NYC Armory Show 1913

    I finally got around to taking a course in American art history this semester. While American art is technically a sophomore level course here at Bradley, probably 80% of the students in my class are seniors. With so many upperclassmen in the course, it is interesting to see how many misconceptions we still have this far into our college careers. I feel as if a large number of students, myself included, were under the false impression that America has been an important center for art for a long time. In reality, America has really only grown to prominence within the art world during the last century. From the country's inception until the mid 1900s, American art existed in the shadow of Europe. If an artist wanted to learn the craft they went to Europe and American trends followed those generated overseas. When the art world shifted its focus from Italy to Paris in the late 1800s, America was slow to adopt to the burgeoning modern art scene that was taking hold. Impressionism and post impressionism, were born in France, but the modern art of Europe took quite a few years to cross the Atlantic. The New York City Armory show of 1913, and the traveling pieces within that show, really brought avant-garde painting to the American public.
    The Association of American Painters and Sculptors, were an American group of artists that had become dissatisfied with the outdated academies and felt that the only way for Americans to adopt modern sensibilities was for as many people to be exposed to it as possible. The group, put together a massive show of 1,400 works; mainly focusing on European artists such as George Braque, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. However American artists such as the impressionist Mary Cassatt and the abstract painter Albert Pinkham Ryder also saw inclusion in the show. This was the largest exhibition New York had ever seen and the Regiment Armory on East 25th Street was a venue big enough to hold it all.
    Modern painting presented a completely different mode of thinking than the work that the American public was used to and it did not go over well with some people. While impressionism was in many ways old news by 1913 (many American artists ,such as members of the ashcan school, were already working in this style), the post impressionistic, cubist, and futurist works were very controversial. One painting that caused an uproar was Matisses's  Blue Nude (pictured below).

    It is easy to see why this work was so controversial;this was not the beautiful illusionistic female nude that Americans were used to seeing in works like Titian's Venus of Urbino. To the American public this was perverse and grotesque. Students at the Art Institute protested and burned the work in effigy when it traveled to Chicago. The students were fearful of what the work represented; an entire shift in the way artists thought about painting. The whole idea behind many of the avant-garde works in the show involved being true to the act of painting. Artists like Matisse, did not bother with illusionism, they acknowledged that they were painting on a canvas. The modern artist demonstrated the inherent flatness of painting on the canvas and allowed their brush strokes to remain visible. Color became a another way in which to display emotion. The works in the Armory show did not tell a story or attempt to render in a three dimensional manner. By their nature, the works in the Armory show forced the viewer to talk about the act of painting itself. Unless the viewer was well versed int he history of painting and understood what the artists were trying to accomplish, the work often went over their heads.

    The most abstract paintings int he show, the cubist and futurist works, were thereby the ones that caused the biggest stir.  The painting that everyone was talking about was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. Duchamp's work is really a futurist piece which borrows the flattening and abstracting of cubism, but adds sequential movement. Journalists simply didn't know what to say about the work. Writers attempted to describe it by its appearance labeling it, "an academic painting of an artichoe" or, "an explosion in a shingle factory." President Theodore Roosevelt even compared it to a Navajo rug he had in his bathroom. Roosevelt is on record stating that while he believed it important for Americans to see what was going on across the sea he viewed the artists in the show as European extremists.  A large portion of the American public simply did not care for the abstract works and they were lampooned in cartoons like the ones below. 

   Nevertheless, the influence of the NYC Armory Show on American artists is undeniable. Post 1913, we can see a movement away from impressionism and a trending towards the more abstract styles. Marsden Hartley is an example of one such American artist whose worked dramatically shifted in the years following the armory show. Hartley's Still Life No. 1 (1912) ,pictured below, already resembles Matisse in its flatness and approach to shadow. Still, there is an attempt at rendering an illusion of depth. Post 1913, we see Hartley abandon this completely in works such as Indian Fantasy and Portrait of a German Officer.

Still Life No. 1 1912

Indian Fantasy 1914

Portrait of a German Officer 1914

    In just two years, the artist has begun rendering with a decorative surface quality with no regard for depth. He is growing increasingly abstract, electing to create a portrait with just symbols. The use of floating numbers and text on the surface of his paintings comes directly from cubism. This floating text approach was also adopted by American Joseph Stella in the years following the show. Notice how, again, the depth and illusionism gives way to abstraction and vivid color. With Stella's Coney Island there is no real attempt to convey a real image of what is going on. It is all light, color, emotion. It is impossible to discuss the work without acknowledging how it was painted.

Still Life 1912

Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras 1914

    From these examples, I hope that it is clear how influential the NYC Armory show of 1913 was. I think it's clear to see how works like Stella's will eventually give rise to Jackson Pollock and the eventual growth of America and NYC into the art center of the world.