Art: The Glorious Affair

In a full-page article in the old New York American, the noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz heralded the coming exhibition in phrases so extravagant that it hardly seemed possible that the show would live up to his claims. “This glorious affair,” he wrote, “is coming off at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. Don’t miss it. If you still belong to the respectable old first primer class in art, you will see there stranger things than you ever dreamed were on land or sea—and you’ll hear a battle cry of freedom without any soft pedal on it.”

Stieglitz, of course, was right: it was America’s first introduction to modern art on the grand scale, and the fabled Armory Show of 1913 was not so much a handshake as a collision. It jolted not only the public but museums, collectors. and even the artists who organized it. The press for the most part jeered, but one reporter on the Globe proved prophetic. “American art,” he said, ”will never be the same again.”

This week, in the same pine-bedecked Armory, more than 300 of the original 1,300 paintings and sculptures that made their formidable debut 50 years ago will be on view again. Joseph S. Trovato, assistant to the director of Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, got the idea of reassembling as much of the show as possible back in 1956. It was a big job. Though the original show was probably the most famous U.S. art exhibition of all time, the 1913 catalogue was a masterpiece of vagueness; the paintings and sculptures have been sold and resold, titles have been changed, and some works have simply disappeared. Most of the artists represented are dead, and those who are still alive are not always sure about what they had on exhibit. But a substantial number of works were found, including many now ranked as masterpieces (see color pages). Placed on exhibition in Utica, before moving this week to Manhattan under the sponsorship of the Henry Street Settlement. Trovato’s re-creation is worth all the trouble: though obviously no longer a shocker, the Armory Show has extraordinary vitality still.

Pitchers & Bananas. The original show had been born out of the not-so-quiet desperation of a group of U.S. painters who felt that their work was not getting nearly the attention it deserved. The art establishment in those days was run by the National Academy of Design, whose tastes ran to the sentimental, the anecdotal, and the academic. Though Stieglitz had exhibited such men as Matisse, Picasso and John Marin in his Manhattan gallery, the critics’ verdict on his shows ranged from a patronizing “bewildering” to a savage “subterhuman hideousness.” The most vital American painters were a group subsequently known as the Ashcan School, but their harshly realistic paintings were receiving almost no recognition. “Stop studying water pitchers and bananas and paint everyday life,” cried Cincinnati-born Robert Henri. But the Academy and the public preferred the bananas.

The art world was ripe for change. In 1911, the dissident artists formed the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which, they hoped, would put on an exhibition that would have the same notoriety and success as Paris’ Salon des Refusées. As president, they chose Painter Arthur B. Davies. not so much because he had exhibited with the Ashcan School, but because he knew people of wealth and position. The choice had repercussions no one foresaw: while the Henri group wanted to put on a huge exhibition to call attention to “progressive” American art, Davies happened to have an instinctive appreciation of the experiments going on in Europe. One day he sent to his friend Painter Walt Kuhn the catalogue from a show of modern art going on in Cologne that contained works by many of Europe’s comers. “I wish we could have a show like this.” he wrote, and Kuhn enthusiastically agreed. Within two weeks, Kuhn was off to Europe to make a selection.

The “New Spirit.” He arrived in Cologne as the show was being dismantled, but he saw enough to inspire him. “Van Gogh’s work enthralled me.” he wrote, “I met the sculptor Lehmbruck and secured some of his sculptures, also works by Munch.” In The Hague, he saw works by Odilon Redon for the first time; then he went to Paris, where he teamed up with Painter Walter Pach and also wired Davies to come over and help him. The Americans “practically lived in taxicabs.” They met the brothers Duchamp-Villon and the dealer Ambroise Vollard. They persuaded Constantin Brancusi to make his U.S. debut in their show, arranged for paintings by Braque and Picasso.

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, news of the exhibition began to spread and American entries poured in. The show adopted as its emblem the Pine Tree Flag of the American Revolution—a symbol of the “new spirit” in art.

