The Baroness Hilla von Rebay died in 1967 after years of close association with Solomon Guggenheim, his collection, and his museum. Today, mention of her name is likely to elicit a slight smirk and some clever remark about “the mistress of Solomon Guggenheim.” Only occasionally will she be given credit for her almost fanatical dedication to modernist art at a time when it was unfashionable and her important influence on the collection that came to form the Guggenheim Museum.
I began Joan M. Lukach’s Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art[1] rally prepared for a biography that catalogued Rebay’s familiar eccentricities. But I hoped for one that did something more—that made some attempt to separate her life from her legend, to understand her actions, to fit her into the larger pattern of art and life in the twentieth century. I surfaced, in the end, somewhere between the two. In Lukach’s book, Hilla Rebay is an attractive, vigorous, zealous woman who, though evil-tongued and evil-tempered, though dumbly opinionated and unpredictable, if not unstable at times, contributed enormously to a great collection of modernist art. The inner recesses of her life, however, remain hidden.
Joan Lukach, the director of the Vassar College Art Gallery, was curator of the Hilla Rebay Foundation Archives of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from 1974 to 1982.. She is a careful researcher and obviously knows well the documents in that collection, which includes many letters to and from the Baroness. Unfortunately,
