Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to theInternational Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, on February 17, 1913, ran to March 15, and became a legendary watershed date in the history of American art, introducing astonished New Yorkers, accustomed to realistic art, to modern art. The show served as a catalyst for American artists, who became more independent and created their own "artistic language"
"A Slight Attack of Third Dimentia Brought on by Excessive Study of the Much Talked of Cubist Pictures in the International Exhibition at New York," drawn by John French Sloan in April 1913. The 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.
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," (this quote is also attributed to Joel Spingarn 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 theNew York Evening Sun entitled it, The rude descending a staircase (Rush hour in the subway). [3] However, the purchase of Paul Cézanne's Hill of the Poor (View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph) by the Metropolitan Museum of Artsignaled 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.
The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and then in Copley Hall in Boston, where, due to a lack of space, all the work by American artists was removed.
Below is a partial list of the artists in the show. These artists are all listed in the 50th anniversary catalog as having exhibited in the original 1913 Armory show.
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, 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, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marie Laurencin, Ernest Lawson, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernand Léger, 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, Marguerite Zorach,William Zorach,
The 1913 Armory Show contained approximately 1300 works by 300 artists. Many of the original works have been lost and some of the artists have been forgotten. The initial premise of the show was to bring the best avant-garde and recent European art to an American audience, and to exhibit the work side by side with the best works of American artists in New York City, Chicago and Boston. The original exhibition was an overwhelming success. However the conditions that made the show so shocking and so revolutionary cannot be duplicated in this modern era and there will never be a repeat of what was. Although there have been several exhibitions that were celebrations of its legacy throughout the 20th century.
In 1944 the Cincinnati Art Museum mounted a smaller version, in 1958 Amherst College held an exhibition of 62 works, 41 of which were in the original show, and in 1963 the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York organized the 1913 Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition sponsored by the Henry Street Settlement in New York which included more than 300 works.
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was officially launched by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman when they collaborated in 1966 and together organized 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. A series of performance art presentations that united artists and engineers. Ten artists worked with more than 30 engineers to produce art performances incorporating new technology. The performances were held in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets as an homage to the original and historical 1913 Armory show
With the 100th anniversary in 2013 on the immediate horizon it is possible that the centennial of the original Armory show will be celebrated in the 21st century.
