrations. More critically, however, they position Bauer as an important witness to this volatile period in German society.

Cabaret and Dance (including the first Die Krater Portfolio) Bauer’s cabaret and dance pictures focus on desire and sexual attraction. A keen observer of the human libidinal condition, Bauer re-created colorful situations that he saw as a regular on the Berlin night scene. Despite their lyrical content, these works often contain Cubist, Expressionist, and Futurist elements.

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Portraits Since Bauer executed portraits during a twenty-year period one can find examples of all his styles, from realism to caricature, and Fauvism to Expressionism. His portraits provide the viewer with a wealth of subtle knowledge about his subjects.

Nudes There exists a large body of nude studies in all mediums, including a number of lithographs that were printed in limited editions. While Bauer was teaching at Der Sturm school he likely had access to academic nude models and Der Sturm’s printing press.

Cubist and Futurist Works Cubism, in which objects are deconstructed into a flattened framework of interrelated planes, and Futurism, in which the attempt is made to evoke the fourth dimension of time through the suggestion of motion within the pictorial sphere, were two art movements that greatly interested Bauer. One of Bauer’s most compelling Cubist series depicts the deconstruction of the female form until it becomes unrecognizable. Bauer also experimented with a completely abstract Cubism in which there is no recognizable subject.

Expressionist and Biomorphic Abstraction The imagery and feel of these abstract works evoke turbulence and undersea life, or perhaps what one might expect to see under a microscope. The compositions can be dense, yet an abstracted space is suggested through the drawing of three-dimensional forms.

Lyrical Abstraction As Bauer’s work matured his line became more elegant, comparable to that of artists such as Picasso, Klee, and Miró. The compositions open up spatially, and the forms he created inhabit a cosmic three-dimensional space.

Geometric Abstraction Before 1920 Bauer experimented with a hybrid style of geometric abstract Cubism. Later his mature style was informed by his prolific experiments in lyrical abstraction. He began to pare down his imagery to pure geometric forms, such as the triangle, circle, and parallelogram. He placed these basic elements in an atmospheric cosmos, often in an effort to pictorially represent music and emotion.

World War I and Prison Drawings In 1938 Bauer was arrested by the Gestapo and jailed in Berlin. Against orders, he created dozens of Non-Objective works on salvaged pieces of paper while captive. That Bauer continued to draw speaks of his determination and defiance during this potentially spirit-crushing period.

Twenty years earlier he had shown a similar boldness against authority in his provocative images of World War I, many of which were also strictly forbidden.

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RB1929-Untitled Pastel on paper 19 3⁄4 x 141⁄2 inches c. 1909–14

WORKS ON PAPER

91

RB1933-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and pencil) 14 1⁄2 x 10 1⁄2 inches c. 1915–21

92

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1594-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and ink) 6 x 12 inches c. 1914–21

RB1259-Odalisque Print with remark (ink and gouache) 6 x 151⁄2 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

93

RB1598-Untitled Mixed media on paper (colored pencil, gouache, and ink) 83⁄8 x 91⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

94

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1257-Untitled Print with remark (ink and gouache) 8 x 131⁄ 2 inches c. 1914–21

RB1258-Untitled Print with remark (ink and gouache) 5 7⁄8 x 12 7⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

95

RB1589-Elsa B. Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and pencil) 131⁄ 8 x 9 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1910–20

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RB1506-Untitled (Hilla Rebay) Charcoal on paper 131⁄ 8 x 9 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1917–21

RB0040-Untitled (Portrait of Schiller) Mixed media on card (ink, charcoal, and pencil) 121⁄4 x 91⁄2 inches c. 1906–10

WORKS ON PAPER

97

RB1575-Untitled Pastel on paper 161⁄8 x 101⁄4 inches c. 1908–14

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RB1351-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, pastel, gouache, and ink) 213⁄8 x 151⁄2 inches c. 1910–19

RB0253-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and ink) 23 5⁄8 x 13 inches c. 1910–21

RB0246-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel and charcoal) 23 x 16 inches c. 1910–15

WORKS ON PAPER

99

RB2281-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, ink, and charcoal) 17 x 10 inches c. 1920s

