On Saturday, September 26th, 2026, a special talk was held during Independent 20th Century that covered the early history of abstraction and non-objective art in the United States, from the arrival of Bauhaus artists in the 1930s to the creation of the Guggenheim in the 1950s, thanks to the influence of the German artist and baroness Hilla von Rebay. In a discussion moderated by Lisa Dennison, Chairman, Americas at Sotheby’s, and former director and curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the gallerists Rowland Weinstein and Alma Luxembourg shared their research into, and personal connections with, this history. Below are highlights from the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Lisa Dennison: Kandinsky is really a useful starting point here. His belief that art could communicate inner or spiritual realities became enormously influential. By the 1920s, he was teaching at the Bauhaus, where his work became increasingly geometric and, more broadly, the Bauhaus challenged the boundaries between fine art, design, craft, architecture, and materials and technology.
That is important because the Bauhaus' American legacy was not simply a style. It was a way of thinking. It was experimental. It was interdisciplinary and it was adaptable. After the Bauhaus closed in Germany in 1933, many of its artists and teachers emigrated to the United States. Walter Gropius took over the design department at Harvard. Josef and Annie Albers brought Bauhaus ideas to Black Mountain College, and we know all the artists that came through their teachings. And László Moholy-Nagy founded the new Bauhaus in Chicago. So, the influx of European artists exposed American artists to many strands of Modernism all at once. Collectors and museums were also becoming engaged with European Modernism. What I have seen throughout this fair, which has been so revelatory, is how American artists were borrowing freely from their European precedents and developing a particularly expansive understanding of abstraction, from more geometric and biomorphic to the more spiritually-inflected work.
We are going to start with you, Alma. Let's talk about Sue Fuller and her passage from the Bauhaus and European Modernism into a distinctly American practice. When you first encountered her work, what made you feel she needed to be reconsidered? How were her studies with Albers and others impacted? And what was it about the environment here that helped transmit the ideas of the European avant-garde to American artists like Sue Fuller?
Alma Luxembourg: When you look at the American artists who were very interested in what came from Europe, consider that often the teachers or those who came from the Bauhaus to America also brought with them the experience of the war and the idea that it is possible to break boundaries. So, Bauhaus really starts as a very avant-garde movement that is interdisciplinary and experimental. But the experience of the war is something that you can see very clearly in American artists' responses.
Sue Fuller has a very interesting path. She was originally from Pittsburgh. She moved to New York in the late 1930s to study here and joined a group of radical printmakers called Atelier 17, which is led by a foreigner, the British Surrealist artist Stanley William Hayter. That group is really interested in trying to find new and different ways of making prints. That is how she started creating string compositions.
What happened to her in terms of an artistic career is quite amazing. She was very early on bought by big American institutions. In fact, she was one of the first women artists to enter the collection of MoMA and exhibited there in 1951.
Lisa Dennison: I read somewhere that at Atelier 17—which she called the “cell of a revolution”—about 40% of the artists were women.
Sue Fuller, String Composition #554, 1968, Lucite and polypropylene thread, 26 7/8 x 26 7/8 x 1 5/8 inches, photography by Richard Ivey. Courtesy of Luxembourg + Co.
Alma Luxembourg: She was Hayter’s assistant and she was also the master of prints within that group, which means she worked with a lot of other European artists ,from Joan Miró to Marc Chagall, who were making prints with them.
Lisa Dennison: The works are remarkably well preserved when you look at them, when you think about the ephemerality of the material and a lot of the artists that she channeled, from Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, also working with string and Plexiglas and unconventional, non-art materials. Have you found that throughout her work, that level of preservation?
Alma Luxembourg: She was very interested in issues of conservation, which led her to do a lot of different things, like work with frame-makers to build these very elaborate metal frames to make sure that the strings keep their tension. By 1965, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and used that to study and patent a way of encasing her string compositions in Lucite, pouring it onto these works to make sure that the color of the strings—some of which she commissioned specifically from fishing line companies to make for her—would not fade over time. She was very innovative technologically in making sure that the works remain perfect.
Lisa Dennison: That is amazing. Let us turn to Wassily Kandinsky and the Guggenheim, another extraordinary transmission of European abstraction to America, taking place through the German baroness Hilla Rebay, a transmission that would ultimately create an institution. Rowland, tell us how it all began, how Hilla met Solomon.
Rowland Weinstein: I was not planning this, but I want to talk a little bit first about how Hilla entered my life, because a man just walked in who woke me up to non-objective artwork and the very purpose, I believe, of why Hilla created the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.
