Marsden Hartley

It's an interesting irony that today, Abstract Expressionism is thought of by the art world as faintly quaint, while the general public still considers it "far out," to misappropriate a 50s term, in defining it.  "They" just don't "get it" while artists have "gotten it" and long since gotten over it.  It's not like Americans haven't had enough time to get over it.  Did you ever wonder who the first American was who painted the first really abstract painting? The year was 1914--not exactly yesterday. It happened not in this country but in Germany, before the First World War. He was a mountain boy (actually, he was 37 at the time) from the state of Maine by way of  Cleveland. He was rounding out his art education studying art in Europe, first in France where he'd been influenced by the work of Cezanne and then assimilated Cubism. From there he was on to Munich, Der Blau Reiter group, and then to Dresden and Die Brucke. His name was Marsden Hartley.

Portrait of a German Officer,
1914, Marsden Hartley

It was a classic art educational experience on the outskirts of modern art of the time. It was in a country bursting with rampant militarism on the one hand and radical political movements on the other. Political tensions from the Balkans to the English Channel were stretched like the proverbial rubber band waiting to snap. Hartley incorporated these tensions in two paintings, Portrait of a German Officer, and Iron Cross both from 1914. Working out of Berlin, the heart of the German tinderbox, both works are an amalgamation of the strident military fever that gripped the country at the time, and ultimately led it to war. In Berlin he was influenced both by Kandinsky and Max Beckmann.  German colors, numbers, symbols, banners, and bravura dominate both paintings which have the feel of still-lifes though without settings or real subject matter. They exude a "feeling" rather than recognizable content.

Iron Cross, 1914, Marsden Hartley

Give him credit for this, Hartley knew when to go home. Back in New York during and after the war, Hartley fell in with Alfred Stieglitz and his group of avant-garde artists who displayed from Stieglitz's Gallery 291. And, having gotten abstraction out of his system, Hartley began painting stark, expressionistic, landscapes he recalled from his boyhood state of Maine. For nearly a generation, until abstraction began to gain some acceptance amongst artists and critics in this country, he dwelt upon the landscape, pushing it closer and closer to those early excursions into abstraction which he'd made as a student in Germany. In the 1920s, he followed the mass exodus of New York artists who discovered Taos, New Mexico, exchanging his Maine landscapes for those of the desert Southwest, in bold, western colors, often heavily outlined in black. 1914--96 years ago--wouldn't you think by now abstraction would be seen by Americans as something more than "fraudulent globs of paint by artists who can't draw?"

Arthur Dove

Two of the most misunderstood related terms in art have to do with that which is "abstract" and that art which is "non-representational." The public, and no doubt some artists, think of them as meaning the same thing. I'm afraid I must confess to at times using them interchangeably. However, strictly speaking, an abstract is basically a summary or abbreviated version of something much more complex. Lawyers use the term quite commonly and I'm starting to sound like one at this point. But at any rate, it has subject matter, though like the law, it may be pretty obscure. Non-representational art, on the other hand, is basically art about art. The subject is color, or line, or mass or any of the other primary or secondary elements of design artists love to talk about when they want to impress their friends outside the field, but which we seldom overtly consider in creating our work (perhaps because such things have become intuitive). In any case, it has, by definition, no basis in reality other than it's own arty existence.

Raptus, 1912-13, Marsden Hartley

Now, to muddy the water, there are those who claim that abstracts can be non-representational under certain esoteric circumstances. So, it's little wonder I got in trouble yesterday for claiming Marsden Hartley to have been the first American abstractionist. It would seem that another member of the Stieglitz group of New York artists may have beaten him by a few years. His name was Arthur Dove and his work from the period 1910 to 1912 would appear to be somewhat more abstract than Hartley's and a little earlier too. However, neither artists would appear to have quite reached what we would call a non-representation level.  Hartley's early abstracts tended toward still-life while Dove's, toward landscape (as did Hartley's later on).

