Art: Like Sun

Solomon Guggenheim has always been interested in education. He was, for example, treasurer of the Public Schools Athletic League of New York for many years and is still a patron of the Brightside Day Nursery. These activities are pie, however, to the educational job Solomon Guggenheim undertook two years ago at the age of 76. “I desire to encourage the development of the esthetic sense of our people,” said old Mr. Guggenheim, and plunked down something like $3,000,000 to endow a foundation for “nonobjective” art (TIME, July 12, 1937).

“Nonobjective” art is the purist’s name for abstract art in which no trace of actuality remains. A cubist breakdown of the statutory cubist wine bottle and guitar would not qualify. Solomon Guggenheim had grown grey in philanthropy and the copper business before he fell for his first nonobjective painting about eleven years ago. Since then he has accumulated 726 of them, the world’s biggest private collection. His guide and friend in non-objectivity has been a fortyish, fervent lady artist, the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen.

In Manhattan last week the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation emerged from abstraction to reality in the shape of an elegant, three-story, glassy gallery on East 54th Street. Through every spacious room amplifiers sent the moping or striding music of Bach; the walls were pure white and velvety grey, and on them were displayed 415 items from the Guggenheim collection. Predominant types: the whorls, jackstraws and disembodied eyelashes of Russian Vasily Kandinsky; the massive, machinelike color patterns of French Fernand Léger; the planetary balls and bubbles, interlocking triangles and color spots of German Rudolf Bauer. It was the biggest, smartest, brightest, most expensive exhibition of abstract painting Manhattan had ever seen.

Manhattanites were interested but not immediately ecstatic. Though the exhibition was boldly billed “Art of Tomorrow” to outbid the Museum of Modern Art’s “Art in Our Time,” a few critics meanly suggested that it was actually art of the past. Curator Hilla Rebay, her blue eyes ablaze, rose to this with two good observations and one transcendental line:

“Only since people learned to hear even subtle variations in the apparent repetition of jazz the great fugues of Bach became approachable to the masses.”

“With architects, engineers and designers using motifs from nonobjective paintings . . . the layman is gradually getting acquainted with their beauty. . . .”

“Top of culture is where art is. Art and culture like sun cannot be old-fashioned or modern. . . .”

Solomon Guggenheim’s snappy, grey-haired, expatriate Niece Peggy shares his affection for abstract art, exhibits it at a cute little London gallery known as “Guggenheim Jeune.” Promised for exhibition in Paris last fortnight was Peggy’s own large and brilliant collection of non-objects. At the last moment casual Parisians were disgusted to learn that “Guggenheim Jeune,” all aflutter, had canceled the show “because of the danger of war.” Last week Peggy Guggenheim cast in her lot with London by announcing that this autumn “Guggenheim Jeune” would be expanded into a Museum of Modern Art with a fulltime curator in the person of Britain’s foremost art-explainer, scholarly Herbert Read.