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RB0383-Untitled (Rudolf Bauer and Hilla Rebay Boating) Mixed media on paper (watercolor and pastel) 183â „4 x 131â „ 2 inches 1915

RB2173-Untitled Mixed media on paper (charcoal and chalk) 24 3⁄4 x 16 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1912–21

RB2279-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 141⁄4 x 7 3⁄4 inches c. 1910–14

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101

RB1679-Schimmel Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, pencil, and ink) 12 5⁄8 x 101⁄4 inches c. 1912–17

RB2174-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel and charcoal) 161⁄2 x 22 5⁄8 inches c. 1910–19

102

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RB2168-Untitled Charcoal on paper 22 5⁄8 x 17 5⁄8 inches c. 1910–17

WORKS ON PAPER

103

RB1800-Unter der Lyra Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 16 x 121⁄2 inches c. 1910

RB1690-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and pencil) 13 3⁄4 x 10 1⁄8 inches c. 1910

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RB1799-Zur Geilen Kalhinka Mixed media on paper (pastel, watercolor, gouache, and ink) 17 3⁄ 8 x 13 5⁄ 8 inches c. 1911–14

RB1676-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and pencil) 15 3⁄4 x 9 3⁄4 inches 1911

RB1713-Zumutung Mixed media on paper (pastel, ink, and pencil) 151⁄ 8 x 12 inches 1911

WORKS ON PAPER

105

RB1801-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and ink) 16 5⁄8 x 121⁄ 8 inches c. 1915–25

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RB1219-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 17 7⁄8 x 7 1⁄2 inches c. 1912–20

RB1105-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, ink, and charcoal) 111⁄2 x 151⁄4 inches c. 1914–19

RB1316-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 141⁄4 x10 3⁄8 inches 1911

RB2156-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 171⁄4 x 121⁄8 inches c. 1912–17

WORKS ON PAPER

107

RB1811-Untitled (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) Mixed media on paper (gouache, ink, and pencil) 18 7⁄8 x 117⁄8 inches c. 1910–14

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RB1642-Untitled Mixed media on paper (ink and pencil) 171⁄2 x 12 5⁄8 inches c. 1912–21

RB1164-Baffchen Mixed media on paper (ink and gouache) 123⁄ 4 x 10 inches 1925

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109

RB1203-Untitled Mixed media on paper (ink and gouache) 111⁄2 x 81⁄4 inches c. 1920s

RB1353-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and charcoal) 23 5⁄8 x 17 3⁄4 inches c. 1914–21

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RUDOLF BAUER

RB1254-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 191⁄2 x 151⁄2 inches c. 1906–10

WORKS ON PAPER

111

RB1834-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and ink) 171⁄4 x 113⁄8 inches c. 1921–29

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RB2195-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 17 7⁄ 8 x 14 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1922–27

RB1119-Zwei Herren Mit Blumen (Im Knopfloch) Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and ink) 111⁄4 x 181⁄8 inches c. 1920

WORKS ON PAPER

113

RB1357-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 161⁄4 x 101⁄2 inches c. 1910–17

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RB1540-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 9 x 6 3⁄4 inches c. 1912–17

RB1953-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, pastel, and gouache) 17 5⁄8 x 111⁄8 inches c. 1912–17

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115

RB1544-Untitled Ink on paper 141⁄2 x 113⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

RB2623-Untitled Watercolor on paper 251⁄8 x 181⁄4 inches c. 1906–14

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RB1010-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, ink, watercolor, and gouache) 171⁄2 x 101⁄2 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

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RB4033-Untitled Mixed media on paper (India ink and China ink) 121⁄2 x 10 3⁄8 inches c. 1912–17

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RB4065-Untitled Ink proof master (ink and pencil) 9 3⁄4 x 51⁄4 inches c. 1914–21

RB1597-Untitled Print with remark (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 12 1⁄ 8 x 9 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1914–21

RB1557-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and ink) 14 7⁄8 x 111⁄2 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

119

RB1979-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, pastel, and gouache) 17 3⁄8 x 10 3⁄4 inches c. 1915–22

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RB4005-Untitled Print with remark (gouache and ink) 10 x 7 1⁄4 inches c. 1910–15

RB1270-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, ink, gouache, and chalk) 14 x 81⁄2 inches c. 1906–10