Sails, 1911-12, Arthur Dove

If we want to dwell on history and "firstisms," Dove was born in 1880, making him a little younger than Hartley, however he beat him to Europe and back by several years. In New York, displaying with the other Stieglitz avant-garde at Gallery 291, Dove may well have come very close to painting without regard for natural subject matter, depending upon how much the viewer is predisposed to probe for such influences. Yet the influence of powerhouse French artists such as Matisse and Cezanne is evident and pretty hard to shake, even though during the 1920s and 30s, Dove further simplified his forms and veered closer and closer toward the truly non-representational. Dove is often compared to Vassily Kandinsky, perhaps what one would call his European counterpart, as both artists struggled to shake free of centuries of deeply embedded subjective influences. So, the calendar aside, is Dove's work non-representational, or merely abstract?  Don't get me started, my head's still spinning from re-reading the first paragraph. Now that you've seen their work, you decide

Albert Henry Krehbiel

Traffic at the Link Bridge - Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 1922, Albert Krehbiel                  
Chicago traffic, the more things change, the more they stay the same.                 

Albert Henry Krehbiel, 1910

Once you've visited a place, especially a major city, paintings encountered later of that place, mean more than before. For one thing, you can judge pretty accurately the authenticity of the painter's vision--how much comes from within, how much from the environment. Also, cities change, but paintings done decades ago don't. It's fascinating to compare the "now" and "then." On our trip out west this spring (2014) we visited four major cities beloved by painters, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. There were others but those are the most common ones chosen. The American Impressionist painter, Albert Henry Krehbiel painted in two of those four locales, and though his style could only be called severely impressionistic, bordering on Expressionism, there's little doubt he knew his subjects intimately.

...Yesterday, 1930, Albert Krehbiel--painting his mid-western roots.

Evening Rush Hour in the Chicago Loop,
 1926, Albert Krehbiel

Albert Krehbiel was born in Denmark...Iowa. Despite his German heritage, that makes him about as American as corn-on-the-cob. Born in 1873, his family moved to Kansas when he was six. His father was a lay preacher of the Mennonite faith who also built buggies and helped found colleges (Bethel College North Newton, Kansas). When he was nineteen, Albert and his younger brother rode their bicycles to Chicago so they might attend the city's famed Art Institute. Four years later Albert graduated with a scholarship to study abroad, in Paris, at the Academie Julan. During the next three years, his work won four gold medals and numerous cash prizes, topping them off with the ultimate prize for any young art student in Paris, the Prix de Rome. This allowed him an additional year of free study in the eternal city. Later, in 1905, two of Krehbiel's history paintings were accepted into the Paris Salon. He became the most highly decorated American painter in the history of the French city.

Black and white archive photo, Illinois State Supreme Court Mural, 1907, Albert Krehbiel

California Village Along Coast,
 Santa Monica, 1922, Albert Krehbiel

Back in Chicago, Krehbiel immediately won a commission to paint a mural for the wall of the city's new Juvenile Court. A year later, that led to the prestigious commission for eleven wall murals and two ceilings in the state's new Supreme Court Building in Springfield. Begun in 1907, that kept him busy for the next fears. During the next several years, Krehbiel spent his summers painting in Santa Monica, California (left), and Sante Fe, New Mexico. (Gees, summering in the desert Southewest...before air conditioning?) There Krehbiel rubbed shoulders with big names from New York's Ashcan School--Robert Henri, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis, all of whom apparently lacked the good sense to go north in the summer, not south. Krehbiel's "day job" during this period was teaching at the AIC where he helped organize the school's summer program. It should be noted, summers in Chicago are only slightly less miserable than in New Mexico.

Ferry Boat Landing, Saugatuck, 1940, Albert Krehbiel

Shaded in Red and Blue, 1939,
Albert Krehbiel

Despite the Great Depression, Krehbiel opened his own school in Saugatuck, Michigan (just across the lake from Chicago) while dividing his time between classes there and at AIC. Other than time spent guiding students, Krehbiel painted incessantly, working from his Park Ridge home, often spending an entire day completing two or three works in pastels, oils, or watercolor before returning home by nightfall. Moreover, he painted outside regardless of the seasons, often painting more during the winter than during the summer, including a considerable number of Chicago street scene such as the Link Bridge - Michigan Avenue (top), from 1922, with particular emphasis on the movement of people and traffic at rush hour. Late in life, Krehbiel's work became more and more abstract, bordering on Cubism as he experimented with highly simplified human figures in a style he called "synchromistic." Krehbiel died of a heart attack in June of 1945 at the age of seventy-two while preparing for yet another painting excurstion, this time through Illinois and Kansas.

Contemplation, 1941, Albert Henry Krehbiel--Synchromistic painting--Guernica with color.

 

Romaine Brooks

La Trajet, 1900, Romaine Brooks. The model was Ida Rubenstein.

Romaine Brooks
Self-portrait,1923, perhaps
her most recognized work.

