My take on the NYC Armory Show from back in 2013, on its centennial…
Most art exhibits come and go without much notice. Even the best don’t exert a lasting claim on the collective consciousness of the art world. Some of the works that comprise them may be masterpieces but the shows themselves are quickly forgotten as one succeeds the next. Even those touted as blockbusters, while they may bring the crowds, fade in memory almost as soon as the doors close.
There is one exception, however, and this month marks the 100th anniversary of the most important art exhibit ever held in the United States. It was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and featured more than 1,200 American and European works of art. It quickly and ever after came to be known as the “Armory Show” because it was staged in the massive new 69th Regiment armory building in New York City.
It was the Europeans who caused most of the buzz. This was the first major presentation of abstract European art in the United States and the organizers had selected all the works with an eye toward shaking up the contemporary art scene. One of the planners said “we want this old show of ours to mark the starting point of the new spirit in art, at least as far as America is concerned.” The opening would be “the red-letter night in the history not only of American but of all modern art.”
The show included virtually every artist who would become famous in the twentieth century. Just among the Europeans there was Braque, Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, Brancusi, and countless others. Whether one loved it or hated it, the public was captivated.
The Armory Show’s most famous critic was none other than former president Theodore Roosevelt, a man known to have passionate opinions on just about everything. Despite how progressive as he had become in his politics, Roosevelt was vehemently conservative when it came to cultural matters. At the Armory Show “the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence,” he said with disgust. “Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously.”
He singled out Marcel Duchamp’s radically cubist/futurist work entitled “Nude Descending A Staircase” (today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) as emblematic of what was wrong. He derisively referred to it as “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs,” and thought it simply preposterous. The Navajo rug he had in his bathroom, he said, made a far more satisfactory picture.
The President had much company in his disapproval. A critic for the New York Times likened the painting to “an explosion in a shingle factory.” The well-known New York gallery Knoedler’s refused even to place an advertisement in the exhibit catalog because it didn’t want to endorse such “radical tendencies in modern art.”
The entire exhibit was a “supreme effort to educate American taste,” explains Milton Brown in his 1963 book The Story of the Armory Show, and among younger American artists in particular, their “complacency was shattered.” The show’s message, Brown says, was that art was always alive and growing. “Life presupposes change,” he notes, and while “the new may at first appear strange” it will eventually be accepted and become commonplace. In that comment is both the story of the exhibit and the story of art throughout the century.
It is not often that one is afforded a look into the future. But that is what the attendees at the 1913 Armory Show discovered. Whether a viewer’s reaction was approving or disapproving, hopeful or skeptical, here, it transpired, was the trajectory of art in the new century. One hundred years later it retains its importance.
I am grateful that we experience change and we retain much of the old. We cannot afford to get lost in what someone believes is the only way now. Its always amazing to me how our appreciation grows with time. Its the way of a good marriage too.