R U D O L F B A U E R

W E I N S T E I N G A L L E R Y

W O R K S O N P A P E R

w i t h a t e x t b y P e t e r S e l z

Published by Rowland Weinstein and Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, in cooperationwith the Rudolf Bauer Estate and Archives, San Francisco

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Rudolf Bauer: Works on Paperat Weinstein Gallery, May–June 2010

© 2010 Weinstein Gallery. Rudolf Bauer artworks and archive documentation © Rudolf Bauer Estate andArchives. Additional copyright notices below.All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-9790207-1-1

Library of Congress Control Number 2010927152

Production and project direction by Briana TarantinoEdited by Jasmine MoorheadArtwork photography by Nick PishvanovDesigned by Linda Corwin, AvantgraphicsPrinted in the U.S.A. by California Lithographers

Weinstein Gallery383 Geary StreetSan Francisco, California 94102415-362-8151www.weinstein.com

Barnett Newman artwork © Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York, and theMuseum of Modern Art, New York. Letter from Alfred Barr to Mrs. Solomon Guggenheim, Alfred H.Barr, Jr., Papers, 12.II.3.A., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; image © The Museum ofModern Art, New York. Additional photographs: Rudolf Bauer Estate and Archives, San Francisco;Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York; Rudolf Bauer Papers, 1918–1983, Archivesof American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Hilla Rebay Archives, Wessling, Germany.

Front cover: RUDOLF BAUER. RB0567-Untitled (detail). Ink, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 91⁄2 x 8 inches. c.1918–25Back cover: RUDOLF BAUER. RB0565-Untitled. Ink and gouache on paper, 117⁄8 x 81⁄8 inches. c.1915–30

Never was I so impressed instantaneously as when I saw the first

Non-Objective painting, a watercolor by Rudolf Bauer. To get such

beauty from something that has been produced from the artist’s

own imagination appealed to me enormously, because in my

business career my object has always been the introduction of

something entirely new and created.

— Solomon R. Guggenheim

Rudolf Bauer, Berlin, c. 1917

DOCUMENTARIANS AND SURVIVORS 5

D O C U M E N T A R I A N S A N D S U R V I V O R S :

R U D O L F B A U E R ’ S W O R K S O N P A P E R

One of the really interesting aspects of Rudolf Bauer’s art is that his early career is domi-

nated by figurative work. He’s so well known for his abstract work that it’s easy to forget

this early period of his career. . . . And it’s interesting to think about these origins

because at the very deepest possible sense Bauer’s work is humanist. . . . This is the core

foundation of his work, and it’s important to remember that foundation when we come

to the later work. —Timothy Anglin Burgard, de Young Museum, San Francisco1

o spend time with Rudolf Bauer’s works on

paper is to begin to understand a little more

about this extraordinary artist and to feel all the

more keenly that his creative powers cannot be cir-

cumscribed by a single term like “Non-Objective”

art. It is also to understand the humanity and humor

that are integral to his visionary work. For Bauer,

drawing and painting on paper was never sec-

ondary. It was a constant presence in his life and art.

From the very beginning, Bauer made his name

and reputation with his works on paper. His early

caricatures were featured in popular magazines

and newspapers such as Simplicissimus and Figaro.

Not only did this represent how Bauer earned his

living, it was a key way in which this sometimes

reserved and private artist could best connect to

the world around him.

By 1917 Bauer’s career was beginning to flourish, and his works on paper were instrumental to this

process. His drawings appeared regularly on the cover of the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm.