WORKS ON PAPER

121

RB1255-Seulement Une Mixed media on paper (ink and gouache) 151⁄4 x 91⁄4 inches c. 1910–20

122

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RB1643-Chat Noir Mixed media on paper (gouache, watercolor, pencil, and ink) 141⁄2 x 91⁄4 inches c. 1920

RB0378-Die Krater Study (Untitled) Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 151⁄2 x 10 1⁄4 inches c. 1920

RB4002-Die Krater Study (Untitled) Print with remark (pastel, gouache, and ink) 151⁄4 x 111⁄2 inches c. 1920

WORKS ON PAPER

123

RB2242-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 213⁄8 x 18 3⁄8 inches c. 1922–29

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RB4042-Untitled Print with remark (gouache, colored pencil, and ink) 191⁄ 2 x 15 inches c. 1920

RB1458-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 131⁄4 x 81⁄2 inches c. 1915–25

WORKS ON PAPER

125

RB1467-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and ink) 111⁄8 x 8 3⁄8 inches c. 1919–25

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RB1256-Untitled Print with remark (ink, gouache, and pastel) 121⁄2 x 10 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

127

RB4046-Untitled Ink proof master (India ink, gouache, and pencil) 81⁄2 x 7 5⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

RB4043-Untitled Mixed media on paper (India ink, China ink, and pencil) 91⁄4 x 7 5⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

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RB4020-Untitled Mixed media on paper (India ink, China ink, and pencil) 171⁄2 x 12 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

129

RB4008-Untitled Print with remark (gouache, ink, and colored pencil) 111⁄2 x 83⁄4 inches c. 1914–21

RB4018-Untitled Print with remark (watercolor and ink) 181⁄8 x 133⁄4 inches c. 1914–21

130

RUDOLF BAUER

RB4019-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache, ink, and watercolor) 17 x 115⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

WORKS ON PAPER

131

RB1092-Untitled Ink on paper 9 3⁄4 x 117⁄ 8 inches c. 1912–17

RB1884-Untitled Pencil on paper 15 x 10 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1920–28

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RB1077-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel and pencil) 17 3⁄4 x 111⁄4 inches c. 1912–17

RB1311-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 123⁄4 x 7 7⁄8 inches c.1912–17

RB1882-Untitled Mixed media on paper (gouache and ink) 14 x 10 5⁄8 inches c.1912–17

WORKS ON PAPER

133

RB4010-Untitled (Trauer) Ink proof master (India ink and pencil) 9 5⁄8 x 63⁄4 inches c. 1912–17

134

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RB4022-Untitled (Trauer) Print with remark (gouache) 171⁄4 x 14 inches c. 1912–17

RB4009-Untitled Mixed media on paper (ink and pencil) 151⁄8 x 101⁄2 inches c. 1912–17

RB4040-Untitled Mixed media on paper (India ink, China ink, and pencil) 17 x 115⁄8 inches c. 1914–21

RB1260-Untitled Ink proof master (ink and pencil) 61⁄2 x 12 inches c. 1922

WORKS ON PAPER

135

RB1221-Untitled Ink on paper 81⁄4 x 14 inches c. 1915–20

RB1331-Untitled Ink on paper 8 7⁄ 8 x 5 3⁄4 inches c. 1914–19

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RB1229-Untitled Ink on paper 10 x 81⁄4 inches c. 1914–20

RB1377-Untitled Ink on paper 12 7⁄ 8 x 8 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1919–24

RB0377-Kubistische Komposition Ink on paper 18 x 111⁄2 inches c. 1915–20

RB0382-Allegretto Print with remark (watercolor) 81⁄2 x 91⁄2 inches 1917

WORKS ON PAPER

137

RB1919-August Stramm Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 135⁄8 x 115⁄8 inches c. 1912–17

138

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1014-Untitled Gouache on paper 191⁄4 x 121⁄2 inches c. 1912–17

RB1051-Untitled Gouache on paper 20 3⁄8 x 8 3⁄4 inches c. 1912–17

WORKS ON PAPER

139

RB1175-Untitled Gouache on paper 25 x 18 3⁄8 inches c. 1912–17

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RB2662-Komposition 18 Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 20 x 26 inches c. 1917

