Hilla Rebay convinced Solomon R. Guggenheim to collect non-objective art in the 1930s, named the museum, hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design the building, and served as its first director. She was then systematically sidelined after Guggenheim's death and spent decades near-invisible in the institution she built. Artnet reports that her own paintings are finally getting a show at Independent 20th Century, courtesy of Weinstein Gallery. The timing, coinciding with the Storm King announcement of a first-of-its-kind Ellsworth Kelly outdoor sculpture exhibition, is worth sitting with. Kelly is canonical. Rebay is, still, a recovery project.
The Institutional Memory Problem
What Rebay's story and Thomas Hart Benton's sanitized American idyll, reviewed in Hyperallergic this week as a vision of national life 'with its limits,' share is a structural problem in how art history encodes inclusion. Both artists had enormous institutional reach. Both are now understood through the lens of what they excluded or suppressed: Benton's whitewashing of American violence, Rebay's erasure from the museum she founded. The archive keeps score, but not always on the right subjects.
Curators Who Disappeared Into Their Institutions
Max Hollein, current director of The Met, has spoken about open access and the future of curation as a practice of stewardship rather than ownership. Rebay is the counter-case: a curator who owned the vision, lost the institution, and had to wait nearly a century for her paintings to be seen. The question her retrospective raises isn't just about gender, though it is partly about gender. It's about what institutions do to the people who build them. The building endures. The builder gets a footnote, if they're lucky. Rebay is getting slightly more than a footnote this season. It shouldn't have taken this long.