Armory Show

Armory Show. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, initially intended to boost new American art and challenge conservative critics and curators, opened in mid‐February 1913 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City and continued to mid‐March. It then moved in abbreviated form to Chicago and Boston. The sponsoring organization, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, led by artists Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach, took their chief inspiration from the Cologne Sonderbund Show (1912) and the Orphist circle around the Duchamp family in Paris. Exposing large numbers of untutored Americans to the Cubist work of Pablo Picasso, the Fauvist work of Henri Matisse, and other unconventional paintings and sculptures, the show excited hostile criticism and parody as it won unprecedented publicity for modernism in art (one critic compared Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 to “an explosion in a shingle factory”). Some found it morally and politically threatening. Although it included some 1,600 works, the show omitted much that was happening on the contemporary art scene, especially in Germany and Italy, and presented a seriously skewed notion of the new artistic movements then maturing. Few noticed the American works at all. A triumph of promotion rather than taste, the Armory Show intimidated mature realistic painters and convinced many younger artists that to succeed they had to study in Paris. It had a more beneficent impact in drawing such major French artists as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to visit New York for extended periods, during which they exercised great influence on such opinion leaders as the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painter and art patron Katherine Dreier.
See also Modernist Culture; Painting: To 1945; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Milton W. Brown , The Story of the Armory Show, 1963.
Robert M. Crunden , American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917, 1993.

Robert M. Crunden