1913 Armory Show
Armory Show button, 1913
Armory show button, 1913, from the Archives of American Art
DateFebruary 17, 1913 (1913-02-17) to March 15, 1913 (1913-03-15)
Location69th Regiment Armory, New York, New York
Also known asThe International Exhibition of Modern Art
ParticipantsSee List of artists in the Armory Show
ArmoryShow poster

Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the first large exhibition of modern art in America. The three-city exhibition started in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, from February 17 until March 15, 1913. The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and then to The Copley Society of Art in Boston,[1] where, due to a lack of space, all the work by American artists was removed.[2] The show became an important event in the history of American art, introducing astonished Americans, who were accustomed to realistic art, to the experimental styles of the European vanguard, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. The show served as a catalyst for American artists, who became more independent and created their own "artistic language."

History

"A slight attack of third dimentia [sic] brought on by excessive study of the much-talked of cubist pictures in the International Exhibition at New York" by John French Sloan, April 1913.
69th Regiment Armory in 2008
Exhibition organizer Walter Pach, circa 1909, from the Archives of American Art
Exhibition organizer Arthur B. Davies, circa 1908, from the Archives of American Art

In January 1912, Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur B. Davies joined together with some two dozen of their colleagues to establish a professional coalition, which they called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS). They intended the organization to "lead the public taste in art, rather than follow it."[3] Other founding AAPS members included Jerome Myers, Elmer Livingston MacRae, Henry Fitch Taylor, D. Putnam Brinley, Gutzon Borglum, John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke, Leon Dabo, William J. Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Jonas Lie, George Luks, Karl Anderson, James E.Fraser, Allen Tucker, and J. Alden Weir.[3] AAPS was to be dedicated to creating new exhibition opportunities for young artists, both American and foreign, outside of the existing academic boundaries, as well as to providing educational art experiences for the American public.[4] Davies served as president of AAPS, with Kuhn acting as secretary.

The AAPS members spent more than a year planning their first project: the International Exhibition of Modern Art, a show of giant proportions, unlike any New York had seen. The 69th Regiment Armory was settled on as the main site for the exhibition in the spring of 1912, rented for a fee of $5,000, plus an additional $500 for additional personnel.[5] It was confirmed that the show would later travel to Chicago and Boston.

Once the space had been secured, the most complicated planning task was selecting the art for the show, particularly after the decision was made to include a large proportion of vanguard European work, most of which had never been seen by an American audience.[4] In September 1912, Kuhn left for an extended collecting tour through Europe, including stops at cities in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, visiting galleries, collections and studios and contracting for loans as he went.[6] While in Paris Kuhn met up with Pach, who knew the art scene there intimately, and was friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse; Davies joined them there in November 1912.[4] Together they secured three paintings that would end up being among the Armory Show’s most famous and polarizing: Matisse’s “Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)” and “Madras Rouge (Red Madras Headdress),”and Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” Only after Davies and Kuhn returned to New York in December did they issue an invitation for American artists to participate. [4]

The Armory Show was the first, and, ultimately, the only exhibition mounted by the AAPS. It displayed some 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented.[7] News reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy, as well as parodies, caricatures, doggerels and mock exhibitions. About the modern works, former President Theodore Roosevelt declared, "That's not art!"[8] The civil authorities did not, however, close down, or otherwise interfere with, the show.

Among the scandalously radical works of art, pride of place goes to Marcel Duchamp's cubist/futurist style Nude Descending a Staircase, painted the year before, in which he expressed motion with successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures. Julian Street, an art critic, wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory" (this quote is also attributed to Joel Spingarn[9]), and cartoonists satirized the piece. Gutzon Borglum, one of the early organizers of the show who for a variety of reasons withdrew both his organizational prowess and his work, labeled this piece A staircase descending a nude, while J. F. Griswold, a writer for the New York Evening Sun, entitled it The rude descending a staircase (Rush hour in the subway).[10]

The purchase of Paul Cézanne's Hill of the Poor (View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph) by the Metropolitan Museum of Art signaled an integration of modernism into the established New York museums, but among the younger artists represented, Cézanne was already an established master.

Duchamp's brother, who went by the "nom de guerre" Jacques Villon, also exhibited, sold all his Cubist drypoint etchings, and struck a sympathetic chord with New York collectors who supported him in the following decades.

The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and then to The Copley Society of Art in Boston,[11]where, due to a lack of space, all the work by American artists was removed.[12]

Floor plan

Three brothers, left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in Puteaux, France, 1914. All three brothers were included in the exhibition.

Legacy

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Robert Henri, Figure in Motion, 1913, Art Institute of Chicago.

