The Fellowship by Roger Friedland

Author:Roger Friedland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

15.

SPACE LOVERS

COPPER MAGNATE SOLOMON GUGGENHEIM HAD been in no hurry. For eight years, he had housed his collection of modern paintings in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. In 1939, it was moved into a gallery space on East 54th Street. But Guggenheim was in his eighties, and he wanted to give his collection a permanent home. And so the job of finding an architect fell to the gallery’s curator, Hilla Rebay.

A redheaded German of Alsatian birth, Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, who liked to be called Contessa v. Rebay, was an artist and a mystic. She had first come in contact with Solomon Guggenheim in the late 1920s, when his wife, Irene, bought several of her paintings; the Guggenheims soon became like second parents to her. In 1928, the avant-garde artist grudgingly agreed to paint a very traditional portrait of Solomon, a collector of Old Masters and French primitives. But the voluble Rebay exposed the sixty-eight-year-old man to a new aesthetic—to the mystical ecstasies, as she saw them, of modern art. Guggenheim found himself identifying with Rebay’s beloved renegade artists. The son of a mining magnate, Solomon had pioneered a new way of extracting copper, only to have his own renegade idea rejected by his more conservative father.

Rebay’s passion for modern art was coupled with a devotion to Theosophy. To her, the two were not unrelated. She considered the painter Wassily Kandinsky the greatest practitioner of what she called non-objective art. Non-objective painters shunned the portrayal of recognizable objects—or even abstractions of them—in favor of rhythmic gestures of pure form and color. And for Kandinsky, at least, those gestures were based on Theosophical theory. His paintings, he suggested, were capable of inducing mental vibrations that related to cosmic occurrences. Rebay believed that such art could connect one to God, not as a divine figure, but as an energized pattern, a rhythm, a moving force. Non-objectivity, she wrote in one of her earliest catalogs, “will be the religion of the future. Very soon the nations on earth will turn to it in thought and feeling and develop such intuitive powers which lead them to harmony.”

On a trip with Rebay to Europe, Guggenheim saw an exhibition of nonobjective works. “Ah,” he told Rebay, “that’s what I want to collect.”

“Mr. Guggenheim,” she replied, “you’re much too old for that … you’ll only make yourself look ridiculous.”

THE CONTESSA FOUND most of American architecture monotonous and “inorganic.” For the new museum, she wanted to find an architect capable of something spiritual. And just as non-objective art did away with the artist’s illusion of three dimensions in favor of another kind of space, Rebay wanted a museum whose interior limitlessness would accord with the paintings she had collected. When a friend, the Bauhaus designer László Moholy-Nagy, suggested a series of European modernists, she replied that they “would never do for the work I have in mind.”

What would do? The answer struck her one day—literally—while she was at home lying on the couch. Suddenly, one of Wright’s books fell off an overhead shelf and hit her on the head.

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