The Armory Show and its Legacy

THE ARMORY SHOW AND ITS LEGACY

A Revolutionary Event

Of all the art exhibitions during the 1910s, the Armory Show in 1913 issued the greatest challenge to the art establishment. In late 1911 more than two dozen New York painters and sculptors, many of whom had been involved in the independents' exhibitions, organized as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, with Arthur B. Davies, a member of The Eight, as the first president. The new group decided to hold a major international exhibition. Hoping to include a large number of artworks, they rented the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City and spent the next year scouting, especially in Europe, for works to exhibit. When the show opened on 17 February 1913, it included more than thirteen hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some introducing new styles and ideas that both fascinated and shocked the opening-night guests. Reviewers called the show an event not to be missed, and over the next month some seventy-five thousand viewers came to see it.

The Artists

The Armory Show offered a wonderful collection of works by established artists, mostly Europeans (Pierre Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) and some Americans (Albert Pinkham Ryder, James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassati). Also exhibited were some works by important American artists then in the beginning or early stages of their careers, including paintings by six of The Eight, as well as John Marin, Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, and George Bellows. Yet of all the artists represented in the Armory Show, the most notable—and most influential, in the long run—were new European talents, including Francis Picabia, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp. Some viewers were offended by Matisse's exaggerated nudes, while Duchamp's Cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase was ridiculed as incomprehensible; one reviewer called it "an explosion in a shingle factory." Other Cubist works, including those by Picasso and Picabia, were better received. Some conservative art critics defended the standards of the National Academy of Design and dismissed the Armory Show. Kenyon Cox wrote, "I have no fear that this kind of art will prevail, or even that it can long endure," but overall public response to the show was enthusiastic.

The Middle Years of the Decade

Later in the spring of 1913 the Armory Show traveled to Chicago, and a truncated version went to Boston. Several American writers who saw the show in Chicago or New York—including poets William Carlos Williams, Harriet Monroe, and Wallace Stevens—were profoundly affected by it and later attributed their own creative inspiration to their exposure to Duchamp, Picasso, Cézanne, and other artists whose works were exhibited in the show. More important, by the time the show ended, a quarter of a million people had seen it, and a lasting interest in modern art, particularly Cubism, had been born in America. Encouraged by this friendly climate, the French Dadaists Duchamp and Picabia came to New York to work. During the mid 1910s works by Armory Show exhibitors and other new artists drew viewers to Alfred Stieglitzes 291 gallery and the Whitney Studio Club (later the Whitney Museum), which heiress and sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded in 1914 to promote new talent. American museums and private collectors were anxious to acquire modern art. Dozens of new galleries were founded to display the new art, and exhibitions were mounted not just in New York but also in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and other cities.

The Independents' Show of 1917 and Beyond

Internal dissension led to the breakup of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1916. Later that year the Society of Independent Artists was founded with the same goal as the AAPS, discovering and advancing new styles and artists. Its first exhibition, in 1917, was bigger than the Armory Show. More than twenty-five hundred works by some thirteen hundred artists were exhibited at the Grand Central Palace in New York City. It was not as successful critically or financially. Again critics were up in arms over Marcel Duchamp, who, under the pseudonym of Richard Mutt, had submitted a urinal as a piece of sculpture called Fountain. The society rejected it, but the considerable publicity surrounding the work, which was subsequently exhibited at Stieglitz's 291 gallery, helped to spread Duchamp's message: there was no difference between "art" and the most common aspects of human life. Though the involvement of the United States in World War I temporarily suspended discussions of aesthetics, the controversies and ideas that were born during the 1910s influenced American artists for the rest of the century.

Sources:

Milton Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Joseph H. Hirschhorn Foundation, 1963);

Martin Green, New York: 1913 (New York: Macmillan, 1988);

Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, 1915: The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).