Then, in the early 1920s, Katherine Dreier acquired thirteen works on paper and the oil painting

Andante 5 for the Société Anonyme. This collection brought the most important works of Euro-

pean modern art to the United States for the first time. Dreier later described Bauer’s impact: “We

had no artist in those early years whose work so appealed to the public.”2 It was also a watercolor

that was requested by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art (see page 6), to

be included in the museum’s important Fifth Anniversary Exhibition.3 He had been rebuffed three

years earlier by Hilla Rebay with a similar request.4 Perhaps most significantly, it was a Bauer work

on paper that first caught the eye of his longtime patron Solomon R. Guggenheim. As Guggen-

heim explained in a filmed press conference in 1941: “Never was I so impressed instantaneously as

when I saw the first Non-Objective painting, a watercolor by Rudolf Bauer. To get such beauty

Rudolf Bauer’s works on paper at The Museum ofNon-Objective Painting, New York

T

6 RUDOLF BAUER

from something that has been produced from the artist’s own imagination appealed to me enor-

mously, because in my business career my object has always been the introduction of something

entirely new and created.”5

Beyond their reach as ambassadors of Bauer’s reputation, these works on paper are also signifi-

cant as documentation of a complex historical moment. In the time period surrounding World

War I Germany harbored one of the greatest artistic revolutions of the 20th century. As one of the

youngest artists associated with Galerie Der Sturm, Bauer was in a unique position to engage with

the most innovative avant-garde artists of the time—the German Expressionists, the Futurists, the

Cubists including Picasso and Gleizes, as well as the Non-Objective world of Vasily Kandinsky.

Bauer integrated each of these diverse influences into his own unique work.

By the time of Bauer’s first solo exhibition at Der Sturm in November 1917, the Americans had

entered the war and Germany’s defeat was imminent. One month after Bauer’s second solo exhi-

bition in 1918, Germany had lost the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated, and the Weimar

Republic was born. Germany was sent into a state of disarray both fiscally and culturally. The peri-

od has been described as a fourteen-year-long New Year’s Eve Party, alternating between cele-

bration and recovery.

Unlike movements before or after it, German Expressionism and the avant-garde art of the

Weimar Republic was predominated by works on paper. Oil painting gave way to pencil, char-

coal, watercolor, crayon, and gouache. This paper revolution was caused not by simple artistic

Right: Letter from Alfred Barr toIrene Guggenheim requesting awatercolor by Rudolf Bauer forModern Works of Art: FifthAnniversary Exhibition at theMuseum of Modern Art. Above,the work Abstraction which wasultimately exhibited

DOCUMENTARIANS AND SURVIVORS 7

choice but by necessity. It was no longer economically viable for artists living and working in

Germany to do involved paintings on canvas in large quantity. There were simply not enough

patrons in the position to purchase them. Works on paper provided an opportunity for artists

to sell their art cheaply and more frequently with far less of a fiscal commitment on the part of

the collector.

The primary subject matter

of this art was the people

themselves. Works on paper

gave the artists an opportu-

nity to enter into the lives of

their subjects in a new and

honest way. As cabarets,

theaters, and brothels came

to dominate German night-

life, the patrons of and par-

ticipants in these worlds—

women and the men sur-

rounding them—became

the central subjects of

Bauer’s drawings. Karole

Vail, a curator at the Gu-

ggenheim Museum, com-

ments that much of Bauer’s

figurative work of this moment in Berlin fits into the satirical tradition of German Expressionists

like Otto Dix and George Grosz.6 The up close and personal nature of works on paper gives the

viewer an opportunity to see the essence of the individual. As a result of this powerful imagery,

simple drawings on paper ascended to the highest level of importance. The subsequent wave of

works on paper would go on to define the social and cultural evolution of Germany during the

Weimar Republic.

The oil paintings that were produced during these years were collected by German museums or

resided in the collections of prominent families. Soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Ger-

many in 1933, he labeled the work of Bauer and his cohorts as “degenerate.” The oils were

stripped from the walls of museums and private homes. Many of these seminal works of art were

displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. After that, they were sold at

fire-sale prices; if they did not sell, they were destroyed by the Nazis. This act made oil paintings

from this period even more scarce. Works on paper, on the other hand, were easier to transport

and hide. They found a way to escape and survive.

In addition to Bauer’s figurative work, he was creating completely abstract, Non-Objective works

on paper. It was in these abstract works that Bauer embraced the visual language of Non-Objec-

tivity as a way to awaken the human spirit and move toward a higher spiritual realm in art. It

appears that Bauer worked in both these styles of art simultaneously for about a decade, with the

figurative work informing the Non-Objective work and Non-Objective elements being very

Cabaret life in Berlin during the Weimar era

8 RUDOLF BAUER

prominent in his figurative works. In his Non-Objective works Bauer was able to take risks with new

techniques, materials, and symbolic forms. Paper was the perfect vehicle for this approach.