I've never written about a lesbian artist before (not knowingly, at least). I have, however written about several gay male artists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, and some others. For the majority of these artists, their sexuality was mostly incidental to their work, if not their lives. In writing about such artists I make it a habit not to dwell on gender preferences. That's not the case with the American expatriate painter, Romaine Brooks. Brooks was a lesbian, and her sexuality permeated virtually every aspect of her life and her work. She dressed as a man, she painted portraits of mostly women, she lived with writer, Natalie Barney, for over fifty years, and though she was married briefly to a man, (who was gay) it seems to have been a turbulent marriage of convenience for them both (she was rich, he wasn't). Moreover, had she not been one of the few openly gay female artists of her time, she would probably be little remembered today.

 

Beatrice Romaine Goddard had a difficult, one might even say tragic, childhood. Born in 1874 in Rome to a wealthy American family, her father deserted his wife, two daughters, and mentally ill son when she was four. She grew up in New York, emotionally abused by her mother, who gave all her attention to her violent son. Eventually, Romaine was put in foster care with a relatively poor family only to have support payments cut off, causing them to sink into poverty. Even though her maternal grandfather was a multi-millionaire, Romaine refused to divulge his name or contact him for fear of being sent back to her mother. Her foster parents eventually located her grandfather on their own. She ended up in an Episcopal boarding school.

 

Romaine Brooks, ca. 1900,
much more attractive than
seen in her self-portraits.

After graduation, Romaine obtained from her mother money enough to move to Paris where she briefly trained to be a singer, working in a cabaret. Later, moving on to Rome she studied art, the only woman in her life drawing class. Not surprisingly, she was a victim of sexual harassment, which she quickly ended by decking her tormentor with his book of underlined pornographic passages. Constantly battling money problems, Romaine returned to Paris for more art studies, then to the island of Capri where she was to spend much of the rest of her life. With the death of her mother and brother in 1901, Romaine and her sister inherited her grandfather's considerable estate. Now independently wealthy, men suddenly found the struggling young artist quite attractive. In 1903 she married an unsuccessful homosexual pianist, John Ellingham Brooks, who objected vehemently to her masculine mode of dress not to mention her tight control over her wealth. He refused to be seen in public with her. They separated after less than a year, and though they were never divorced, neither were they ever really married in the first place.

 

The Black Cape, 1907, Romaine Brooks, 
one of her few feminine portraits.

Disposing of her husband (though, for some reason, keeping his name), and dissatisfied with her painting as well (particularly her colorful palette), Romaine Brooks rented a studio in St. Ives on England's Cornish coast where she delved into shades of gray, influenced greatly by the work of another American expatriate, James McNeill Whistler. Having no need to sell her work, she also had no need to pay heed to the swirling modernist movement during the first decades of the 20th century. Her palette was dominated by black, white, and gray, with occasional tints of ochre and umber, all of which caused her to stand out artistically as much as her lifestyle did socially. Moving to Paris, Brooks ignored the avant-garde, her wealth allowing her to mingle among, and paint the upper class social celebrities of the time, several of whom she briefly took at lovers. Recognized by the art dealer, Durand Ruel, who fostered an exhibition of her work in 1910, her reputation as a portrait artist grew along with her high society friendships.

 

Natalie Barney, 1920, Romaine Brooks,
her companion for more than 50 years.

After a lengthy relationship with actress/dancer Ida Rubenstein (top), whom she painted more often than any other model, Romaine Brooks met the left-bank American writer, Natalie Clifford Barney (right). Today we would call it an open, same-sex marriage, though in pre-WW I France, such arrangements were, of course, unheard of. They built a house with two separate wings joined by a dining room to accommodate their need to be together, yet separate. Though frequently apart, their "arrangement" lasted more than fifty years. Brook's list of paintings from this period might also be termed her list of female lovers as well. Her short hair and masculine attire became fashionable, as seen in many of Brook's portraits at the time (including her own).



The Impeders, 1930, Romaine Brooks.

After 1925, Romaine Brooks quit painting self-portraits. In fact, she quit painting almost entirely. Only four portraits are known to exist from that point on. She was, however the subject of numerous literary portraits by Natalie Barney and her friends. Brooks turned more to drawing, especially complex line drawings. The Impeders, from 1930, is typical of her style in later years. When an artist fails to produce, they sink into oblivion. Even though she lived to the ripe old age of 96, by the 1960s, Romaine Brooks was largely forgotten. Only in recent years, with the advent of the LGBT movement, has Brooks' art come to symbolize the openness and lifestyle freedom of expression that only her independent wealth would allow one-hundred years ago.

