Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century
This collaborative project between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, presents digitized highlights from the personal libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force, the museums respective inaugural directors.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art have each played a key role in shaping New York’s vital cultural landscape, contributing significantly to the history of art and culture in the United States. Both founded in the 1930s, these museums were also each initially led by women—the Guggenheim, then the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, by Hilla Rebay and the Whitney by Juliana Force—who served as inaugural directors. Each woman acquired a considerable library during her tenure, collecting materials ranging from the uncommon (gallery announcements from New York and beyond, as well as rare and unusual periodicals and books) to the required reading of the day (exhibition catalogs and major monographs on contemporary artists). These important resources influenced the two women, who in turn influenced the vision and development of their respective institutions, which remain integral to the city’s cultural life today.
Working in partnership to make Rebay and Force’s personal libraries more widely available, the Guggenheim Library and Whitney Library digitized key material from each. The digitized selections, which are displayed together on the Internet Archive to highlight their commonalities and differences, are of special interest to curators, art historians, and other researchers and scholars, including those focusing on museum studies, women’s studies, and the history of New York City.
Digitized publications from both libraries can be found on the Art Resources Project Page at the Internet Archive with highlights from Hilla Rebay’s collection shown below.
This collaboration was generously funded in part by a grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO).
Digitized Highlights from the Hilla Rebay Library Collection
Art of tomorrow: seventieth founders year festival: Bauer, Kandinsky, Rebay, exhibition of non-objective painting (1955)
Author: Florida Southern College
Catalog of an exhibition held the week of Feb. 27, 1955
Erster deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin 1913 (1913)
Author: Walden, Herwarth
Catalog of an exhibition which included works of Italian futurists and other artists. Annotated by Hilla Rebay
Forbidden art in the Third Reich: paintings by German artists whose work was banned from museums and forbidden to exhibit (1945?)
Author: Institute of Modern Art (Boston, Mass.); Nierendorf Gallery
Collected and first shown by the Nierendorf Gallery in New York, formerly of Berlin.
Three lectures on modern art : “Intrinsic significance” in modern art by Katherine S. Dreier. Modern art and tradition by James Johnson Sweeney. A retrospective view of constructive art by Naum Gabo. (1949)
Author: Dreier, Katherine Sophie; Sweeney, James Johnson; Gabo, Naum
Lectures held at Yale University under the auspices of the Thomas Rutherford Trowbridge Art Lecture Foundation, 1948.
Zur Farbenlehre (1810)
Author: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Attack on Newton's theory of colors