The Real Philistines. The final selection did not cover all of modern art. Most of the German expressionists were omitted, because the organizers did not think them particularly significant. The Russian geometric abstractionists were overlooked; there was only one Kandinsky; the Italian futurists were turned down because of some sort of disagreement now lost to history. But aside from these omissions, just about every big name in modern art was in, and the big names turned out to be mostly French, including the small historical perspective of Ingres, Delacroix, Daumier and Corot. But perspective was not what the critics saw.

For two weeks the crowds were orderly, and the press played the Armory story fairly straight. It was the critics and old-line artists, as Armory Expert Milton Brown of Brooklyn College has pointed out, who turned out to be the Philistines. Ignoring the American paintings, which had been targets in the past, they centered their fire on the European cubists and postimpressionists. One of the byproducts of the show, in fact, is that the critics made such fools of themselves that their successors have been almost too permissive ever since.

The Chatter of Monkeys. “The real meaning of the cubist movement,” wrote New York Painter Kenyon Cox in Harper’s Weekly, “is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting.” Other critics denounced modernism as “the chatter of anarchistic monkeys” and “the harbinger of universal anarchy.” To them, it proved that Europe was suffering from “the licentiousness of over-estheticism, the madness of ultra culture.”

Modernism was not only a threat to art; it also imperiled society as a whole and the morals of American youth. Seldom has the vocabulary of opprobrium—”paranoiacs,”‘ “triumphant charlatanism,” “madhouse designs,” “unbalanced fanatics”—been used so lavishly; and seldom have cartoonists been more poisonous.

One who escaped the tirade was Odilon Redon: his work cast the same spell it does today. On the other hand, the critics could not find words strong enough for Henri Matisse. Even the sensitive Harriet Monroe, editor of the avant-garde Poetry, called his pictures “the most hideous monstrosities ever perpetrated in the name of long-suffering art.” As for Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, everyone had a field day. Julian Street’s description of it as an “explosion in a shingle factory” became almost a household phrase. Teddy Roosevelt compared it unfavorably to a Navajo rug in his bathroom—which, he thought, was “a far more satisfactory and decorative picture.”

The Invasion. The irony of the show was that for all this ridicule, the introduction of the French modern masters into the U.S. was a huge success. Davies helped build the impressionist collection of Lizzie P. Bliss; Glackens sold Albert C. Barnes on the virtues of the Armory’s Cézannes; Kuhn got John Quinn to invest in modern art. Collectors Walter Arensberg and Stephen C. Clark both bought from the show. The Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first U.S. museum to buy a Cézanne; a San Francisco dealer snapped up Duchamp’s Nude sight unseen. As a matter of fact, Duchamp and his brother, Jacques Villon, sold everything they had on display.

Of the 250-odd works sold, the French outnumbered the American 4 to 1. When Walt Kuhn submitted the sales report to members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which had started the whole thing, the grand disillusionment set in. One after another the American artists read it, and one after another they resigned. As Painter Jerome Myers sadly explained: “Our land of opportunity I was thrown wide open to foreign art, unirestricted and triumphant; more than ever ! before, our great country had become a colony; more than ever before, we had become provincials.”

The show, in effect, plunged the U.S. realist tradition temporarily in the shadows. It was not until the 1950s, when the powerful wave of abstraction reached its peak, that the U.S. asserted itself strongly on the international stage. But if the show shattered Ashcan hopes of becoming the dominating force in U.S. art, those who called the U.S. provincial were obviously passing judgment too soon. From the older generation of Americans in the show, Albert Ryder’s paintings live on to haunt posterity. Of those who were in their middle years, Walt Kuhn went on to do first-rate work, John Marin is seen to be one of the most imaginative artists of his time, and even Maurice Prendergast has been reassessed as a far more daring painter than his antimacassar subject matter made him seem. Freshman Stuart Davis, then 18, is now one of the world’s best abstractionists, and Edward Hopper, then 30, carries on the realist tradition at its best. In 1963, the cultural lag of 50 years ago no longer exists—and perhaps it was never so wide as it seemed.