The Armory Show of 1913 Exposed for the First Time Modern Art to Audiences in the
'Arsenal Show' That Shocked America In 1913, Celebrates 100 05:40
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On Feb. 17, 1913, an art exhibition opened in New York City that shocked the country, inverse our perception of beauty and had a profound effect on artists and collectors.
The International Exhibition of Modern Art — which came to be known, simply, as the Armory Show — marked the dawn of Modernism in America. It was the kickoff fourth dimension the phrase "advanced" was used to depict painting and sculpture.
On the evening of the prove's opening, 4,000 guests milled around the makeshift galleries in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue.
Two-thirds of the paintings on view were by American artists. But it was the Europeans — Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp — that caused a sensation.
American audiences were used to seeing Rembrandts and Titians in their galleries — "a very realistic blazon of fine art," says Marilyn Kushner, the co-curator of an exhibition called "The Armory Show at 100" that opens in October at the New York Historical Social club.
"If you saw a female person nude, in art, in sculpture or painting, information technology was very classical," Kushner adds. "And information technology was the thought of this perfect, classical beauty."
Kushner says information technology was jarring for audiences in 1913 to meet works such every bit Matisse'southward Blue Nude for the commencement time.
"Yous know, she'due south a nude. Y'all can tell she's a nude. But she's in all of these colors that you never imagined yous would see on a adult female before," she says. "She looks very primitive, almost childlike."
Viewers were shocked, Kushner says, "because they'd never seen anything similar this before. And they didn't know how to chronicle to information technology."
Critics reviled the experimental fine art as "insane" and an affront to their sensibilities. But the media attention drew crowds, and collectors took notice.
Matisse'southward Blue Nude wound up at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Leah Dickerman, a curator at New York'south Museum of Mod Art, explains The Ruddy Studio, another Matisse from the evidence.
"You see pictures piled up in the background, a bureau with some other piece of work leaning confronting it," Dickerman says. "But the walls of the studio, the floors of the studio, the tabular array — anything that'southward non art, and non his equanimous still life, is washed in a vivid brick ruby.
"Information technology's an extraordinary painting. The cherry-red jumps, and yet, inside that background, are all these brightly colored paintings and sculptural figures that are an inventory of things that Matisse made."
Dickerman says the works in the bear witness had a profound issue on American artists. But virtually as remarkable was the exhibition itself. It was organized past a group of 2 dozen young artists who called themselves "The Association of American Painters and Sculptors." They raised money, generated publicity, transported the art, rented the Armory and staged the exhibition — all without public funding.
Historian Valerie Paley calls that revolution a countercultural moment that questioned the 19th-century vision of the globe: "I think art historians are fond of thinking that it created a revolution."
Only, Paley says, the artists' ingenuity was part of a bigger revolution.
"All sorts of extraordinary things are happening," Paley says of the modern age. "Albert Einstein is working on a new theory of gravity. New engineering science — electrical light, communication — simply an explosion of 19th-century norms. And in New York, new buildings like the Woolworth Edifice or the Grand Cardinal Final — these are opening.
"It'due south a dissimilar time. It's the dawn of a different fourth dimension. And certainly this thought of deconstructing the onetime way of thinking — is very much in the air."
The most talked-about painting in the 1913 Armory Show deconstructed a human figure in abstract chocolate-brown panels in overlapping motion. Marcel Duchamp'due south Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle mill."
In 1963, on the 50th ceremony of the Armory Show, Duchamp was interviewed past CBS reporter Charles Collingwood. The sound is now at the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art.
When Collingwood asked Duchamp if he had realized that the piece would create "such a "furor," the creative person responded: "Not the slightest. In the get-go place, I was a very young painter, 26 years sometime. Never had been to America. Wasn't here at the time."
Duchamp said he was in France when he got discussion that his painting had sold for $324. Afterwards the commission, he received $240 — most $5,565, in today'due south dollars. Not bad for an artist unknown in this land at the time.
Duchamp went on in the 1963 interview to say that, at the time, artists had lost the ability to surprise the public.
"At that place's a public to receive it today that did non exist then. Cubism was sort of forced upon the public to reject information technology. You know what I mean?" Duchamp said. "Instead, today, whatever new motility is nigh accustomed before information technology started. See, there'south no more than element of shock anymore."
That's why the Armory Show was so of import in 1913, Dickerman says.
"Information technology's this moment in time, 100 years ago, in which the foundations of cultural practice were totally reordered in as keen a way as nosotros have seen," she says. "And that this marks a reordering of the rules of fine art-making — it's as big as we've seen since the Renaissance.
"And I don't think we've seen as smashing a transformation in the 100 years that follow — where the foundations of how fine art is conceived are totally shaken."
The 1913 Armory Show attracted 87,000 visitors in New York City before it traveled to Chicago, where critic Harriet Monroe saw it. She wrote in the Sunday Tribune, "These radical artists are right. They stand for a search for new beauty" and "a longing for new versions of truth observed."
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Source: https://www.wbur.org/npr/172002686/armory-show-that-shocked-america-in-1913-celebrates-100