Composition I, 1915. Oil on canvas, 52 1/8 x 39 1/8 inches (132.4 x 99.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,The Hilla Rebay Collection  38.380

German-born Hilla Rebay was an accomplished artist, as well as the founding director and curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, later named the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Though trained as a classical portraitist, Rebay embraced the idea of non-objective art—nonrepresentational art with no links to the material world—as both an aesthetic style and a manifestation of spirituality. Rebay produced a prolific array of paintings and works on paper during her long career. Composition I is a dynamic canvas energized by bold colors and shapes and intensified in the foreground by a curvilinear form, a motif representing the strength of the artist's emotions that repeatedly occurs throughout her work.