Although there can be no question about the grandeur of his oils, there is an intimate, personal

side to his Non-Objective works on paper unobtainable in the larger scale work. Some of the most

striking examples of Bauer’s Non-Objective work are executed on paper.

The works of Rudolf Bauer featured in this exhibition span from 1905–38. In that same time period

humanity witnessed the fall of the German monarchy, the Russian monarchy, the Austro-Hungari-

an Empire, and Ottoman Empire. The world felt the impact of the rise of fascism, communism, the

final phase of the industrial revolution, and mechanized warfare. Through all of this, these works of

art on paper were documentarians and survivors. In many ways we should not have this opportu-

nity: this work should have been sold or destroyed long ago. If not by the hand of man, then by

time itself. The story these works tell should have been erased, along with so many great things of

this period, but they survived.

After spending several months of 1938 in a Berlin prison, Bauer was released with the help of

Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, his former lover and Guggenheim’s curator. Before he fled

Germany for the United States he carefully stored his personal collection of works on paper. After

his exile to the U.S. in 1939 he would never see it again. This exhibition is the most complete over-

view of Bauer’s works on paper since they were put away for safekeeping more than 70 years ago.

ROWLAND WEINSTEINWeinstein Gallery

Left: RUDOLF BAUER. Römisches Wagenrennen von Ulpiano Chéca. Ink and gouache on board,111⁄4 x 195⁄8 inches. 1905;Right: RUDOLF BAUER. RB0589-Prison Drawing 186. Pencil on paper, 8 x 83⁄4 inches. 1938

NOTES

1. Interview with Timothy Burgard, Ednah Root Curator of American Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2007.

2. Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, eds., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1984), p. 56.

3. Letter from Alfred Barr to Irene Guggenheim, November 2, 1944. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives.

4. Letter from Hilla Rebay to Bauer, March 30, 1931, quoted in Joan Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York: George Braziller, 1983), p. 135. Rebay writes, “The Barr (sic) who isDirector of the new museum [MoMA] wants to do an international

abstract exhibition on one floor of a skyscraper which is known as the ‘new museum.’ It is sponsored by wealthy people and always very crowded. Right now Heckel, Kirchner, Rotluff, Nolde, Kokoschka, Hofer (very good), Dix, Grosz, Klee, Belling, Sintenis and similar sculptors are exhibited there. They had also wanted to borrow Kandinskys and watercolors by you from Guggi [Guggen-heim] and me, but I said: refuse, that is no company for you.”

5. Quoted from footage included as part of the 2009 Guggenheim-published DVD “Art, Architecture, and Innovation: Celebrating the Guggenheim Museum,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, N.Y.

6. Interview with Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggen-heim Museum, 2007.

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 9

R U D O L F B A U E R R E V I S I T E D

Peter Selz

well remember the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on East 54th Street in Manhattan.

There, Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Collection, formerly housed in his suite in the Plaza Hotel,

was exhibited in stately ambience of luxury. The paintings, mostly by Vasily Kandinsky and

Rudolf Bauer were set in wide silver-colored frames, hung on gray velour walls, and displayed at

knee-height, close to the floor, which was covered with matching thick gray carpet. The paint-

ings were lit with newly invented fluorescent tubes. Music by Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven was

piped into this temple of art. At certain unannounced times the Baroness Hilla von Rebay, the

Museum’s director and curator, would appear and inform the public that modern art from

Manet to Picasso—as exhibited in the nearby Museum of Modern Art—was essentially a prepa-

ration for the great Non-Objective art of the future as exemplified by Kandinsky and Bauer. In

1939, MoMA inaugurated its new building on 53rd Street with an exhibition entitled Art in Our

Time, but the Guggenheim trumped this with its exhibition The Art of Tomorrow, in accordance

with the appellation of the New York 1939 World’s Fair, named World of Tomorrow. I was twenty

years old at the time, having arrived from Munich three years earlier, and was somewhat

familiar with Kandinsky. But who was Bauer, whose large paintings of rhythmic movement and

strong flowing color, were prominently featured in this new museum? I was greatly impressed by

The Art of Tomorrow.

