Forum Exhibition

Forum Exhibition (in full, Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters). An exhibition arranged in New York in 1916 by the critic Willard Huntington Wright with the support of the magazine The Forum, to which he was a regular contributor. The purpose of the exhibition was to pinpoint the best of progressive American painting in order to convince the public that it could stand up to the work of the European avant-garde, which had made a great impact at the Armory Show three years earlier. Robert Henri and Alfred Stieglitz were on the selection committee. The exhibition consisted of about 200 pictures by seventeen artists, including Benton (ironically, later a bitter enemy of modernism), Dove, Macdonald-Wright ( Wright's brother), Marin, Sheeler, and Zorach. Anticipating that some of the work on show might be too advanced for public taste, Wright wrote in the catalogue: ‘Not one man represented in this exhibition is either a charlatan or a maniac', and he vigorously defended abstraction: ‘It is neither the subject-matter nor the painter's approximation to nature which makes his work great: it is the inherent aesthetic qualities of order, rhythm, composition and form.’