She selected the artists that she felt could transform and lift up humans. I think later we are going to talk about the spiritual in art, but Hilla, when she came to America, brought with her a series of collages, a technique she learned from Hans Arp. So, she has a show in America of collage paintings in 1927. At that show, Solomon and Irene Guggenheim walk in and purchase a piece by Hilla Rebay. It is so funny how chance encounters cannot just transform your life, they can transform art in its entirety. They can transform a city like New York, and all of America, by one chance encounter.
My chance encounter is that I walked into an art gallery on Madison Avenue and I met a very young Helly Nahmad, and befriended him, and one day David Nahmad walked in, and I will always be grateful because it transformed my life. I was selling Picasso and Miró and Chagall and Dalí, but I had not really woken up to non-objective art. Standing in front of a Kandinsky and being with a man who could see and open my eyes, ignited a passion that has never left me.
At the time of Hilla Rebay’s exhibition, Solomon is mostly collecting Barbizon artists; he is not collecting Modern art. She turned Solomon on to non-objectivity and there is a famous line, where she said, "You need to not collect the art of yesterday. You need to collect the art of tomorrow."
Lisa Dennison: She is commissioned to paint his portrait and she proselytizes him in her ways, in this profound belief. It is so central to who she is as an artist. Consequently, they actually travel together; she takes Solomon and Irene to Europe. What happens there?
Hilla Rebay, Untitled, 1935, collage on paper, 18 x 24 inches. © Hilla von Rebay Foundation. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.
Rowland Weinstein: They go to the Bauhaus and Hilla introduces Solomon to Kandinsky. Just as a side note, because I can now understand in a way I never would have understood, a transformation happened in Solomon and he would eventually amass a collection of, I believe, 150 Kandinsky paintings.
Lisa Dennison: So, in 1937, Solomon establishes the Foundation and, two years later, Rebay opens the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, not on 89th Street, but on East 54th Street, envisioning it as a kind of spiritually-charged museum-temple, filled with music, incense, abstract art, paintings hung low to the ground. There was plush carpeting and banquettes, there was classical music wafting through the speakers. Commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright [to design the Guggenheim Museum building] did not happen until 1943, and the opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was in 1959. Let’s talk about the difference between abstraction and non-objective art. What is the nuance? Are they the same thing?
Rowland Weinstein: They really are not, although you could say one is a subset of the other. You could call non-objective art a subset of abstraction. You could infer in abstraction something that relates to the objective world. Non-objective art is literally just that. It is color, shape, and form that does not relate to anything in the physical world, but can open you up—and I believe this is what drove Hilla—to higher planes. When we talk about the spirit, we all have a different idea of what the spiritual is, but what we can all agree on is that it is not objective. You cannot relate it to this world.
Lisa Dennison: That is as good a definition as I have ever heard. Kandinsky, of course, is central to the Guggenheim collection, but Hilla championed other artists, many of whom are fantastic artists, but less familiar than Kandinsky. How did she discover these artists? Who were they? And why do you think their historical trajectories bifurcated?
Rowland Weinstein: There was a moment in time when they were not obscure. Hilla Rebay showed with the Dadaists. She was important enough as an artist to be shown by Der Sturm, the first gallery that brought all of this avant-garde work to the world. She came here and created a great institution, and yet we do not know her work. There is a different reason for each artist that falls into obscurity. Here is what I think it is for Hilla: at a time when it was really hard to be a powerful woman, she was a powerful and determined woman. She had a clear vision and sometimes ruffled feathers, but did not allow anything to get in the way of executing that vision. And sometimes, I think, she became so important as a curator, that it eclipsed her art.
Lisa Dennison: How many works that you encounter, that you have the privilege of selling, or even exhibiting, have a Guggenheim label on the back? Lots and lots and lots of works were acquired and then sold.
Rowland Weinstein: I do not have a count. It is in the hundreds. But I can tell you that over 80% of what I am showing was purchased by Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla, as part of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. After Solomon died, the museum was renamed and there was a bit of a change in vision. A lot of that work ended up in the basement, until the point where it slowly got deaccessioned, and this is one of the things that boggles my mind. I have three paintings. One of them is a piece called Color Swinging by Rudolf Bauer. When Solomon Guggenheim decided to open the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Hilla put together a mission statement and there was only one painting on the front cover, it was Color Swinging, but it was deaccessioned.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Lisa Dennison: So, there is a little bit of a clue here. This collection of non-objective art that was built by Hilla Rebay and Solomon Guggenheim was then sold, let go. First, it was in the basement, already in obscurity, and then it was sold. Now, that was the good news because that let it recycle throughout the world. And that includes Kandinskys, by the way. I remember David Nash—he was a great specialist at Sotheby's—his first day, he was told to go over to the Guggenheim Museum, look in the basemen, and help them select 60 Kandinskys to sell. Not Bauer, not Rolph Scarlett, not Hilla Rebay, but Kandinsky. But the work of these other artists remained in relative obscurity.