I

Rudolf Bauer paintings in the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York

10 RUDOLF BAUER

Rudolf Bauer was born in 1889 in a small town in eastern

Germany, which is now part of Poland. In 1904, he settled

in Berlin, and like Lyonel Feininger, who, when he first

arrived in Berlin, supported himself by sending comic strips

to American and German newspapers, and George Grosz,

who made caricatures for Esquire magazine, Bauer earned

his living by producing cartoons for several of the humor

magazines which were so prevalent at the time. He was a

talented and highly skilled draftsman who would make

drawings with appropriate captions, satirizing the world of

fashion, the military, the upper classes, the lower classes,

the intelligentsia, etc. In many of his caricatures the comic

and the satirical interact. There are delightful drawings of

people disporting themselves in scant clothing on the

beach and there are clowns and circus scenes. Bauer

liked to draw pictures of women with their bosoms partially

or fully exposed, encountering strolling gentlemen or

seductive hookers walking the streets of Berlin, as well as

pictures of elegant soirées and hunting parties, drawings of

people on their way to the opera and of ordinary types

with large mugs of beer. He drew excellent portraits, including the copy, done in ink and

gouache, of the portrait of Friedrich von Schiller, which used to hang in our classrooms in

Germany. Bauer continued producing caricatures even after he ridiculed army officers and

depicted soldiers shooting from their foxholes. As time went on, he made drawings in which he

incorporated Cubo-Futurist elements. In these works, sometimes caustic and sarcastic, Bauer

caricatured an epoch. And not all his drawings were humorous. He thought well enough of his

caricatures to have them installed in an upstairs room of his own museum, Das Geistreich, in the

early 1930s, where they honored the walls surrounding a billiards table and modernist furniture.

In 1912 Rudolf Bauer came into his own when he encoun-

tered Herwarth Walden and his Sturm circle and saw paint-

ings by Kandinsky and the Italian Futurists. Walden was a

great impresario and propagator of new ideas. When many

of the old bourgeois values began to crumble in the 20th

century, a deep-seated antagonism against foreign culture

re-emerged in Wilhelmine Germany and it took extraordi-

nary courage on Walden’s part to open the gates to inter-

national modernism. Herwarth Walden was a man who,

through his prodigious energy and enthusiasm and the

hydra-headed organization which he created, became the

catalyst of expressionism in all its guises and of the modern

movement in general. He started his enterprise with a jour-

nal, Der Sturm, which among many of its contributors pub-

lished works by August Strindberg, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, andRUDOLF BAUER. Portrait of Schiller.Ink and gouache on board,111⁄4 x 195⁄8 inches. 1905

Rudolf Bauer as a young man

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 11

Heinrich Mann. When he first saw paintings by Oskar Kokoschka he brought the young artist

from Vienna to Berlin and began printing his work, followed soon thereafter with reproducing

paintings by the Brücke artists, who had just arrived in Berlin from Dresden. In 1912 Walden

decided to organize the first of hundreds of Sturm exhibitions in his rooms on the Potsdamer

Strasse. He added the Munich painters of the Blue Rider to his stable and adopted many of

Kandinsky’s ideas about art as well as exhibiting his paintings. Walden introduced the Futurists to

Germany, showing their revolutionary paintings and printing their manifesto. Then, in 1913, he

created the First German Autumn Salon, which was the first international exhibition embracing

all the new trends in art. From France there were paintings by Chagall, the Delaunays, Léger,

Picabia; from Italy, all the Futurists; from Russia, the Burliuks, Natalie Goncharova, and Michael

Larionoff; Mondrian from the Netherlands; and Klee from Switzerland. America was represented

by Lyonel Feininger and Marsden Hartley. Unlike the Armory Show which was mounted in New

