Guggenheim Co-Founder Returns as an Artist: Hilla Rebay Gets Her Due at “Independent 20th Century”

Hilla Rebay (1890–1967) is best known as the German baroness, co-founder and first director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York — the woman who convinced Solomon Guggenheim to collect abstract art and who chose Frank Lloyd Wright to design its iconic spiral building. But before she was a director, Rebay was — and always remained — an abstract artist. Now, more than half a century after her death, her own work is finally getting the attention it deserves.

San Francisco’s Weinstein Gallery puts Rebay in the spotlight at the “Independent 20th Century” fair, running September 24–27, 2026 at Sotheby’s in the Breuer Building, 945 Madison Avenue, New York. Her non-objective paintings and collages are shown alongside works by artists she herself supported and promoted during her career: Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Alice Trumbull Mason, Paul Klee, Rudolf Bauer and Wassily Kandinsky.

Her work at the fair is offered at prices ranging from $35,000 to $850,000. The top figure far exceeds her auction record — $182,700 for the painting “Con Fuoco,” set in 2024 — a clear sign of growing interest in 20th-century modernism and in the women artists history unfairly left in the shadows.

“Rebay never stopped being an artist,” says Weinstein Gallery curator Kendy Genovese, adding that “creating the museum is perhaps her greatest collage” — an assessment that directly links her curatorial vision to her creative practice.

Born in Strasbourg in 1890, Rebay studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and was deeply influenced by theosophy and the work of Kandinsky. In 1927 she moved to New York, where she met Solomon Guggenheim through a portrait she painted of him. She persuaded him to collect some 700 works by European abstractionists — from Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Chagall and Calder to Delaunay. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in 1939, with Rebay as director until 1952; she died in 1967.

Source: Artnet News