WORKS ON PAPER

141

RB1143-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and pastel) 14 3⁄4 x 10 inches 1922

142

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1163-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, pastel, colored pencil, ink, and pencil) 16 3⁄4 x 121⁄4 inches 1924

RB2661-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel and pencil) 251⁄ 2 x 18 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1920–24

WORKS ON PAPER

143

RB1284-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, pastel, gouache, ink, and pencil) 19 x 12 5⁄8 inches c.1919–24

144

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1285-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 171⁄4 x 121⁄2 inches c. 1916–24

WORKS ON PAPER

145

RB0379-Untitled Watercolor on paper 13 x 8 3⁄8 inches c. 1924–30

146

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1150-Untitled Gouache on paper 181⁄4 x 111⁄4 inches c. 1919–24

RB0358-Andante Mixed media on paper (watercolor and ink) 10 x 12 inches 1920

WORKS ON PAPER

147

RB1154-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and pastel) 193⁄4 x 141⁄4 inches 1926

148

RUDOLF BAUER

RB0187-Untitled Pastel on paper 25 3⁄4 x 19 3⁄4 inches c. 1919–24

WORKS ON PAPER

149

RB1354-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor and gouache) 19 x 121⁄2 inches c. 1930

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RUDOLF BAUER

RB2028-Untitled Pastel on paper 25 3⁄8 x 191⁄8 inches c. 1920–25

RB0359-Untitled Mixed media on paper (pastel, colored pencil, and ink) 20 x 14 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1920–25

WORKS ON PAPER

151

RB1425-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, ink, and pencil) 101⁄4 x 14 3⁄4 inches c. 1917–24

152

RUDOLF BAUER

RB0371-Happy Mixed media on paper (watercolor, ink, tempera, and conte crayon) 171⁄ 8 x 12 3⁄4 inches 1925

WORKS ON PAPER

153

RB1216-Untitled Gouache on paper 171⁄4 x 12 5⁄8 inches c. 1917–24

154

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1152-Untitled Pastel on paper 17 3⁄8 x 23 3⁄8 inches c. 1920–25

WORKS ON PAPER

155

RB1151-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, ink, and pastel) 221⁄4 x 16 3⁄8 inches c. 1919–24

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RUDOLF BAUER

RB0385-Improvisation Watercolor on paper 13 x 8 inches 1924

WORKS ON PAPER

157

RB0384-Untitled Mixed media on paper (watercolor, gouache, and conte crayon) 20 3⁄4 x 15 inches c. 1925–30

158

RUDOLF BAUER

RB0370-Allegro Mixed media on paper (watercolor, ink, and pencil) 18 7⁄ 8 x 14 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1925

WORKS ON PAPER

159

RB1289-Untitled Mixed media on paper (colored pencil, pencil, and ink) 201⁄ 2 x 143⁄ 4 inches c. 1925–30

160

RUDOLF BAUER

RB1214-Untitled Mixed media on paper (ink, watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and charcoal) 17 1⁄ 4 x 12 7⁄ 8 inches c. 1925–30

WORKS ON PAPER

161

RB2235-Untitled (WWI) Mixed media on paper (pastel and charcoal) 19 x 111⁄2 inches c. 1914–18

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RUDOLF BAUER

RB2185-Untitled (WWI) Mixed media on paper (pastel, charcoal, and ink) 23 x 19 inches c. 1914–18

RB2227-Untitled (WWI) Mixed media on paper (pastel and charcoal) 131⁄2 x 121⁄8 inches c. 1914–18

RB2289-Untitled (WWI) Mixed media on paper (pastel and charcoal) 181⁄4 x 12 inches c. 1914–18

RB2176-Untitled (WWI) Mixed media on paper (pastel, gouache, and charcoal) 161⁄4 x 121⁄4 inches c.1914–18

WORKS ON PAPER

163

RB0206-PD 9 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 5 3⁄4 x 9 1⁄4 inches 1938

RB0199-PD 2 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 6 3⁄ 8 x 91⁄4 inches 1938

RB0215-PD 18 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 61⁄4 x 91⁄8 inches 1938

RB0205-PD 8 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 61⁄4 x 91⁄8 inches 1938

RB0241-PD 44 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 61⁄4 x 91⁄4 inches 1938

RB0234-PD 37 (Prison Drawing) Colored pencil on paper 61⁄4 x 9 inches 1938

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CHRONOLOGY

RUDOLF

1889

BAUER

CHRONOLOGY

Born in Lindenwald, Germany (now Poland), the son of an engine fitter.

