ABOVE: Detail from Hilla Rebay’s Untitled (1930). Rebay, who was instrumental in the formation of the Guggenheim museum and a fierce advocate of non-objective art, will be the focus of a show there starting May 20.

The New York cog of the Guggenheim machine announced yesterday that it is opening what it says is the first show dedicated entirely to works by Hilla Rebay, who talked Solomon Guggenheim into starting his collection of non-objective art in the late 1920s when she was working on his portrait. She suggested purchases—Moholy-Nagy, Léger, 150 Kandinskys, among many others—and he did the hard part with the chequebook.

The show will display notebooks, sketches, posters, and other ephemera of Rebay’s career, along with complementary works by Kandinsky, Picasso, and Schwitters. About 140 of Rebay’s works will be on display, including some non-objective watercolors, large-scale paintings, and collages. It’s hardly her fault, but many of her works bear an unfortunate resemblance to soft jazz album covers of the mid-1980s. But they were ripping her off, not the other way around. Keep that in mind. The show runs May 20 to August 10 before hopping over to Munich and Berlin for the remainder of the year.

LINK: Guggenheim Museum: Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim

ABOVE: The “Flower Portrait” of William Shakespeare, named for the family that donated it to Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, is a fake, scientists declared.

One of the most famous portraits of William Shakespeare—the Andrew Lloyd Webber of Elizabethan Europe—is a fraud, British scientists and art historians announced last week. The Flower Portrait, they noted, already adorns the covers of many modern publications of Shakespeare’s plays, which will presumably need revision on the next go-round.

After scratching, soaking, lasering, and poking at the portrait for four months, the scientists found some chrome yellow paint in the mix, paint that betrayed the portrait’s 19th-century origins—not 1609 as the canvas says. Some art historians have always found the portrait a little dodgy, saying that it was executed in a suspiciously modern style, but now they have some hard evidence. Next up: the Grafton and Chandos portraits, another two iconic paintings of Shakespeare, will be examined using the same methods. They might not stand up to scrutiny either.

Ironically, all the investigation into these portraits is being done in preparation for an NPG show called Searching for Shakespeare, to celebrate the gallery’s sesquicentennial—150 years for non-latin-speakers. Looks like they’ll have to keep searching.

LINK: BBC News: Shakespeare portrait ‘is a fake’