The Armory Show Of 1913

The 96th Armory Building

The Armory show of 1913 allowed artists from Europe and America to showcase groundbreaking new art while displaying modern art concepts such as cubism and fauvism. The show hosted approximately 90,000 people from February 17 to March 15 and showcased 1,400 works of art from every corner of the globe. It was housed in the New York Guards 96th armory and had 18 different rooms to showcase the myriad of pieces. The individual galleries of each room consisted of sculptures to paintings to giant murals that expanded across vast walls of the galleria.

The new ideas brought forth by the Europeans were being displayed to the masses for the first time in this exhibit and brought copious amounts of criticism, none more than Marcel Duchamp's piece titled “Nude descending a staircase”.

"Nude Descending A Staircase"

Using cubism Duchamp gave this piece a perceived look of motion, another proprietor of the cubist movement,Francis Picabia, described it as how "The qualitative conception of reality can no longer be expressed in a purely visual or optical manner; and in consequence pictorial expression has had to eliminate more and more objective formulae from its convention in order to relate itself to the qualitative conception". The painting was criticized harshly as"A bundle of slats, an explosion in a shingle factory," said curator Marilyn Kushner. It even attracted attention from former president Theodore Roosevelt, who compared it to a Navajo rug he had on the floor of his bathroom.

"Vine Wood"

The American artists were annoyed by the fact that the European artists were causing more of a stir in their home country than they were. Some newspaper writers foreshadowed this by titling news articles, "It Will Throw a Bomb Into Our Art World and a Good Many Leaders Will be Hit" and "Cubist, Futurists, and Post Impressionists Win First Engagement, Leaving the Enemy Awestruck" these articles greeted the public, emphasizing the paintings of Duchamp, Matisse, and Picabia and the sculpture of Brancusi as intellectual warfare. Even though the Americans despised the Europeans for tainting their art show a few of them were recognized and had their art thoroughly discussed. One such artist is Agnes Pelton who was creating what she called "Imaginative Paintings," which like impressionism explored the variations of sunlight but focused on mythic rather than contemporary scenes with titles like Vine Wood  and Stone Age. One person stated Pelton as "a woman who is almost in a class by herself . . . Her later work is of a strictly mystical, visionary character . . . It is an art of detached spirituality."

The Armory show impacted the artistic world drastically in the years following it. After the show closed in New York, the chairman of the Armory Show declared it a success, anticipating its ability to spawn gallery openings in downtown Manhattan: "It was said by one of the critics that, if the Association had stopped short and not hung a single picture, or put up a single piece of sculpture, it would have performed a notable work in solving what had been regarded as one of the town's great problems." The Armory Show's crowning achievement was not its impact on the individual artists who sought to learn the mysteries of cubism in the wake of the Armory Show but its ability to capture the attention of collectors and gallery owners, hyping up the desirability and profitability of new age modern art. While bringing modern art to the attention of the greater public, inspiring collectors and patrons, creating a market in which galleries could survive, the Armory Show was of signal importance for the new age of American art that would soon take the world by storm.

Citations:

Nash, Gary B. "Armory Show." The Emergence of Modern America: 1900 to 1928. By Elizabeth Faue. Vol. VII. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2003. 17. Print. Encyclopedia Of American History.

Huyghe, Rene. Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art: From 1800 to the Present Day. Ed. Hugh Newbury and Ralph De Saram. Middlesex: Spring, 1961. Print.

Staples, Shelley. "Welcome to the 1913 Armory Show." Welcome to the 1913 Armory Show. American Studies Program at The University Of Virginia, n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2014.

Stamberg, Susan. "In 1913, A New York Armory Filled With Art Stunned The Nation." NPR. NPR, 11 Nov. 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2014.