Resurrection of ‘Tomorrow’

The story of great art is not just about talent, paint, canvas or brushes. It’s also about passion, money, politics “” and, lest we forget, passion.

One of the great neglected art stories of the 20th century will be told in an extensive collection of modernist works dating from 1917 to contemporary times, at Wendt Modern Gallery in Laguna Beach.

The exhibition, “Champions of Modernism III,” opening Saturday, represents a resurrection for a forgotten genius “” and perhaps a reconciliation as well.

The exhibition tells the captivating story of fellow painters and erstwhile lovers Rudolf Bauer and Hilla Rebay, and how the Guggenheim Museum in New York City came to be born from their romance, breakup and ultimate betrayal “” a menage a trois that contributed to the creation of one of the world’s preeminent art museums.

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Art of Tomorrow

The Laguna show includes other early modernist works from a long-buried art movement called “Art of Tomorrow,” many of whose early proponents have gone on to join the pantheon of renowned modern artists, including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Jean Arp and more.

The works of Bauer and Rebay, however, ended up literally in the basement at the Guggenheim for 40 years, according to Wendt Gallery owner Serina Manqueros.

Manqueros, whose gallery has long focused primarily on representational art, said she wanted to delve into modernism with this show to bring to light a branch of art that has been shelved for too long.

“I wanted to educate collectors about the origins of modern art, because these modernist painters all started as traditional painters who then wanted to do something completely new, hence the ‘Art of Tomorrow,’” Manqueros said.

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Film details Bauer’s ‘betrayals’

The exhibit is accompanied by an Emmy-nominated documentary film, “Betrayal “” the Life and Art of Rudolf Bauer,” which explains how he and Rebay came to be part of the inner circle of Solomon Guggenheim, one of the world’s wealthiest men and a major art patron of his time.

New York City-based curator Steven Lowy, who appears in the film and helped select work for the show, specializes in the work of “underdog” artists who have fallen off the art grid.

“My job as curator is to say, ‘look, this work is fantastic,’ it gives me the ‘aha’ moment,” Lowy said.

“My mission is to revisit artists who’s star has dimmed and shed new light on what will remain great work.”

Lowy curated two earlier “Champions of Modernism” shows, both on the East Coast. This show is headed for Singapore, probably in 2011, according to Manqueros.

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Star-crossed lovers

Bauer, from a humble working-class German family, became inextricably linked with Rebay, a baroness from the German aristocracy. The star-crossed lovers “” who met in 1916 through the Der Sturm group of avant-garde artists and thinkers “” lived and worked together but were “verboten” from marrying by Rebay’s father, who swore he would shoot Bauer, and disinherit his daughter, if the couple wedded, according to the film.

Instead, Rebay went on to a lengthy alliance with the older Guggenheim “” after his wife hired Rebay to paint her husband’s portrait in 1928 “” infuriating the Guggenheim family but giving her an opportunity to champion Bauer’s work and make him the most popular artist in the “Art of Tomorrow” group.

This group, which at one point included Jackson Pollock, practiced non-objective art, in stark contrast to the Impressionists and Cubists of the time, such as Mondrian or Picasso, who used real objects in their art, however abstract.

Bauer’s skill in drawing “” he began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist “” led him to create intricate, austere geometric works that were considered by Rebay and other advocates as highly spiritual in nature.

In 1930, Rebay convinced Guggenheim to be the major benefactor of Bauer’s museum in Berlin, called Das Geistreich, which means Realm of the Spirit, devoted to the Art of Tomorrow, and turning Bauer into the pre-eminent modern artist of his day.

‘Degenerate art’

But when the Nazis took over Germany, all non-representational art “” and the artists themselves “” were damned as “defective” or “degenerate,” Manqueros said.

After Bauer’s work was part of the wildly successful 1937 “Degenerate Art” show in Munich “” and he publicly defended his art against Hitler “” he was arrested and thrown into a Gestapo prison, where he languished for eight months, making pencil drawings that are part of the Wendt exhibit.

One of the “betrayals” that colored his life was that his own sister turned against him at this perilous time, according to the film.

Rebay then stepped in, convincing her blue-blood relatives and Guggenheim to intervene. Bauer was released, for a price, and escaped to America.

But America proved not to be the fount of freedom and security that the artist needed to continue to produce art.

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Final betrayals

Bauer’s betrayals continued, when, urged on by Rebay, he signed a contract with Guggenheim in English that he apparently could not understand. The contract gave Guggenheim Bauer’s entire artistic output, and relegated the artist to a life of comfortable servitude in a Guggenheim-owned mansion on the Jersey shore, according to the film.

Nevertheless, Rebay continued to champion her former lover, making him a co-curator of the Guggenheim-funded Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, along with Rebay, and involving him in the yet-to-be-built Guggenheim Museum that stands today.

When, in 1943, Rebay hired American architect Frank Lloyd Wright instead of a German to design the new museum, Bauer saw this as yet another betrayal, according to the Bauer catalog for the show.

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Stopped painting

Sometime in the 1940s, Bauer stopped painting, Manqueros said.

He was in his 50s, and could have been considered at the height of his artistic powers.

Whether he lost his will to create or lost faith in his art patron, no one apparently knows.

Bauer eventually married his German-born maid, who is quoted as saying that, when he died in 1953 at the age of 64, he was “a broken man.”

The Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, 10 years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim family removed the modernist work of Bauer and Rebay that Solomon Guggenheim had championed and replaced it with more palatable traditional art, according to the film. The family also may have wanted to purge the museum of anything associated with the elder Guggenheim’s alleged mistress and her associates, Manqueros said.

In 2006, the Guggenheim opened up its basement and brought out works for the first-ever major retrospective of Hilla Rebay, Manqueros said. Now Lowy and Manqueros want the world to know about Bauer, Rebay and the Art of Tomorrow.

The show continues through July 15 at Wendt Modern, 1550 S. Coast Hwy., Suite 102. For more information, call (949) 497-4292 or visit www.wendtmodern.com

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 380-4321 or [email protected].