Watercolor on paper, c. 1945. 203x241 mm; 8x9 1/2 inches.
Provenance: Estate of Hilla Rebay; Gary Snyder Fine Art, NY.
In March of 1996, Snyder Fine Art opened its exhibition, Museum of Non-Objective Painting: American Abstract Art. Gary Snyder acquired a large body of works from the Hilla Rebay Estate, many of the works on paper spent decades archivally stored in flat files with fresh colors and immaculate paper. The Museum of Non-Objective painting was Solomon R. Guggenheim's precursor to his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art we know today. Under the guidance of Hilla Rebay, Guggenheim was a pioneer in assembling a collection dedicated to art whose objective was purely spiritual and void of abstract forms derived from nature. Rebay would become the first director of Guggenheim's Art of Tomorrow: The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, when it opened its doors at Twenty-Four East Fifty-Fourth Street in 1939. Hilla Rebay not only promoted the current practitioners of this new form of art, rather she convinced her patron to allow her a stipend to fund young artists who chose pure abstraction as a means for their voice. Lots 97 - 109 in this catalog are works by American artists who participated in Hilla Rebay's art experiment.