Romaine Brooks poses in her studio around 1960. The writer, Truman Capote, termed
her studio, "the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935, or thereabouts."

 

Illusion Versus Reality

Still-life wall painting, Pompeii, before 69 AD.

In painting, they have always been a minor genre. They have mostly been sublimated to history painting, portraiture, even the lowly landscape. Someone eons ago decided to call such work still-lifes. From the very start it's a contradiction of terms. A better phrase might have been life, stilled. That is to say, a bit of life, animal, vegetable, or mineral, culled by the artist from its natural environment, and "stilled" into a contrived arrangement hopefully signifying something. As painting goes, they're a relatively recent development, perhaps growing out of the props used to decorate portraits or religious paintings. Both, going back centuries, sometimes have exciting little nooks and crannies with modest, often exquisite little still-life representations. Vermeer comes to mind...and Rembrandt.

The Milkmaid (detail), ca. 1658, Jan Vermeer

Not coincidentally, both were Dutch. Of course, by the time painting came of age in the low countries and northern Germany, the still-life had long been a staple in the painter's art. In fact, the genre reached a sort of peak in the hard-edged realism reflecting the highly materialistic world of Flemish art. Not until our modern era do we again see it hold such sway. Strangely enough, it was Picasso, Braque, and the Cubists who once more brought up the subject, using it as a platform for their experiments in shattering illusions of planes and textures. Artists as diverse as Marsden Hartley, and James McNeill Whistler have tried their hand at it. Photographer's delight in them, perhaps because they offer the opportunity to experiment almost endlessly with nuances of light and shadow, edges, reflections, and textures, and afterwards, if you've chosen your model carefully, you can eat it.

Flowers and Vase, 1985, Donald Sulton

Painters routinely deal with two primal elements in their work--reality and Illusion. Like fire and water, in the art of still-life painting, they are often at war with one another. American still-life artists such as Charles Bird King, several of the Peales, William Harnett, Frederick Peto, and others all, chose to explore the illusional end. An artist by the name of Donald Sulton uses tar, oil, plaster,even linoleum over Masonite to explore the reality of the genre. His 1985 Flowers and Vase (left) is a modern example. In my own work, I've done both, even tried to broker a peace between the warring factions by mixing the two elements, asking, "Where does illusion end and reality begin?" We can paint extremely credible illusions of reality with oils or fabricate sculptural illusions with all manner of mixed media, even appropriating the "real thing," an actually apple for instance, in the ultimate homage to reality. In dealing with these extremes, on the one end there is painted, two-dimensional illusion masquerading as reality, while on the other extreme is three-dimensional reality masquerading as art, which begs the question, is it, in fact, "art" once it reaches such an extreme? Hurry and answer before the apple rots.

 

The titles below refer to "before" the diet and "after" with elements of the still-life fabricated, painted, and attached to the surface, even "breaking" the frame.

Before, 2000, Jim Lane

After, 2000, Jim Lane

Max Weber

In the first two decades of the twentieth century it is difficult to overstate the influence Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 Gallery had on cutting edge art in this country.  There was virtually no Avant-garde artist working in this country (meaning New York City) that weren't intimately connected with Stieglitz, or hadn't at least exhibited at 291 Fifth Avenue. The typical routine tended to be that they were "discovered" by Stieglitz, went to Europe, (Paris and/or Munich) studied Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky and a few others, then came back carrying with them an amalgamation of many of these styles to try and make a go of it in this country. This group included artists such as John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Max Weber among others.

Composition with Three Figures,
1910, Max Weber

Weber is an interesting case study. Born in 1881 in Bialystok, Russia, his Jewish parents brought him to this country when he was ten. He grew up poor in Brooklyn where he attended the Pratt Institute.  There he studied under Arthur Wesley Dow who, had worked with Gauguin. From Dow he picked up an emphasis on structure and patterned design. As was typical of the time, he went to Paris to complete his art studies, working under Robert Delaunay while studying the Fauves, Cezanne, and apparently Cubism, given the similarities between his Composition with Three Figures painted in 1910, and Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d' Avignon. The Cubist and African influence is unmistakable.