1921

1904– Settles in Berlin and publishes elaborate 1910 cartoons and illustrations for several Berlin newspapers and magazines.

Writes “Manifesto of Painting,” which serves as the main text for the publication celebrating the 100th exhibition by the Der Sturm group. Graphic work reproduced in “Monatsschrift für Kultur und die Kunste,” also published by Galerie Der Sturm.

Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin.

1912

1914

Art dealer Herwarth Walden opens the avant-garde Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin; Der Sturm exhibitions that year include influential shows of the Blaue Reiter group and the Futurists. Bauer meets Walden, who will support his work for the next fifteen years.

World War I begins in August with Germany declaring war on Russia and then on France, following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

1915

Exhibits in Galerie Der Sturm group show for the first time; show features his Non-Objective painting. Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Marc Chagall are also included.

1916

Through the Der Sturm group, meets Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, a twenty-five-yearold baroness and art student. Bauer will greatly influence Rebay’s artistic ideas, and she in turn will have a profound effect on his art career.

1917

First solo exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm; includes 120 abstract works.

1918

Writes first important theoretical essay, “The Cosmic Movement,” developing a distinct theory of art that aligns the meanings of art, music, and cosmic forces.

Publishes a lithograph as part of a Bauhaus portfolio.

1922

Included in Société Anonyme exhibition at Smith College, Northampton Mass., and Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, among others.

1923

Exhibits at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as part of a Société Anonyme show.

Der Sturm publishes 175-page volume, Einblick in Kunst, Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus, documenting the 150th exhibition since its founding; the book includes three Bauer works.

1926

Included in the exhibition Grosse berliner Kunstausstellung.

1927

Hilla Rebay sails to the United States.

Solo exhibition Royal Palace, Berlin.

1928

Rebay meets the wealthy philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and begins a portrait commission. As she paints him she encourages Guggenheim to start a collection of Non-Objective art.

1930

Meets Kandinsky at Dessau, where he is teaching at the Bauhaus.

Has second solo exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm.

Rebay travels to Europe with the Guggenheims to introduce them to the Non-Objective artists in person. They meet Kandinsky in Dessau and Bauer in Berlin.

Exhibits in Der Sturm group show at Georg Kleis Kunsthandel, Copenhagen.

World War I ends in November.

Bauer founds his own gallery in Berlin, in part with funds supplied by Guggenheim, through Rebay, in exchange for paintings. He calls it Das Geistreich, which translates as Realm of the Spirit, but also means ingenious.

Co-founds the Novembergruppe with Rudolf Belling, Otto Freundlich, and Max Pechstein.

1919

Shares studio with Rebay.

Founds short-lived art group with Rebay and Otto Nebel called Die Krater.

1920

Third solo show at Galerie Der Sturm, which demonstrates Walden’s trust in Bauer and Bauer’s status as one of his most important artists.

Exhibits work in Rome as part of a Novembergruppe exhibition organized by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism and a friend of Bauer. Rebay also represented.

In America, Katherine Dreier founds the Société Anonyme; its fall exhibition, held November 1– December 15 in New York, includes works by Bauer, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and others.

Included in five Société Anonyme exhibitions, among them a show at the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.

1931

Produces a deluxe portfolio titled Das Geistreich, which includes writings on NonObjective art and reproductions of his work.

Lectures in German schools and universities.

1932

Mounts exhibition at Das Geistreich: Werke von Kandinsky und Bauer. Later organizes solo show of Rebay’s work.

With the rising influence of the Nazi party, Walden closes Galerie Der Sturm and moves to Russia.

CHRONOLOGY

165

1933

Included in the exhibition Modern European Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The painting Symphony, in the Guggenheim collection, is featured on the cover of the museum’s bulletin.

Selections from the Guggenheim collection are included in Le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, an exhibition organized in part by artist Robert Delaunay for the Galerie Charpentier in Paris.