York the same year and included the moderns among mostly traditional artists, the Sturm exhibi-

tion was a great manifestation of what the Guggenheim Collection called years later the “Art

of Tomorrow.” The Sturm continued its progressive program during and after the War: there

were the “Sturmabende” with lectures and poetry readings; there was the “Sturmschule” which

provided training in stage design, poetry, music, as well as painting, and also jobs for young

artists like Bauer. The Sturm publishing house issued the writings of Kandinsky, Apollinaire, and

others—texts that became seminal to the writings by Bauer and Rebay. During the early years of

the Weimar Republic, Walden continued to sponsor artists—Max Ernst, Georg Muche, Kurt

Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, as well as Rudolf Bauer.

Bauer must have been inspired when he saw the first Sturm exhibition in 1912, and soon

became part of Walden’s circle. It was there, in 1916, that he first met Hilla Rebay von Ehren-

wiesen, and began a life-long, stormy relationship. Bauer’s first design of the cover of the

monthly Sturm magazine in May 1917 was in a Cubist style, while the October cover was more

fluid and organic. It was in the fall of 1917 that he had his first solo exhibition in the Sturm gallery,

which consisted of 120 abstract oil, gouaches, watercolors, drawings, and lithographs. He wrote

an introductory text which insisted on a total separation between art and nature and stressed

Interior rooms of Das Geistreich, Berlin

12 RUDOLF BAUER

that the expression of feelings and emo-

tions was the essence of true works of art.

He also affirmed the equivalence of music

and art. For that reason he gave musical

titles, such as Allegretto, Fugal, Presto, Sin-

fonie, to his canvases in which dynamic

floods of strong color gyrate over the sur-

face in energetic movement. Theodor

Däubler, poet and eminent critic, wrote

with great insight in the Berliner Börsen-

Courier, “Kandinsky is the first artist, after a

long struggle, to discard the object. Bauer

was able to instantly produce composi-

tions of painterly-musical feeling. In tem-

perament the significant Russian and the

young German are very different. With

Kandinsky there is an unexpected blos-

soming of totally new visions of color.

Bauer is close to Cubism and transforms his

musical dreams into color. . . . Compared

to Kandinsky, his work is more tactile, almost

sculptural in character.”

In 1918 Bauer had his second solo Sturm

exhibition. On that occasion he con-

tributed his essay “The Cosmic Movement”

to Walden’s book Expressionism—The Turn-

ing Point. In his article Bauer emphasizes

again the primacy of feeling in the cre-

ative act and proceeds to illustrate graph-

ically ways and means to express different

emotions such as calm, restlessness, anger,

and doubt by judicious use of line and

color. Here he anticipates Kandinsky’s

treatise Point and Line to Plane, published

by the Bauhaus in 1926, and even Rudolf

Arnheim’s more sophisticated text on

the grammar of form, based on Gestalt

psychology.

In 1918, Germany, having lost the War,

compelled the Kaiser to abdicate and

proclaimed a republic. Artists, in response

to the putative November Revolution,Der Sturm magazine covers featuring work by Rudolf Bauer

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 13

formed the Novembergruppe of painters, sculp-

tors, writers, and architects, in the hope of

bringing about a coherent association for a

renewal of creative endeavor. Bauer found

himself to be among the 22 artists, including

Kokoschka, Otto Mueller, Erich Mendelsohn and

Max Pechstein, who attended the first meeting

in Berlin. Bauer, however, was never active

politically during these times of turmoil. The

extensive correspondence between Bauer and

Rebay also mentions many of the German

Dadaists. Richard Hülsenbeck, George Grosz,

and Max Ernst were among his acquaintances.

He writes about attending the infamous Dada

Fair in Berlin and meeting Kurt Schwitters, who

wrote an aleatoric chance poem, “Portrait of

Rudolf Bauer,” which in his collagist Merz lan-

guage concludes: “Crackle whirlyfishes first it

lets itself be twirled around.” Bauer, however,

stayed aloof from the Dadaists, as he did from

political art, as he was primarily concerned with

his own work and career.

