In 1913, the original Armory Show was the first exhibition mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and was run by their president, Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn the secretary and Walter Pach. It displayed some 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented. ARTKABINETT art collector social network is proud to visit the contemporary reincarnation of the event later this week.
Back then, news reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy, as well as parodies, caricatures, doggerels and mock exhibitions. About the modern works, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, "That's not art!" The civil authorities did not, however, close down, or otherwise interfere with, the show.
Among the scandalously radical works of art, pride of place goes to Marcel Duchamp's Cubist/Futurist style Nude Descending a Staircase, painted the year before, in which he expressed motion with successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures.
Julian Street, an art critic, wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece. Gutzon Borglum, one of the early organizers of the show who for a variety of reasons withdrew both his organizational prowess and his work, labeled this piece, A staircase descending a nude while J. F. Griswold a writer for the New York Evening Sun entitled it, The rude descending a staircase (Rush hour in the subway).
However, the purchase of Paul Cézanne's Hill of the Poor (View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph) by the Metropolitan Museum of Art signaled an integration of modernism into the established New York museums, but among the younger artists represented, Cézanne was already an established master.
Duchamp's brother, who went by the "nom de guerre" Jacques Villon, also exhibited, sold all his Cubist drypoint etchings, and struck a sympathetic chord with New York collectors who supported him in the following decades.
Here is the 1913 list of participating artists:
* Robert Ingersoll Aitken
* Alexander Archipenko
* George Grey Barnard
* Chester Beach
* Gifford Beal
* Maurice Becker
* George Bellows
* Joseph Bernard
* Guy Pène du Bois
* Oscar Bluemner
* Pierre Bonnard
* Solon Borglum
* Antoine Bourdelle
* Constantin Brancusi
* Georges Braque
* Patrick Henry Bruce
* Paul Burlin
* Theodore Earl Butler
* Charles Camoin
* Arthur Carles
* Mary Cassatt
* Oscar Cesare
* Paul Cézanne
* Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
* Camille Corot
* Gustave Courbet
* Henri-Edmond Cross
* Leon Dabo
* Andrew Dasburg
* Honoré Daumier
* Jo Davidson
* Arthur B. Davies
* Stuart Davis
* Edgar Degas
* Eugène Delacroix
* Robert Delaunay
* Maurice Denis
* André Derain
* Marcel Duchamp
* Raoul Dufy
* Jacob Epstein
* Roger de La Fresnaye
* Othon Friesz
* Paul Gauguin
* William Glackens
* Albert Gleizes
* Vincent van Gogh
* Francisco Goya
* Marsden Hartley
* Childe Hassam
* Robert Henri
* Edward Hopper
* Ferdinand Hodler
* Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
* James Dickson Innes
* Augustus John
* Wassily Kandinsky
* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
* Leon Kroll
* Walt Kuhn
* Gaston Lachaise
* Marie Laurencin
* Ernest Lawson
* Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
* Fernand Léger
* Wilhelm Lehmbruck
* Jonas Lie
* George Luks
* Aristide Maillol
* Édouard Manet
* Henri Manguin
* John Marin
* Albert Marquet
* Henri Matisse
* Alfred Henry Maurer
* Kenneth Hayes Miller
* Claude Monet
* Adolphe Monticelli
* Edward Munch
* Elie Nadelman
* Walter Pach
* Jules Pascin
* Francis Picabia
* Pablo Picasso
* Camille Pissarro
* Maurice Prendergast
* Odilon Redon
* Pierre-Auguste Renoir
* Boardman Robinson
* Theodore Robinson
* Auguste Rodin
* Georges Rouault
* Henri Rousseau
* Morgan Russell
* Albert Pinkham Ryder
* André Dunoyer de Segonzac
* Georges Seurat
* Charles Sheeler
* Walter Sickert
* Paul Signac
* Alfred Sisley
* John Sloan
* Amadeo de Souza Cardoso
* Joseph Stella
* John Henry Twachtman
* Félix Vallotton
* Raymond Duchamp-Villon
* Jacques Villon
* Maurice de Vlaminck
* Édouard Vuillard
* Abraham Walkowitz
* J. Alden Weir
* James Abbott McNeill Whistler
* Jack B. Yeats
* Mahonri Young
* Marguerite Zorach
* William Zorach