1934

Exhibits again at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in Modern Works of Art.

1935

Publishes a manifesto, “Eppure Si Muove” (“And Still It Moves”).

Arrives in the United States in August. Lives several months with Rebay at her home in Greens Farms, Connecticut, eventually moving to a house in Deal, New Jersey.

1936

Guggenheim publicly exhibits his Collection of Non-Objective Paintings for the first time, at the Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery in Charleston, S.C. Bauer attends this exhibition, his first visit to the U.S. A solo exhibition follows at the Arts Club of Chicago, which he also visits.

World War II begins.

Signs infamous contract with Guggenheim, in which he unwittingly agrees to “sell” 110 works to the Guggenheim Foundation in exchange for a monthly stipend based on interest income instead of a lump-sum payment. Will dispute the contract terms and the Foundation’s control of his art for the rest of his life.

Returns to Berlin.

1937

Guggenheim collection presented at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Work is included in Degenerate Art show in Munich.

Included in Innovation, une nouvelle ére artistique at the Galerie Chanth, Paris; Bauer’s Points (1936) is reproduced on exhibition catalogue cover.

Large group exhibition, Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant, takes place at the Musée du Jeu de Paume (an annex of the Louvre for modern work) in Paris and includes Bauer; museum acquires one painting by Bauer.

1941– Included in Guggenheim Foundation loan 1945 shows at the San Diego Art Gallery; galleries in Massilon, Ohio, and Springfield, Mass.; Dallas Art Museum; Pennsylvania State Center; The Arts Club, Washington, D.C.; a museum in La Plata, Argentina; and Everhart Museum, Scranton, Pa. 1942– Rebay, still a German citizen, is briefly 1943 arrested by the U.S. government for possible Nazi connections (unfounded). Ironically, Bauer is allowed total freedom because he was rescued from the Nazis.

In Rebay’s absence, takes over briefly as the Foundation’s director, a role he has long desired. Guggenheim, however, reconfirms Rebay as director, when she is cleared of the charges.

Visits both Paris exhibitions, returning to Berlin after each show.

The Nazis order Das Geistreich to be closed.

1938

Is arrested by the Nazi government around March in Berlin and placed in a Gestapo prison.

1943

Through Rebay, Frank Lloyd Wright is commissioned to design a museum as a permanent home for the Guggenheim collection. This decision infuriates Bauer who had been led to believe the architect would be a German, perhaps a former Bauhaus instructor, several of whom are living in the United States.

1944

Bauer marries Louise Huber, a Germanspeaking Austrian woman hired originally as his maid. This fact greatly upsets Rebay, who insults Louise in writing. Bauer sues Rebay for slander. This represents the final personal, though not artistic, rift between the two, and begins to alienate Guggenheim from Bauer.

1945

World War II ends.

Second exhibition of Guggenheim collection at Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery, takes place.

Is released in July with the help of Rebay and Guggenheim and following two meetings between Franz-Hugo von Rebay, Hilla’s brother, and the Gestapo prison officials.

1939

Exhibition of Guggenheim collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art; handbook of collection is published, which includes 415 Non-Objective works and 309 works “with an object.” Collection has 215 Bauer works and 103 works by Kandinsky.

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, housing the Guggenheim collection and curated by Hilla Rebay, opens on June 1 at 24 East 54th Street in Manhattan, one block away from the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is called the Art of Tomorrow. The gallery concept and design are strongly influenced by Bauer’s Das Geistreich.

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RUDOLF BAUER

Rebay wins the slander suit against her.

1946

Included in Cubist and Non-Objective Paintings, John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis.

1947

Included in the second Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris; exhibition travels to Mannheim and Zurich.

1948

1949

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting moves to 1071 Fifth Avenue (where the current Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum now stands). Museum presents a group exhibition of its permanent collection, which includes Bauer’s work.

Solo exhibition at Galerie Valentien, Stuttgart.

1974

Solo exhibition at Galleria del Levante, Milan.

1976

Solomon R. Guggenheim dies at age 88.

Tenth Anniversary exhibition takes place at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

1950

Included in exhibition at Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin.

