Armory Show

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Armory Show poster. 1913.

Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, on February 17, 1913, ran to March 15, and became a legendary watershed date in the history of American art, introducing astonished New Yorkers, accustomed to realistic art, to modern art. The show served as a catalyst for American artists, who became more independent and created their own "artistic language".

[edit] History

"A Slight Attack of Third Dimentia Brought on by Excessive Study of the Much Talked of Cubist Pictures in the International Exhibition at New York," drawn by John French Sloan in April 1913.

The Armory Show, was the first exhibition mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and was run by their president, Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn the secretary and Walter Pach. It displayed some 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented.^[1]

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, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, "That's not art!" 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. An art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece.

However, 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 in Chicago and Boston.

[edit] Partial list of the artists

Robert Ingersoll Aitken, Alexander Archipenko, George Grey Barnard, Chester Beach, Gifford Beal, George Bellows, Joseph Bernard, Guy Pène du Bois, Oscar Bluemner, Pierre Bonnard, Gutzon Borglum, Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Patrick Henry Bruce, Paul Burlin, Charles Camoin, Arthur Carles, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Henri-Edmond Cross, Andrew Dasburg, Honoré Daumier, Stuart Davis, Arthur B. Davies, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Robert Delaunay, Maurice Denis, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Jacob Epstein, Roger de La Fresnaye, Othon Friesz, Paul Gauguin, William Glackens, Albert Gleizes, Vincent van Gogh, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, James Innes, Augustus John, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Leon Kroll, Walt Kuhn, Gaston Lachaise, Marie Laurencin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernand Léger, Jonas Lie, George Luks, Aristide Maillol, Édouard Manet, Henri Manguin, John Marin, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Alfred Henry Maurer, Claude Monet, Adolphe Monticelli, Edward Munch, Walter Pach, Jules Pascin, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Maurice Prendergast, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Theodore Robinson, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Georges Seurat, Charles Sheeler, Walter Sickert, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, John Sloan, Joseph Stella, John Henry Twachtman, Félix Vallotton, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, Édouard Vuillard, Abraham Walkowitz, J. Alden Weir, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Jack B. Yeats, William Zorach ^[2]

[edit] Legacy

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 New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets as an homage to the original and historical 1913 Armory show. ^{[3] [4]}

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 an 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.

[edit] See also

• Experiments in Art and Technology
• American modernism
• Culture of New York City
• The Armory Show (art fair)

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Sarah Douglas. "Pier Pressure." ARTINFO. March 26, 2008 Accessed on 15 April 2008 from http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27204/pier-pressure/
• Catalogue of International Exhibition of Modern Art, at the Armory of the Sixty-Ninth Infantry, Feb. 15 to Mar. 15, 1913. Association of American Painters and Sculptors, 1913.
• The Story of the Armory Show. Walt Kuhn. New York, 1938.
• The Story of the Armory Show. Milton W. Brown. Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1963. [republished by Abbeville Press, 1988.]
• 1913 Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition. Text by Milton W. Brown. Utica: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1963.
• Malloy, Nancy and Stover, Catherine. A Finding Aid to the Walter Pach Papers, 1883–1980, in the Archives of American Art. The Walter Pach Papers Online, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

[edit] External links

1913 Armory Show

• Virtual re-creation of the Armory Show from the American Studies Programs at the University of Virginia
• 1913 news and reviews of the Armory Show have been digitized and posted online as the Walt Kuhn, Kuhn Family Papers, And Armory Show Records at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Armory shows after 1913

• The "New" Armory Show
• Artkrush.com feature on the 2006 Armory Show (March, 2006)

Coordinates: 40°44′28.44″N 73°59′00.54″W / 40.7412333°N 73.9834833°W / 40.7412333; -73.9834833