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