He returned to New York in 1908. His big break came three years later when Stieglitz invited him to exhibit at the 291 Gallery. However two years after that, some of his paintings were refused at the 1913 Armory Show. In a fit of pique, he withdrew them all. It was a major career error. He went unrepresented in the most important Avant-garde show of its time. Many of Stieglitz's other artists made major names for themselves while Weber faded from view.

Rush Hour, New York, 1915, Max Weber

Chinese Restaurant, 1915,
Max Weber

The next few years were difficult for him. In his painting Chinese Restaurant (1915), he experiment with Synthetic Cubism, and in the same year, in painting Rush Hour, New York, there is the element of Futurism as he attempted to capture the powerful rhythms of the streets in abstract form.  But as with many artists who are ahead of their time, Weber suffered for it. Critics had nothing good to say about any of his work. Everyone else ignored him. Disillusioned and broke, Weber gradually turned to representational images in the early 1920s, letting Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and a number of other art movements pass him by. By the time of his death in 1961, he was largely forgotten.

The Modern Art Invasion

It's hard for us to imagine today, in this Post-Modern era of an international art world, or even in the context of the last century when the United States so dominated the world of art after WW II,  but a hundred years ago, in the early years of the Twentieth Century, this country was an artistic backwater.  We were only vaguely familiar with the artistic trends rocking the European art scene and largely ignorant of the movers and shakers of the dozens of art "movements" terrorizing the staid art establishment that had so dominated France, England, Spain, Italy, and Germany for so many years. Art in America had only recently assimilated Impressionism and was still, in fact, debating it's finer points long after the style had become almost antique in Europe.

A number of American artists of the time had in mind to change all that. They counted among their membership men like Walt Kuhn, Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Bellows, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast. Davies and Kuhn spent the summer of 1912 in Europe rounding up a selection of works representing all the current art movements. What they brought back with them was over 1300 works representing 300 different artists.  The list read like a who's who of Modern Art. Names like Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Derain, and Duchamp were shown side by side with American artists, Stuart Davies, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Joseph Stella, and others.

The show opened on February 17, 1913 in the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in New York to an audience of over 70,000 people. A smaller version of the show traveled inland to Chicago, and later to Boston. The effect was stunning, also scandalous and amusing as a naive American public struggled to come to terms with the European artistic invasion of their native shores and sensibilities.

Known today simply as The Armory Show,

 American art would never be the same again.

The 1913 Armory Show

1913 Armory Show, 2014, James R. Huntsberger

Virtually anyone who knows much about art, especially Modern Art, especially modern American art has heard of New York City's famed 1913 69th Regiment Armory Show. There the showing of American and European avant-garde art racked up an astounding attendance figure of more than 87,000 visitors (in the middle of the winter, no less). From New York the show moved on to Chicago where the attendance was more than twice that of New York (188,700), followed by a showing in Boston where, due to a lack of space, the exhibit was stripped of American artists and the crowd dwindled to just 14,400. (Bostonians always have tended to be a stodgy lot.)

 

The handwritten plan is labeled as a proposed arrangement. How accurately it was followed is problematical. Notice the prominent placement of van Gogh's work near the entrance while the cubist works are tucked away in a far corner.

So important was this show in the history of American art that I've mentioned it, or written about it, on several occasions. For a background understanding, check out the first Invasion of Modern Art, as well as Duchamp (and others) in discussing Vernacular Art. When the show opened, word of the outrageous content spread quickly. The crowds hurried first to the Cubist and Futurist rooms, eager to see the worst. There, most of them felt obliged to laugh, while others were struck dumb in an open-mouth stare. A few were seized with deep despair. So unfamiliar were these violently abstracted forms that they represented something of a blow to the face—a bomb thrown at the art establishment. One dismayed art connoisseur noted, “It makes me fear for the world. Something must be wrong with an age which can put these things in a gallery and call them art. The minds that produced them are fit subjects for alienists and the canvases—I can’t call them pictures—should hang in the curio room of an insane asylum.”