Alma, let us go back to Sue Fuller. She had works at the Met, MoMA, such a promising start, and then nothing. What happens to an artist like that, who was working in abstraction from the 1930s to the ‘50s and became far less visible in our later history? How do you account for that shift?
Alma Luxembourg: First, she was an innovator throughout her career, until, say, the mid-1980s. She starts out making prints, then does the string compositions. She works with Lucite. She develops the frames. She changes the types of strings she uses. She even creates sculptures combining Lucite and string together, does commissions, including for the Unitarian church down the road on Madison Avenue for an altarpiece. She has a big work that she does for the McNay Art Museum in Texas. She is continuing to push the boundaries. What happened to her, I think, is what happens to a lot of artists—the fashion changed. In the 1970s, what became very fashionable was a certain kind of feminist art. Artists like Sue Fuller were seen to be somehow working in craft. When we look at the work, there is nothing really craft-like about it; it is very mathematical and scientific and, in that sense, very Bauhaus-y. But the market is looking in a different direction and what she does is no longer what people are looking at.
Lisa Dennison: What is the role of the institution in keeping these histories alive, or do they bear some blame here for so many great artists today who have fallen outside the traditional canon?
Alma Luxembourg: Institutions also have fashions. It was the fashion for MoMA in the early 1950s to do, once a year, a show of “abstract art today” and include a whole host of artists, many of whom were very young and completely unknown. Institutions were really a place of discovery and were very risk-taking. They bought works by many artists whose careers, perhaps, did not develop. Maybe these institutions did not buy enough works to then have a critical mass that would drive programming or inspire curators to do something with it, sadly.
Lisa Dennison: I want to get a little bit into this idea of spirituality, because when you talk about fashion, I am thinking of the success of the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim, and Emma Kunz, here [at Independent 20th Century with Hauser & Wirth] now, and a lot of these artists whose foundation has to do with the spiritual and art. I think there is something trending there. I could be wrong, but I think this idea of artists searching for something greater, whether it be clarity of expression or a new tomorrow or a better future, resonates.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Rowland Weinstein: I was puzzling this very question because, if you think about where abstraction came from, it really came in the chaos of World War I. With all of that death and all of that destruction and all of that fear, you can look at the figure, you can look at the form, and I think artists were pondering, “What does this mean anymore?” They were searching for something that could be uplifting, that could ascend to something higher. I have been wondering, why is it coming back now?
I do not have an answer to the question, but what comes to my mind is that, since World War II, this is probably the time of the biggest instability in the world. There is a lot of chaos and fear in the world. This is making the search for the spirit and more meaning, the search for ascension, the need for it, come back to the fore.
Lisa Dennison: I think that is well said. Do you agree, Alma?
Alma Luxembourg: Definitely. One of the reactions to World War II, even for figurative artists, is to move towards abstraction, because coming back to the figure is so difficult and complicated after the horrors. If you look in the postwar period, there were so many shows that really championed that. Sue Fuller was in a show called The Responsive Eye at MoMA in 1965 that was so important and influential and brought a whole new way of looking. So why is it coming back today? I think that it touches people’s hearts and they long for an interaction like that. The success of Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim—nobody would have been able to guess that would happen. It is obviously touching people.
Lisa Dennison: I think about the Guggenheim’s history and how far it left its origins as the Museum of Non-Objective Art and how closely it stayed to those origins. Obviously, the collection and the exhibition program has broadened, but that essential spirit is still there. My first day on the job in 1978, there was a Rothko retrospective. That inner core, that feeling of transcendence, that feeling of spirituality, that feeling of not just looking at the world and nature, but absorbing religious art and impulse—all of that to me felt extremely appropriate to the Guggenheim. When we had the opportunity to buy the collection of Giovanna and Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, of Minimalist and Conceptual Art, we deaccessioned a Chagall, a Modigliani, and a Kandinsky to pay for that collection. The New York Times ran a headline saying, “Guggenheim sells masterpieces for worthless paper,” because a lot of this art was certificate-based. It was considered a crime against humanity, but the truth was that it continued the legacy of non-objective art, of abstraction, by thinking about Minimalist art. When all is said and done, we have talked about the Bauhaus and the émigrés, but it was not just those artists that came; the Surrealist artists were equally important and also had a profound influence on the formation of the avant-garde in America.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Alma Luxembourg: And the dealers who came from Europe championed these artists and brought them into all these American institutions.
Lisa Dennison: They really did take all of these learnings and put them into one big pot and something distinctly American emerged. But without the early contributions of people like Sue Fuller and the artists in the circle of Hilla Rebay, it would be safe to say none of that would have happened.