Rudolf Bauer with a group of fellow artists from the “Abstraction” section of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, c. 1926.Photo published in the newspaper Der Welt Spiegel

Page from Rudolf Bauer’s 1918 essay “The CosmicMovement”

14 RUDOLF BAUER

Bauer’s Non-Objective work intrigued Katherine Dreier, whose Société Anonyme included it in its

first exhibition in 1920. This was Bauer’s first contact with the American art world. Dreier, with the

guidance of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, picked up the banner for modern art after Alfred

Stieglitz had closed his 291 Gallery in 1917. The Societé Anonyme, which exhibited and acquired

some of the best modern European and American art, was the first museum of modern art and

it exhibited Bauer’s work again in 1921 and 1928. It was a floating museum without a permanent

home, mounting important shows in Brooklyn, Worcester, MA, and Detroit, and it was finally

donated to the Yale Art Gallery in 1941. In a letter to Bauer in 1949, Dreier reminded the painter

that his work was in her collection and ended cogently: “I hope this does not mean that you

have given up your painting, though that can easily happen.” As, indeed it did.

In the 1920s and 30s, as Bauer continued to explore the possibilities and opportunities of Non-

Objective art, his paintings and watercolors, like Kandinsky’s, became more geometric.

Solomon R. Guggenheim began to purchase paintings by Bauer under the counsel of Hilla

Rebay, who had painted Guggenheim’s portrait in 1928. In addition to acquiring paintings by

Bauer, Guggenheim also appointed him as his agent for the acquisition of abstract paintings by

leading European artists. In 1930 Bauer was able to establish his own private museum of Non-

Objective painting in Berlin which he called Das Geistreich (“The Realm of the Spirit”). It was

meant to be a temple of the art of the future with paintings by Kandinsky, Rebay, and many of

Bauer’s own. The villa was surrounded by a park and became a fashionable salon. In a report in

the Berliner Tageblatt (March 8, 1934) we read about a tea party for a small circle of the elite,

Das Geistreich, Berlin

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 15

which included a princess, a state secretary, a field marshal, and various aristocrats. In 1930,

Bauer took a trip to Dessau to finally meet Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. He also began to enjoy an

international reputation. His painting Symphony (c. 1929) from the Guggenheim Collection was

featured on the cover of the October 1933 Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, announcing

the Museum’s exhibition of Cubism and Abstract Art. The following year a Bauer painting was

included in the Museum’s important show Modern Works of Art: Fifth Anniversary Exhibition.

Two years later Rebay

organized a traveling

exhibition of the Gug-

genheim Collection which

opened in Charleston,

South Carolina, and went

on to Philadelphia, Balti-

more, and Chicago.

Bauer himself came to

America to see the exhi-

bition in which he was

represented with sixty

paintings. Among other

artists in this initial show

were Kandinsky, Rebay,

Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee,

and Albert Gleizes. In

1937, after returning from

Paris where several of his

paintings were included in an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, he found that the Nazis had

closed Das Geistreich and, having been denounced by a Nazi member of his family, he was

arrested by the Gestapo in 1938, for being a “Degenerate Artist” and for speculating in foreign

currency. During his time in jail the painter produced a series of remarkable geometric drawings.

It took the intervention of Bauer’s friend and mentor F.T. Marinetti, members of the von Rebay

family, as well as lawyers and dollars from Guggenheim to have him released, and in 1939 he

sailed for the U.S., never to return to Germany.

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in its own location in New York in June 1939. The

gallery concept and design were in keeping with Bauer’s Geistreich. The permanent collection

included Moholy-Nagy, Balcomb Greene, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Rolph Scarlett,

Maria Vieira da Silva, Jean Xceron, and, of course, Hilla von Rebay, a large number of Kandin-

skys, as well as 215 Rudolf Bauers. It constituted a major collection of mostly Non-Objective

work. Under Rebay’s direction, it also presented 74 temporary shows and numerous traveling

exhibitions between 1939 and 1952. The list of artists in these exhibitions constitutes a compendium

of just about all of the European and American modernists. The temporary space on 54th Street

was also the venue of lectures and of abstract films by Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Norman

McLaren, Hans Richter, James Whitney, and Thomas Wilfred.

