On this day in New York · February 17, 1913
The Armory Show Shocks New York
A drill hall on Lexington Avenue filled up with Cubists and Fauves, and New York found out it had opinions about modern art.
The facts
- Opened
- February 17, 1913
- Location
- 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets
- Organizer
- Association of American Painters and Sculptors
- Scale
- About 1,300 works by more than 300 artists
On February 17, 1913, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors opened the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. Organized by Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach, the show packed in roughly 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by more than 300 artists, mixing American painters with the European avant-garde. The scandal of the run was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, a Cubist figure caught mid-motion like overlapping film frames, which critics and cartoonists could not stop mocking. Former President Theodore Roosevelt walked through and pronounced it not art at all. The show ran through March 15 before moving on to Chicago and Boston, and it changed what New Yorkers expected a painting to look like.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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That's not art!
Former President Theodore Roosevelt, reacting to the modern works on view at the 1913 Armory Show
Source: Wikipedia -
an explosion in a shingle factory
Julian Street, art critic, describing Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Armory Show was the moment American audiences and collectors first had to reckon with Cubism and abstraction in person, and the ridicule it drew didn't stop it from reshaping American taste and the market for modern art for decades after.
Sources
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