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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
HILLA REBAY Women at the Beach.
Pencil, color crayons and watercolor on paper. 360x282 mm; 14 1/8x11 1/4 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Private collection, New Jersey.
Rebay (1890-1967) was born into an aristocratic family in Strasbourg (at the time a part of Germany) and studied painting in Paris, Cologne and Munich. In 1917, she moved to Berlin and was introduced to the avant-garde Galerie der Sturm, which was the center of the modern art scene in the city. While in Berlin, she also met Rudolf Bauer (1889-1953), with whom she had a lifelong relationship.
Rebay was interested in non-objective art, a form of abstraction that was rooted in esoteric religious beliefs and philosophical ideas of intuition. She believed this form of art was a cure for a world ravaged by war and the burgeoning technological innovations that fueled materialism.
In 1927, she moved to New York and was commissioned to paint Solomon Guggenheim's portrait. She took the opportunity to encourage him to collect non-objective art and became instrumental in guiding Guggenheim's collection. When he founded the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in New York, she was the first curator and director of the museum and chose Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) to design the now iconic building.