The original exhibition was an overwhelming success. There have been several exhibitions that were celebrations of its legacy throughout the 20th century.[13]

In 1944 the Cincinnati Art Museum mounted a smaller version, in 1958 Amherst College held an exhibition of 62 works, 41 of which were in the original show, and in 1963 the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York organized the "1913 Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition" sponsored by the Henry Street Settlement in New York, which included more than 300 works.[13]

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was officially launched by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman when they collaborated in 1966 and together organized 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performance art presentations that united artists and engineers. Ten artists worked with more than 30 engineers to produce art performances incorporating new technology. The performances were held in the 69th Regiment Armory, as an homage to the original and historical 1913 Armory show.[14][15]

In February 2009, the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) presented its 21st annual Art Show to benefit the Henry Street Settlement, at the Seventh Regiment Armory, located between 66th and 67th Streets and Park and Lexington Avenues in New York City. The exhibition began as a historical homage to the original 1913 Armory Show.

Starting with a small exhibition in 1994, by 2001 the "New" New York Armory Show, held in piers on the Hudson River, evolved into a "hugely entertaining" (New York Times) annual contemporary arts festival with a strong commercial bent. The 2008 and 2009 Armory Shows did not hold back on the more crude and vulgar works, which are not unknown for the show, which has been less tame in past years.

Commemorating the Centennial

File:Robert W. Chanler, 1912, Leopard and Deer, Gouache or tempera on canvas, mounted on wood, 194.3 × 133.4 cm (76.5 × 52.5 in), Rokeby Collection.jpg
Robert W. Chanler, 1912, Leopard and Deer, gouache or tempera on canvas, mounted on wood, 194.3 × 133.4 cm (76.5 × 52.5 in), Rokeby Collection

Five physical exhibitions in 2013 celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show, as well as a number of publications, virtual exhibitions, and programs. The first exhibition, “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913,” opens at the Montclair Art Museum on Feb. 17, 2013, a hundred years to the day from the original.[4] The second exhibition will be organized by the New-York Historical Society, titled "The Armory Show at 100," which will take place from October 18, 2013 through February 23, 2014.[16] The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, which lent dozens of historic documents to both the New-York Historical Society and Montclair for the exhibitions, has created an online timeline of events, 1913 Armory Show: the Story in Primary Sources, to showcase the records and documents created by the show's organizers.[17] Showing contemporary work, a third exhibition, The Fountain Art Fair, will take place at the 69th Regiment Armory itself during the 100th anniversary from March 8-10th, 2013. The ethos of Fountain Art Fair is inspired by Duchamp's famous, "Fountain" which is the symbol of the Fair.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). The Art Institute of Chicago, which was the only museum to host the 1913 Armory Show, is presenting works from the museum's modern collection that were displayed in the original 1913 exhibition February 20–May 12, 2013. This presentation is complemented by a special online exhibition that traces the history and legacy of the revolutionary show in Chicago and a display of archival materials in the museum's Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, opening April 23, 2013, that offers a glimpse of the museum 100 years ago.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). Lastly, The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Illinois will be presenting "For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show +100" from April 4 through June 16, 2013. Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).

List of the artists

Main article: List of artists in the Armory Show

Below is a partial list of the artists in the show. These artists are all listed in the 50th anniversary catalog as having exhibited in the original 1913 Armory show.[13]

Images

Selected works

Sources

See also

References

  1. ^ International Exhibition of Modern Art, Copley Society of Boston, Copley Hall, Boston, Mass., 1913
  2. ^ Brown, Milton W., The Story of the Armory Show, Joseph H Hirshhorn Foundation, New York, 1963, pp. 185–186
  3. ^ a b "New York Armory Show of 1913". AskArt.com. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
  4. ^ a b c d e Cotter, Holland (October 28, 2012). "Rethinking the Armory Show". The New York Times. p. 1.
  5. ^ "Securing a Space: The 69th Regiment Armory". 1913 Armory Show: the Story in Primary Sources. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
  6. ^ "Walt Kuhn's Itinerary through Europe, 1912". 1913 Armory Show: the Story in Primary Sources. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
  7. ^ McShea, Megan, A Finding Aid to the Walt Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records, 1859–1978 (bulk 1900–1949), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
  8. ^ Theodore Roosevelt's review of the Armory Show for The Outlook, published on March 29, 1913, was entitled "A Layman's View of an Art Exhibition". See Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, New York, 2010; ISBN 978-0-375-50487-7), pages 267–272 and 660–663. According to Morris, Roosevelt's review looked with some favor upon the new American artists.
  9. ^ Joel Spingarn, p. 110
  10. ^ Brown, Milton W., The Story of the Armory Show, Joseph H Hirshhorn Foundation, New York, 1963, p. 110
  11. ^ International Exhibition of Modern Art, Copley Society of Boston, Copley Hall, Boston, Mass., 1913
  12. ^ Brown, Milton W., The Story of the Armory Show, Joseph H Hirshhorn Foundation, New York, 1963, pp. 185–186
  13. ^ a b c 1913 Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition 1963 copyright and organized by Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, copyright and sponsored by the Henry Street Settlement, New York City, Library of Congress card number 63-13993
  14. ^ Vehicle, online. Retrieved September 25, 2008.
  15. ^ documents, history online. Retrieved September 25, 2008.
  16. ^ "The Armory Show at 100". New-York Historical Society. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
  17. ^ "1913 Armory Show: The Story in Primary Sources". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved February 1, 2013.

External links

1913 Armory Show

Armory shows after 1913

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