RUDOLF BAUER. Sinfonie 23. Oil on canvas, 291⁄2 x 391⁄2 inches. 1919

16 RUDOLF BAUER

Rudolf Bauer’s painting, The Holy One (Red Point) (1936) with its tall red pyramid standing next to

a large yellow circle, was featured on the cover of the Guggenheim Collection’s catalogue for

the second Charleston show (1938) and again appeared as the frontispiece of the first NY show.

It was undoubtedly the inspiration for Wallace Harrison’s Trylon and Perisphere, the logo of the

1939 World’s Fair. In this context it is worth noting that Bauer’s painting Blue Triangle (1934), in

which a squat pyramid serves as the base for an upside-down obelisk, appears like a two-dimen-

sional model for Barnett Newman’s famed sculpture, Broken Obelisk (1963–69). Certainly, there is

an affinity. Bauer’s geometric paintings were related to the hard-edge paintings of his time, to the

Abstraction-Creation and Circle et Carré in Paris and the American Abstract Artists group, found-

ed in New York in 1936. Again, Bauer stayed aloof from joining these compatible associations.

Rudolf Bauer had turned to geometric abstraction in the late 1920s. His paintings, watercolors,

gouaches, and drawings were now done with mathematical precision. He created composi-

tions of circles and squares, rectangles and triangles, targets and vectors, spirals, ellipses and

ovoids, as well as free forms and doodles, arranged in rigorous formal order. While related to

Kandinsky’s painting of the Bauhaus and Paris periods, Bauer’s paintings do not turn to oriental

splendor, but his canvases have a great sense of the real; many of them actually are not all

that non-objective. A blue circle is a circle of blue color and a black triangle is just that, looking

ahead, so it seems to me, to later minimal painting. Furthermore, Bauer, the former caricaturist,

frequently admits humor, indeed, a sense of wit, into his pictures.

There is no doubt that Bauer was a fine painter who produced work of great merit. His career was

not helped, however, by the Baroness’s unrestrained adulation. We read in her essay in The Art

Left: RUDOLF BAUER. The Holy One (Red Point). Oil on canvas, 513⁄8 x 513⁄8 inches. 1936. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggen-heim Museum, New York; Right: Trylon and Perisphere, New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York,1939–40

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 17

of Tomorrow catalogue that “in this collection is represented the development of a genius, the

greatest of all painters, spiritually the most advanced artist whose influence leads in the future.

Rudolf Bauer, whose every work of Non-objectivity is an accomplished masterpiece and so extra-

ordinarily organized that no form, no point, could be eliminated or changed without upsetting the

perfect organization of his creation.” Rebay’s infatuation with Bauer and Bauer’s good personal

relation with Solomon Guggen-

heim, his chief patron, led him

to believe that he would have

a major voice in the direction

of the new museum, which, he

hoped, would be a great tem-

ple of art in the New World,

based on his Geistreich in Berlin.

He also expected to have a

major say in the selection of its

architect. But Rebay consulted

with Walter Gropius and Ludwig

Mies van der Rohe, Wallace

Harrison, and for some time

with the visionary Frederick

Kiesler, who had migrated to

New York in 1931 and wasRudolf Bauer and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at Bauer’s Das GeistreichMuseum in Berlin, 1930s

Left: RUDOLF BAUER. Blue Triangle. Oil on canvas, 51 x 50 inches. 1934. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,New York; Right: BARNETT NEWMAN. Broken Obelisk. Cor-ten steel, in two parts, 24 feet 10 inches x 10 feet 11 inches x 10feet 11 inches. 1963–69. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and installed in the museum’s Donald B. andCatherine C. Marron Atrium

18 RUDOLF BAUER

brought to Rebay’s attention by the distinguished art dealer, J.B. Neumann. In 1943, however,

she contacted Frank Lloyd Wright, who, she felt was the man for the job. In this same year,

America’s greatest architect and one of its richest men, Solomon R. Guggenheim, signed the

contract, where upon the copper magnate purchased the property on Fifth Avenue at 89th

Street, facing Central Park, where the Guggenheim Museum stands today.