1952

Included in Evolution to Non-Objectivity, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Hilla Rebay is forced to resign from the directorship of the Guggenheim Foundation

by Harry Guggenheim and is replaced by James Johnson Sweeney. Subsequently most of the Bauer collection is relegated to the Museum’s storage.

1953

Dies of lung cancer at his home in Deal, on November 28, at the age of 64.

1955

Art of Tomorrow: Bauer—Kandinsky—Rebay, Exhibition of Non-Objective Painting takes place at Florida Southern College, Lakeland.

1959

1967

1969 1970

Solo exhibition, Rudolf Bauer 1889–1953: The Constructivist Years, at Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York.

Included in The Guggenheim Museum Collection: Paintings 1880–1945, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

1981

Included in Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm: Artist and Publications, La Boetie Gallery, New York.

1985

Retrospective exhibition, Rudolf Bauer 1889– 1953 takes place at the 20er Haus (Museum of the Twentieth Century), Vienna: travels to Stäatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin.

Included in Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

Included in The Twenties in Germany, CDR Fine Arts Ltd., London.

1987

Solo exhibition at Borghi & Co., New York.

1988

Rudolf Bauer, Rolph Scarlett, Hilla Rebay takes place at Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York.

1988

Rudolf Bauer: Bilder aus den 1930er Jahren und satirische Zeichnungen 1910–1930 at Galerie & Edition Schlegl, Zurich.

1989

Rudolf Bauer: Centennial Exhibition, organized by Portico New York, takes place; travels to Fiorella Urbinati Gallery, Los Angeles; Cologne Art Fair; Struve Gallery, Chicago; and Philadelphia Art Alliance.

1991

Solo exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne.

Included in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which travels to the Art Institute of Chicago.

1992

Solo exhibition at Hutton-Hutschnecker Gallery, New York.

Rudolf Bauer: Paintings, Watercolors and Grahics at Harcourts Modern, San Francisco.

1995

Included in Die neue Wirklichkeit: Abstraktion als Weltentwurf at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed

by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens with a group exhibition, in which Bauer is not included.

Wright has died six months prior to the building’s completion; Rebay is not invited to the opening.

Rebay dies at her home at age 77.

Included in Seven Decades, A Selection, at the Guggenheim Museum.

1968

Included in De Stijl: Circle et Carré, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne.

Acquisitions of the 1930s and 1940s, a tribute exhibition to Rebay takes place at the Guggenheim Museum and includes works

by Bauer.

Solo exhibition at Städtisches Museum, Wiesbaden.

Solo exhibition at Galerie Withofs, Brussels.

Included in the exhibition The Non-Objective World: 1914–1924, Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

1972

Included in The Museum of Non-Objective Painting at Washburn Gallery, New York.

1973

Included in the exhibition The Non-Objective World: 1914–1955, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, an expanded version of its 1970 exhibition; it travels to the University Art Museum, The University of Texas, Austin.

Included in Champions of Modernism: NonObjective Art of the 1930s and 40s and Its Legacy, which travels through 1998 to: Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, N.Y.; Mary Washington College Galleries, Fredericksburg, Va.; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, S.C.; Sunrise Museum of Art, Charleston, W.V.; Brevard Museum of Art and Science, Melbourne, Fla.; and Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Fla. Included in Okkultismus und Avantgarde, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Comprehensive solo exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne.

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1996

Munich, and Schlossmuseum Murnau; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

Included in Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Solo exhibition Master Drawings from the Concentration Camps, at Tobey Fine Arts, New York. (Bauer was never actually in a concentration camp; his confinement was in a Gestapo prison.)

Included in The Museum of Non-Objective Painting at Snyder Fine Art, New York.

1999

Included in The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900–1950, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

2000

Included in Four Non-Objective Painters at Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York.

Included in Hilla Rebay: A Baroness in Westport, Westport Historical Society, Westport, Conn.

The Art of Rudolf Bauer: From Berlin to New York 1910–1940 at Connaught Brown Gallery, London.

Included in Hilla Rebay and The Museum of Non-Objective Painting at DC Moore Gallery, New York.

2003

Included in The Omnipotent Dream: Man Ray, Confluences and Influences, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C.

2004

Included in European Art between the Wars, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, N.Y.

