Finding 25: Installation Photograph, Museum of Non-Objective Painting

This 1948 installation view shows the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's collection at the first museum site, then located on 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street in New York. The exhibition showcased paintings by Vasily Kandinsky and Rudolf Bauer—nonobjective artists favored by Hilla Rebay—and artists at the core of the museum’s collection. The paintings in the museum were hung close to the floor, as shown in the photograph. Rebay wanted the viewer to have an intimate experience with the paintings, and believed the low placement could help foster that experience.
  
—Martha Horan, archives assistant