Soon after his arrival in America Bauer

signed a contract with Guggenheim

to trade 110 works and the eventual

donation of his entire estate to the

Guggenheim Foundation in exchange

for a monthly stipend, a mansion in

Deal, N.J., facing the Atlantic ocean

and a Duesenberg car. It appears

that Bauer, not well versed in English

at the time, signed this document

upon Rebay’s guidance, but soon

regretted what he had done, realizing

that he signed away his life’s work for

a relatively low annual retainer. He felt

that he had been cheated and

blamed his former lover, Rebay, who

in 1943 was briefly detained by the

U.S. government as an “enemy alien.”

Their relationship deteriorated and

they wrote resentful, angry letters, full

of accusations and recriminations.

Bauer, also penned antagonistic, in-

sulting letters to Mr. Wright, which the

architect evidently never bothered

to answer. In 1944, Bauer married his

former housekeeper and also sued Rebay for slander, which was the final expression of his ani-

mus. During the last fourteen years of his life, the painter never picked up a brush again.

Solomon Guggenheim died in 1949, and Hilla Rebay was forced to resign three years later when

James Johnson Sweeney was appointed director of the Foundation. He dismantled the unique

treatment of the space and framing of the paintings and painted the walls white. When he

presided at the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright building, there were no Bauers on the slanting

walls, even though he was still highly regarded in Germany. In 1950 an article in Leipzig’s

Zeitschrift für Kunst called “Painting in the Spirit of Music” signifies him—together with Rebay,

Moholy-Nagy, and Morris Graves as leading abstract painters in America. At the new Museum,

however, things looked dismal for the artist. He received a letter from Jerome Ashmore, profes-

sor of philosophy at Columbia University, who reported to him in 1953 that “much of the work

shown is mainly of value to a pedantic historian of art. Of the cosmic spirituality reflected in your

Fernand Léger, Hilla Rebay, Hans Richter, and Rudolf Bauer, atRebay's home in Greens Farms, Connecticut, c. 1941

RUDOLF BAUER REVISITED 19

work there is none. . . . The exhibition hanging in that Fifth Avenue location today takes the

observer no place while you take the observer to eternity.”

It took years to reinstate Bauer’s reputation as a modernist painter of significance. It must be

remembered that his private museum in Berlin served as the model for the original venue of the

Guggenheim Collection and that his painting Blue Triangle predicted one of the icons of mod-

ernist American sculpture. It was not until 1968 that his paintings were shown again at the

Guggenheim museum in a tribute to Rebay. Then, in 1969 and 1970, there were solo exhibitions

at the Galerie Gmurzyska in Cologne and at Hutton-Hutschnecker in New York, followed by

shows in Brussels, Wiesbaden, and London. In 1987, Thomas M. Messer, who succeeded

Sweeney as the Guggenheim’s director for many years, observed that, “There was a time when

the works of Rudolf Bauer were exhibited too often at this institution. I believe we are now com-

ing out of a time when his work has been exhibited too little.” Aside from shows in Milan, Berlin,

Stuttgart, London, Zurich, Chicago, and elsewhere, Bauer’s work returned to the Guggenheim in

2003 in its reprise of The Art of Tomorrow, an exhibition that was shown in New York, Munich,

Murnau, and Berlin. After many years of disregard, Bauer is finally reinstated in his place as an

eminent figure in the history of abstract painting. To quote William Faulkner: “The past is never

dead, it’s not even past.”

About the author: Peter Selz is a distinguished art historian, whose expertise ranges from German Expressionismto kinetic art to California modernism. Born in Germany, Selz emigrated to the United States in 1936 andobtained his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the 1957 German Expressionist Paint-ing, one of the first English-language books on that subject. He became Chief Curator in the Department ofPainting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958, leaving in 1964 to become the founding direc-tor of the Berkeley Art Museum and professor of the History of Art at UC Berkeley. He currently lives and worksin Berkeley.