Rudolf Bauer

Rudolf Bauer (born February 11, 1889, Lindenwald, Germany (now in Poland)—died November 28, 1953, Deal, New Jersey, U.S.) was a German-born abstract artist whose role in the conception and founding of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was buried for some 60 years after he had a falling-out with Guggenheim. As a result of the same incident, Bauer’s own colourful geometric paintings also remained largely out of the public eye until the early 21st century.

Bauer’s interest in art began at an early age. He left home in 1905, without the support of his family, and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin-Charlottenburg. Losing interest in academic training, he left school and supported himself by drawing political cartoons and caricatures that he sold to magazines and newspapers. The small income he earned in this fashion allowed him to pursue his own art. He experimented with both representational and nonrepresentational modes of expression, including Impressionism and Expressionism. In 1915 he joined Der Sturm, a circle of avant-garde artists such as Wassily Kandinsky who were affiliated with Herwarth Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm. Bauer began exhibiting frequently with them, teaching in Walden’s Sturmschule and writing for his magazine. It was at that gallery in 1916 that Bauer met Hilla Rebay, a German baroness and artist. Rebay immediately became the greatest champion of his work, and the two began a nearly three-decade-long on-and-off relationship.

In 1917, 1918, and 1920 Bauer had solo exhibitions at Galerie Der Sturm. During that time he also cofounded two avant-garde artists’ groups, the Novembergruppe (1918) and, with Rebay and artist Otto Nebel, Die Krater (1920). The latter was formed out of the conviction that painting should be nonrepresentational and the visual expression of the artistic experience. In 1920 Bauer’s first works appeared in America by way of artist and collector Katherine Dreier, who introduced Americans to many of Europe’s finest avant-garde artists. She exhibited his work several times with her arts organization, Société Anonyme (founded 1920). Bauer painted, exhibited, and wrote prolifically throughout the 1920s. His essay “Manifesto of Painting” was the central text of the catalog for Der Sturm’s 100th exhibition in 1921. In 1927 Bauer had a solo exhibition at the Royal Palace in Berlin. That same year Rebay immigrated to the United States, taking with her examples of work by her protégé. She found an American patron for Bauer in Solomon Guggenheim, who was immediately taken with Bauer’s work. Rebay also began advising Guggenheim to establish a museum for nonobjective art, suggesting Bauer as the collection’s anchor.

Bauer’s career was flourishing at home and abroad. With money he earned from the sale of works to Guggenheim, Bauer in 1930 opened a small museum, Das Geistreich (“The Realm of the Spirit”), in which to exhibit his own work as well as that of Kandinsky. Bauer’s work in that period became more sharply focused on geometric forms, circles in particular, beginning with such paintings as Orange Accent (1929–31) and Tetraptychon II (1930). In 1933 and 1934 he was included in exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He then had a solo exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1936 and another one at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1937. Meanwhile, Rebay and Guggenheim were taking steps toward making the museum and had established the Guggenheim Foundation, and Guggenheim had hired Rebay as the chief curator of his art collection. Bauer’s ideas were intrinsic to the design of the museum. According to correspondence between Bauer and Rebay, it was Bauer’s idea to use ramps rather than stairs between floors so that the art on display could be viewed without interruption. In 1936 Bauer—along with Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Albert Gleizes, and Robert Delaunay, among others—was included in the collection’s first exhibition, held at the Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina.

As tensions in Germany increased and the Nazi Party gained broader control throughout Europe, Bauer began to recognize his precarious situation as an abstract artist in Berlin. In 1937 his museum was shut down, and in 1938 the Nazis labeled his work “degenerate” and arrested him. He was liberated when Rebay traveled to Berlin from the U.S. and, using funds from Guggenheim, successfully negotiated his release. Bauer left Berlin for the U.S. in 1939, the year in which the first iteration of the Guggenheim institution, called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Bauer was included in the museum’s first exhibition in its new home, “Art of Tomorrow,” and his 1933 painting Invention (Composition 31) was used on the cover of the exhibition’s catalog.

When Bauer arrived in the U.S. in 1939, he joined Rebay in her home in Greens Farms, Connecticut. After several months Guggenheim offered him a mansion near the ocean in Deal, New Jersey, a car, a maid, and a yearly stipend; in exchange Guggenheim would have ownership over those works already in his possession and of all works Bauer would create during the rest of his life. Speaking very little English and under pressure from Rebay to sign the contract, Bauer misunderstood many of its terms. Soon after signing it, when he had time to translate the contract in detail, Bauer realized that he had signed away his life’s work and would not actually own any of the luxuries that Guggenheim was providing for him. In anger, Bauer backed out of the agreement by never painting or drawing again (though, according to at least one source, a sizeable trove of drawings and paintings was found in his house after his death).

Bauer and Rebay finally, and unamicably, severed their relationship in 1944, the year that Bauer married his former maid. The artist lived out his life in solitude and obscurity, dying of cancer before the Guggenheim Museum opened its doors to the public in 1959 (with an exhibition that did not include a single work by him). In the end, his works were relegated to storage in the museum for many years. Guggenheim’s nephew, Harry, took over as supervisor for the museum project when his uncle passed away in 1949. The nephew had less regard for nonobjective art and steered the museum in other directions, including away from the influence of Rebay, who was forced to resign in 1952.

Bauer’s work rarely surfaced in Guggenheim exhibitions over the following four decades, though he was included in group (and a handful of solo) exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. over those years. His role in the creation of the Guggenheim Museum was buried in correspondence, which came to light only with the Guggenheim’s 2005 exhibition “Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim.” Since then Bauer has been newly recognized as an important player in the nonobjective art movement as well as in the making of one of the world’s most important collections devoted to it. In 2014, during the 75th anniversary year of the “Art of Tomorrow” exhibition, Bauer was the subject of a play—Bauer by Lauren Gunderson—and of two exhibitions, at Sotheby’s and at the German Consulate in New York City.