Though often accused of being out of touch with the pulse of art in this country, the established museums often present traveling exhibitions of great artists who have virtually changed the course of world artmaking. Occasionally, they also present retrospectives of important but obscure artists who, for one reason or another, have otherwise become mere footnotes in our art history textbooks.
I thought I would start this catch-all topic to discuss all such exhibitions, as they are often poorly publicized in "Downtown" art circles.

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Hilla Rebay (1890-1967)
At The Guggenheim, Fifth Avenue @ 89th Street, NYC
May 20th-August 10th

She was a young Bavarian Baroness who lived and painted in Berlin in the 1920s when she met the much older heir to a vast banking and mining fortune, Solomon Guggenheim, and became his lover. Together they concocted a scheme to open a brand new museum in New York City they wanted to call The Museum Of Non-Objective Painting to display the work of such painters as Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Hans Richter and Jean Arp, among others. Rebay also convinced Guggenheim to have the architect Frank Lloyd Wright design a scandalous new building to house the collection, served as the museum's first director and gave financial support to many fledgling non-representational painters, including Jackson Pollock. The museum, of course, later became the reknown Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and contains one of the world's finest collections of 20th Century Modernism.

After her patron's death, due to a power struggle, she was removed from the museum's directorship and Rebay's career-- and work-- vanished into obscurity.

Rebay's large, non-objective collages which are part of this show, are not to be missed. And supposedly there will be a reconstruction of the first exhibition that Rebay and Guggenheim mounted in their new museum, entitled The Art Of Tomorrow and including many rarities.
For those a bit cash-strapped, Friday eves from 6-8 are pay what you wish.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: hatches,