Which Work of Art Was Considered to Be One of the Most Controversial Pieces at the Armory Show?
On Feb. 17, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. The Armory Show, as it came to be known, had a profound effect on American art. Smithsonian Establishment Archives of American Art hide caption
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Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art
On Feb. 17, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. The Armory Testify, as it came to be known, had a profound effect on American art.
Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art
On Feb. 17, 1913, an art exhibition opened in New York City that shocked the country, changed our perception of beauty and had a profound effect on artists and collectors.
The International Exhibition of Modern Fine art — which came to be known, simply, as the Armory Show — marked the dawn of Modernism in America. It was the commencement fourth dimension the phrase "avant-garde" was used to describe painting and sculpture.
On the evening of the evidence'south opening, iv,000 guests milled around the makeshift galleries in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue.
Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Philadelphia Museum of Fine art/Copyright succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Social club (ARS), New York 2013 hide caption
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Philadelphia Museum of Art/Copyright succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Lodge (ARS), New York 2013
Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory."
Philadelphia Museum of Fine art/Copyright succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Guild (ARS), New York 2013
Two-thirds of the paintings on view were by American artists. Simply 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 type of 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 Society.
"If y'all saw a female nude, in fine art, in sculpture or painting, it was very classical," Kushner adds. "And it was the idea of this perfect, classical beauty."
Kushner says it was jarring for audiences in 1913 to encounter works such as Matisse's Blue Nude for the first time.
"You lot know, she'south a nude. You can tell she's a nude. But she's in all of these colors that you never imagined y'all would see on a woman before," she says. "She looks very primitive, most childlike."
Viewers were shocked, Kushner says, "because they'd never seen anything similar this before. And they didn't know how to chronicle to it."
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's Bluish Nude wound up at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Leah Dickerman, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Fine art, explains The Red Studio, another Matisse from the testify.
"You run across pictures piled upwardly in the groundwork, a agency with another work leaning against it," Dickerman says. "Simply the walls of the studio, the floors of the studio, the table — annihilation that's not fine art, and non his composed still life, is washed in a bright brick red.
"It'south an extraordinary painting. The ruddy jumps, and notwithstanding, inside that groundwork, are all these brightly colored paintings and sculptural figures that are an inventory of things that Matisse fabricated."
Marcel Duchamp, shown here with art historian Henri Marceau at the Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition in 1963, painted the revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase when he was just 26 years old. Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art hide caption
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Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Fine art
Marcel Duchamp, shown here with art historian Henri Marceau at the Armory Show 50th Ceremony Exhibition in 1963, painted the revolutionary Nude Descending a Staircase when he was but 26 years old.
Smithsonian Establishment Archives of American Art
Dickerman says the works in the show had a profound effect on American artists. Simply almost equally remarkable was the exhibition itself. It was organized by a grouping of two dozen immature artists who chosen 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 retrieve fine art historians are addicted of thinking that information technology created a revolution."
But, Paley says, the artists' ingenuity was role of a bigger revolution.
"All sorts of boggling things are happening," Paley says of the modern age. "Albert Einstein is working on a new theory of gravity. New applied science — electrical light, communication — just an explosion of 19th-century norms. And in New York, new buildings like the Woolworth Building or the M Central Concluding — these are opening.
"Information technology'due south a unlike time. It's the dawn of a different time. And certainly this idea of deconstructing the old way of thinking — is very much in the air."
The most talked-nearly painting in the 1913 Armory Show deconstructed a homo effigy in abstract brown panels in overlapping motion. Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic every bit "an explosion in a shingle factory."
In 1963, on the 50th ceremony of the Armory Show, Duchamp was interviewed by CBS reporter Charles Collingwood. The audio is now at the Smithsonian's Archive of American Fine art.
A notebook recording sales at the New York Armory Prove shows that Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase sold for $324. Walter Pach papers/Archives of American Fine art, Smithsonian Establishment hide caption
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Walter Pach papers/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
A notebook recording sales at the New York Armory Show shows that Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase sold for $324.
Walter Pach papers/Archives of American Fine art, Smithsonian Institution
When Collingwood asked Duchamp if he had realized that the piece would create "such a "furor," the artist responded: "Not the slightest. In the showtime place, I was a very immature painter, 26 years onetime. Never had been to America. Wasn't here at the time."
Duchamp said he was in French republic when he got word that his painting had sold for $324. After the commission, he received $240 — virtually $5,565, in today'due south dollars. Bang-up for an artist unknown in this country at the time.
Duchamp went on in the 1963 interview to say that, at the fourth dimension, artists had lost the ability to surprise the public.
"In that location's a public to receive it today that did not exist so. Cubism was sort of forced upon the public to reject information technology. You know what I mean?" Duchamp said. "Instead, today, whatever new motion is virtually accepted before it started. See, there's no more element of shock anymore."
That's why the Arsenal Show was so important in 1913, Dickerman says.
"Information technology'south this moment in fourth dimension, 100 years agone, in which the foundations of cultural practise were totally reordered in as peachy a way as we accept seen," she says. "And that this marks a reordering of the rules of art-making — it'southward every bit big every bit we've seen since the Renaissance.
"And I don't recall nosotros've seen equally great a transformation in the 100 years that follow — where the foundations of how art is conceived are totally shaken."
The 1913 Armory Bear witness attracted 87,000 visitors in New York City earlier it traveled to Chicago, where critic Harriet Monroe saw it. She wrote in the Sunday Tribune, "These radical artists are right. They represent a search for new dazzler" and "a longing for new versions of truth observed."
Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/02/17/172002686/armory-show-that-shocked-america-in-1913-celebrates-100
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