2005

Rudolf Bauer: Berlin Drawings and Prints of the 1920s and 1930s at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Fla. Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, includes many works by Bauer; it travels in 2005–06 to Museum Villa Stuck,

2006

Part of the Société Anonyme: Modernism for America exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; it will travel through 2010 to The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art; Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

Included in an exhibition of work from the Guggenheim Museum collection at Kunstund Ausstelungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

2007

Comprehensive solo exhibition at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

Advertisement from The Art Digest, 1941

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RUDOLF BAUER

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

A. Newspaper clippings reporting Rudolf Bauer’s first trip to the United States in 1936 B.

Rudolf Bauer’s hand-typed resume, c. 1937

C. Newspaper clippings citing requests for Rudolf Bauer to return to the U.S. At this point Bauer is incarcerated in a German prison.

D. Letter from Frank Crowninshield, Editor, Vogue magazine, February 28, 1938, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, asking to arrange a meeting with Rudolf Bauer E.

Letter from Solomon R. Guggenheim to Rudolf Bauer, November 14, 1939. Markings are Bauer’s own.

F.

Letter from Rudolf Bauer replying to Guggenheim’s November 14th letter, late November 1939

G. Letter from Rudolf Bauer to Hilla Rebay, founding director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, November 10, 1943. This letter follows several years of tension surrounding Bauer’s contract with the Guggenheim Foundation and disputes between Bauer and Rebay about the handling of its operations. Bauer’s artistic prose shows an adept playfulness with the English language, while it is also clear he is not a native speaker and probably is translating German phraseology verbatim.

H. First page of an undated eleven-page letter from Rudolf Bauer to Frank Lloyd Wright protesting Wright’s being chosen as architect for the museum to house the Guggenheim collection, as Bauer believed the architect should have been from the Bauhaus I.

Letter from Katherine Dreier, Société Anonyme founder, to Marie Menken Maas, filmmaker and secretary at the Guggenheim Foundation, about Rudolf Bauer in the Société Anonyme Collection and requesting contact with him, December 27, 1944

J.

Letter from Marie Menken Maas to Rudolf Bauer, January 30, 1945

K.

Letter from Katherine Dreier to Rudolf Bauer, January 24, 1949. It is unclear who has written “not to be answered” at the top of the page.

L.

Statement (fragment) from Louise Bauer, c. 1954

M. Handwritten letter (with typescript) from Louise Bauer to Hilla Rebay, c. 1955, following Rudolf Bauer’s death

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APPENDIX M

Dear Miss Rebay, This letter is almost dictated by a great spirit, who once was called “Bauer.”

Knowing full well the deep hate you bear me, I have fought this supreme command with all my strength and will power. But Alas, what is the strength of poor mortals compared with the spiritual power of the great genius.

There is so much Bauer voiced to me during his long and horrible illness. Most of the time he was bitter—He really died of a heartbreaking disappointment—but, there were times when he was gentle and mellow.

He would then speak of you.—The hard struggles you faced together, he spoke of Teningen, your home in the country. It left no doubt, but that this meant most to him, because, and this is the reason for my letter, he voiced the wish that his remains should be taken back to this place. If my eyes are blurred with tears while I write this, yours must overflow while you read it.— This great master must have loved you very much—that this was destroyed is pitiful. It was not by me, believe me, I really tried to have peace. It was the heartbreaking circumstance of fate to test us all. None of us stood the test.

We failed him while he lived. Let us not fail him now Miss Rebay.

If we keep our minds pure he will surely find that peace in the great infinite. That now is the Master’s Domain.

“Bauer” in time to come will be the beacon of light for all humanity.

But of course it was your privilege to know this long before now.

Thus I have at long last done the Master’s wish. The rest is up to you.

Let me know your decision. Bauer’s ashes at the moment rest with me.

In the spirit of Bauer, I am in all sincerity, Louise R. Bauer

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My opinion of Bauer’s work has evolved in a very positive way.

Bauer’s art—particularly his mature Non-Objective paintings, as well as earlier proto-Cubist works on paper—certainly deserves to be reevaluated and to be made available to a wider public.

— Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in conversation with Steven Lowy, during the organization of the Art of Tomorrow exhibition at the Guggenheim