Davies saw the groundbreaking Cologne Sonderbund Show catalogue
and, unable to attend himself, sent Walt Kuhn, secretary and spokesman
for the AAPS, to Germany just in time to see the closing day and the
dismantling of the show, which would become the basis of what the
AAPS hoped to bring to New York. This closing of the Cologne
Sonderbund exhibition marked the beginning of Kuhn’s important
European tour, during which he solicited works by Munch, Redon and
van Gogh in northern Europe before traveling on to Paris in 1912. In Paris,
Kuhn was surrounded by the works of Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Gleizes,
Léger, Duchamp and Villon, to name only a handful of the core group of
artists. Davies soon joined Kuhn in Paris for a week, and with the help
of American ex-patriot artists then living there, Walter Pach and Alfred
Maurer (lot 207), was introduced to prominent Parisian dealers
Ambroise Vollard, Henry Kahnweiler and Émile Druet, among others, as
well as scores of French artists, notably the Villon/Duchamp brothers
and their Puteaux group and Picasso. Amazingly, they were able to
round up hundreds of European works within a matter of weeks for the
Armory Show. Without the efforts of these organizers, Matisse’s
Blue
Nude
and Duchamp’s
The Nude Descending the Staircase II
would never
have arrived in New York as early as 1913 and the country as a whole
(with the exhibition stops in New York, Chicago and Boston, would never
have received such a timely and spirited introduction to modern art.
The artist Elmer MacRae was elected treasurer and acted as chairman of
the Committee on Foreign Exhibits (he included 10 works in the Armory
Show as well). He was a member of the Cos Cob Art Colony in
Connecticut where he painted with Weir, Twachtman, Lawson and Taylor,
all original AAPS charter members. Back in New York, while Davies and
Kuhn were abroad and fervently collecting art for the show, MacRae set
up an office on 122 East 25th street, just months before the February
opening, and set to tackling the minutiae of day-to-day organizational
tasks. MacRae’s was no easy task with Kuhn and Pach soon to return, the
art works to be shipped from Europe (and collected from American
artists and patrons) and the entire 1300+ item exhibition to be mounted,
publicized and dismounted before moving on to the two other American
venues within the subsequent weeks and months of 1913.
(continued)
