Few New Yorkers today, let alone the throngs of tourists who visit the Madison
Square Park area daily, are likely aware of the momentous exhibition which took
place 100 years ago only a few blocks away at the nondescript 69th Regiment
Armory on Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. This show, known as the International
Exhibition of Modern Art, or colloquially simply as the Armory Show, which ran in
New York from February 15 to March 15, 1913 (and then on to Chicago and Boston),
is one that I am reminded of nearly every work day, as I look out from my office
window, across 25th Street, toward the Armory that held the exhibition. Save for a
small plaque signalling the historical significance of the exhibition at the entrance to
the Armory on Lexington Avenue, there is no other indication of that watershed
moment, in 1913, that changed the way Americans, and the world for that matter,
viewed what came to be known as the first modern art of the era.
Those who are familiar with the Armory Show, perhaps through college art history
courses or various museum exhibitions, are probably aware of the controversy played
up by the press at the time of the show, which was focused primarily on a handful of
works by then “subversive” (and now significantly accepted, if not revered) artists
Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, and the artistic movements they
belonged to: Cubism, Fauvism and Post Impressionism. These artists represented a
major shift in style from the academic, Victorian-tinged art that most Americans
were used to seeing and the press' hostility toward these modern art movements
stirred up the controversy with sensational effects. Had it not been for the
widespread distaste for the Armory Show trumpeted by the press, it might not have
made the impact that it did on many viewers, 80,000 of whom visited the show
during its month-long run in New York alone (supporting the dictum that there is no
such thing as bad publicity). Echoing many sentiments at the time, Kenyon Cox, an
artist himself and an outspoken critic against modernism, contributed a major article
on the Armory Show in
Harper's Weekly
in 1913 (the
USA Today
of the era), in which
he advised the public against finding any value in the modern art at the Armory
Show, stating, “If your stomach revolts against the rubbish it is because it is not fit
for human food. Let no man persuade you to stuff yourself with it.” What gets lost
in the often remembered controversy surrounding the show, however, is the
herculean task accomplished by its organizers to bring together more than 1300
works of art from across Europe and the United States in a year or less, to mount an
exhibition of this scope in several months and then to pack it all up and rearrange
the show in two subsequent cities—and all of this in an age without computers and
only the most basic means of electronic communication.
Swann has actively been planning the auction to celebrate the centennial of the Armory
Show for well over a year, and in the shadow of the Armory building where Swann has
been located for decades, we are well aware of the hallowed street we share with this
once prominent artistic space in New York. While it might have often felt to those of us
focused on the auction as a massive task, we benefit from all the technological
advantages of our day and, of course, the proverbial golden hindsight. As the auction
and accompanying catalogue have come together over the year, I am thankful to the
public institutions in and around New York that have mounted centennial exhibitions
themselves in honor of the Armory Show, in particular (and chronological order) the
Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York (“Modernizing America: Artists of the
Armory
Show,” December 8, 2012-April 14, 2013), the Montclair Museum of Art, New
Jersey (“The New Spirit: American
Art
in the
Armory Show
,” February 17, 2013-June 16,
2013), the International Print Center of New York (“1913 Armory Show Revisited: The