 

1913 Armory Show overview.

Words of the Devil,
1892, Paul Gauguin

The exhibition was a brilliant success in every way. The attendance was large, and sales were numerous and remunerative. The exhibition set the town talking and thinking. At the turn of the century, the teeming metropolis of New York City was taking large strides into the future. Yet its art world, was about fifty years behind the times. The deeply conservative National Academy of Design functioned as its primary gatekeeper, awarding opportunities to the select few who emulated the historical and landscape paintings of 19th-century Paris salons. New York was home to a mere smattering of progressive galleries, while the few public art museums in American cities functioned as little more than shrines to the Old Masters. Picasso, Duchamp, Paul Gauguin (left), Edward Hopper, and the 1913 Armory Show scandalized America. The American estab-lishment was eager to demonstrate a cultural lineage that ran all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Gilded Age millionaires, who made up the country’s small collector base, sought to acquire grand artworks as a symbol of their status. It was, a system that effectively stifled innovation. However, rumblings of dissent against the National Acad-emy appeared long before the Armory Show.

 

The driving forces behind the Armory Show.

Robert Henri and a group of artists known as The Eight (later known as the Ashcan School) rejected the idealized subject matter championed by the National Academy. Instead they sought to paint the reality of contemporary life in the United States. At about the same time, in 1911, an American Impressionist named Walt Kuhn, a man who lived his life with a sort of reckless bravado, was struggling to get his art shown. He began to plot a cultural revolution. Towards the end of that year, Kuhn formed a society of artists who would stand in direct opposition to the Academy. They called themselves the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. A middle-aged artist named Arthur Bowen Davies was voted in as the organization’s president in 1912. Kuhn and Davies had both studied in Europe where they developed a strong appreciation for the groundbreaking developments that were taking place, particularly in Paris. Both also had ambitious dreams of altering the very fabric of American art and culture. The pair would be particularly instrumental in bringing to U.S. shores a kind of art the likes of which most Americans had never seen before. With the same sprawling exhibition, they would also provide opportunities they had found so lacking in their own careers to benefit other American artists.

Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), 1912 Wassily Kandinsky




Le Divan Japonais, 1892,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

There was no jury. The 1913 Armory Show was, "Come on in." Such openness had never happened before. Not every submis-sion was accepted, of course (Duchamp's urinal Fountain, for example). But com-pared to the elitist undertones of the Acad-emy’s juried shows, the Armory Show embraced a broad range of artists and styles. Throughout 1912, Kuhn voyaged across Europe to obtain artworks for the show. Along the way, he picked up Improv-isation 27 (Garden of Love II), (1912) by Wassily Kandinsky (above). Its bold, sket-chy lines, vivid colors, and flat, ornamental approache to space set this canvas in stark opposition to the virtuosic techniques so beloved by the Academy. Kuhn included van Gogh's Mountains at Saint-Rémy (below), from July of 1889.

Mountains at Saint-Rémy (Montagnes à Saint-Rémy),
July 1889. Vincent van Gogh.

While Kuhn was collecting art in Europe, back home, other members of the society gathered together works from a couple hundred American artists. These included abstracted landscapes by Albert Pinkham Ryder, a still life by Marsden Hartley, and, notably, work from female artists, including the muscular nudes of Kathleen McEnery. Days before the month-long exhibition finally opened on February 17, 1913, there developed a linear tour through the evolution of modern art, from Ingres to Matisse. The impact was immediate. It would be difficult to overstate the role of this exhibition in changing American understandings of art, both for artists and collectors. Today, we live in a very small world, one where you can watch what’s happening at a gallery in London or Paris. That was not the case then. Color photography wasn’t widely accessible, and the quality of black-and-white photos was often poor (as you can see in some I've chosen). Thus, artists and collectors had to rely on verbal descriptions to understand the incredible extent of the artistic revolution happening across the Atlantic. It was impossible for an American who couldn’t afford to travel to know about the newest art from Picasso.

J.F. Griswold, The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush-Hour at the Subway). Just above, Cubism, by John Sloan.

The artwork that generated the most headlines was almost certainly Duchamp’s now-famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase (upper image, above) from 1912. Armory Show visitors, saw no nude figure. Duchamp and his "nude" became a lightning rod for any number of satiric cartoon drawings (above). ARTnews even issued an invitation to their readers offering a $10 reward to anyone who could decode the meaning of this inscrutable work. One man wrote in, suggesting that Duchamp might have been experiencing a brain malfunction at the sight of a nude woman. “The painter, never having seen a nude lady, in doing so becomes rather confused. The picture plainly shows this emotion, a veritable brain-storm.” The winning poem hypothesized that the figure was, in fact, a man. The painting, nonetheless, found a buyer.


Monk Talking to an Old Woman,
1824-25, Francisco Goya.
This typifies the reaction of many
visitors to the Armory Show. Never
again was the American art world
allowed to dictate that art must
be beautiful.