For four weeks in early 1913, the most talked-about room in America was Gallery I of a National Guard armoury on Lexington Avenue, New York — promptly nicknamed the "Chamber of Horrors" by the press. The crowds came to gawp at the Cubists, and above all at one canvas: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, a fractured brown blur of motion that seemed, to eyes trained on portraits and landscapes, to contain neither nude nor staircase. The critic Julian Street dismissed it as "an explosion in a shingle factory"; a newspaper cartoonist retitled it "The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)"; one paper offered a prize to any reader who could find the lady. America was having its first mass encounter with modern art, and it could not look away.
The International Exhibition of Modern Art — for ever after simply the Armory Show — ran from 17 February to 15 March 1913 in the 69th Regiment Armory. It was organised not by a museum but by a scrappy artists' cooperative, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, whose leaders — the painter-president Arthur B. Davies, the burly organiser Walt Kuhn and the Paris-based scout Walter Pach — had toured Europe's radical exhibitions and shipped the revolution home. Roughly 1,300 works by some 300 artists went up, under a pine-tree flag borrowed from the American Revolution and the motto "The New Spirit". Two-thirds of the show was American work, but it was the European third that detonated: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Brancusi — names most Americans had literally never seen on a wall. Kuhn had raced through Europe in 1912 — the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, dealers in Paris, studios in Munich — cabling home in mounting excitement as the scale of what Americans were missing sank in.
Rage, ridicule and Roosevelt's rug
The mockery was industrial. Brancusi's sleek plaster Mlle Pogany was likened to a hard-boiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar; Matisse, whose Blue Nude proved almost as inflammatory as Duchamp's canvas, was declared a menace to civilisation. Former president Theodore Roosevelt strode through the galleries and published "A Layman's Views of an Art Exhibition", conceding the need for change while famously observing that the Navajo rug in his bathroom was a more satisfactory piece of modernist design than the Cubist paintings on offer. When a reduced version of the show travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago, students there staged a mock trial of one "Henri Hair-Mattress" — Henri Matisse — and burned imitations of his canvases on the museum steps. None of it kept anyone away. New York drew close to 90,000 visitors and Chicago nearly twice that; with a final, quieter stop in Boston, total attendance ran to something like a quarter of a million people — an astonishing figure for an art exhibition of the era, achieved substantially by people who came to jeer.
Beneath the ridicule, wallets were opening. Around 170 works sold. The scandalous Nude itself went for $324 to the San Francisco dealer Frederic C. Torrey, sight unseen by telegram; the photographer Alfred Stieglitz bought Kandinsky's Improvisation No. 27; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Cézanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph — the first Cézanne to enter an American public collection, a quietly momentous act of institutional surrender to the new.
The aftershock
The Armory Show scrambled American art permanently. Young painters who saw it — the future regionalists and abstractionists alike — described it as a door blown off its hinges, and the collectors it energised, from Walter Arensberg to Duncan Phillips, built the holdings around which America's modern museums would later form; the Museum of Modern Art itself, founded in 1929, is in a real sense the show's grandchild. As for Duchamp, he became a celebrity in a country he had never visited; when he finally sailed to New York in 1915, reporters met the boat. He repaid America's outrage with interest two years later, submitting a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" to another New York exhibition. The public had laughed at a painting of a walking nude; the century that followed belonged to the people who had hung it anyway. In American art, "before the Armory Show" and "after" remain the working definition of ancient and modern history.
Quiz nuggets
- The Armory Show ran 17 February–15 March 1913 at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York: about 1,300 works by some 300 artists.
- Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was mocked as "an explosion in a shingle factory" (Julian Street) and sold for $324.
- Theodore Roosevelt wrote that his Navajo bathroom rug beat the Cubists at their own game.
- Chicago students mock-tried "Henri Hair-Mattress" and burned imitation Matisses at the Art Institute leg.
- The Met bought Cézanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph — the first Cézanne in an American public collection.