BY STEPHEN MAYMONTCLAIR, N.J. — The best-known and most influentialexhibition ever displayed in America, the International Exhi-

bition of Modern Art — better known as the Armory Showof 1913 — shook the nation’s art establishment to its core.

Presented at the 69th Regiment Armory on LexingtonAvenue at 25th Street in Manhattan, the display com-prised more than 1,200 works by American and Euro-

pean artists and exposed 100,000 visitors, many forthe first time, to the avant-garde work of Constan-

tin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and HenriMatisse. It placed American art in a new per-

spective; it would never be the same again.The idea for the show grew out of meet-

ings among four artists — Walt Kuhn,Elmer MacRae, Jerome Myers and

Henry Fitch Taylor — who estab-lished the Association of Amer-

ican Painters and Sculptorswith the mission of

exhibiting art of liv-

ing, progressive artists. Arthur B. Davies, who served as presi-dent, soon traveled to Europe with Kuhn to select works of for-eign artists.The centennial of their exhibition is being celebrated by several

shows, led by “The New Spirit: American Art in the ArmoryShow, 1913,” on view at the Montclair Art Museum, throughJune 16. Co-curated by Montclair’s chief curator Gail Stavitskyand guest curator Laurette E. McCarthy, it is the first exhibitionto concentrate primarily on the significant role American artistsplayed in the planning, implementation and critical reception ofthe show. As Montclair director Lora S. Urbanelli points out,“Until now, public attention has focused almost exclusively onthe now famous European participants in the Armory Show, andAmerican art, which made up two-thirds of the exhibition, hasbeen relatively overlooked.”Co-curator McCarthy says the exhibition “seeks to reexamine

and reevaluate many of the accepted ideas about the show inlight of new scholarship and recent discoveries, to dispel some ofthe legends surrounding it and to develop a fuller and richerunderstanding of this complex, fluid and important event in thehistory of American and Modern art.”Details of the original installation have been recreated in the

display, including burlap wall coverings, decorative pine treesand yellow streamers overhead, forming a tentlike canopy forthe exhibition space.Since the organizers of the Armory Show wanted to highlight

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AT MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM

D. Putnam Brinley, who took up the Modernist cause while in Paris,returned to the United States to create notable works like “The Peony Gar-den,” circa 1912. It is similar to an Impressionist work, “but the vivid colors,lack of atmospheric effect and thick, almost sculptural, brushwork show an

affinity with the post-Impressionist paintings of Vin-cent van Gogh,” says co-curator McCarthy. VirginiaMuseum of Fine Arts

The bold, colorful Fauve works of Henri Matisse, like “Nude in a Wood,”1906, shocked visitors to the Armory Show and created a firestorm of deri-sion. Nevertheless, the Frenchman’s vivid colors and expressive composi-tions deeply influenced numerous American painters. Brooklyn Museum

The New Spirit:

American Art In The Armory Show, 1913

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Another Rodin fan, Jo Davidson, was part of Modernist circles in Paris before the Armory Show,in which he displayed this bronze, “Seated Female,” 1913. It was praised by critic Frank Jewett

Mather as an “adroit and charming sculpture.” The Angerman Collection

vanguard European work, a key figure was critic andpainter Walter Pach, who lived in France and workedclosely with Davies to assemble a strong Europeandisplay. Of interest is Pach’s painting in the show,“The Wall of the City,” based on visits to Italy, which“combines the intense hues of post-Impressionismwith the structural geometric forms of Cezanne’spaintings to create his powerful vision of the wallhugging the hillside of Arezzo,” in McCarthy’s words.Among the leading foreign artists represented were

Old Masters like Daumier, Corot, Delacroix, Goyaand Ingres, followed by more recent artists, such asCezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Manet, Matisse,Monet, Picasso and Rodin.Challenging the conservative standards long pro-

moted by such institutions as the National Academyof Design, these European Modernists startled visi-tors with their nonrepresentational colors, boldbrushstrokes, dark outlines and fragmented forms.Critics and the press zeroed in on these avant-gardeworks, blasting them as shocking images by wild menbereft of talent and taste The popular sensations, caricatured across the

country, were Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Stair-case,” a complex of flashing shapes and lines (likenedby one wag to “an explosion in a shingle factory”),several vivid paintings by Matisse and Brancusi’s“Mademoiselle Pogany,” her features emerging fromher smooth, white, egg-shaped head (described by onecritic as “a kid’s glass marble placed on a cracker”).Conservative painter and critic Kenyon Cox decried

the loss of respect for tradition and discipline, callingMatisse’s drawings the scrawls of a nasty boy. Anoth-er critic described Matisse’s work as “monstrousthings…fantastic in drawing, crude in color, absurd

and unintelligible.” In Chicago, art students burnedcopies of Matisse paintings and a mock trial was con-ducted, finding the artist guilty of “artistic murder”and “general aesthetic aberration.”Traditionalist critic Royal Cortissoz concluded that

Cezanne was an ignoramus, van Gogh a crazy incom-petent and Picasso an upstart self-promoter. Ameri-ca’s leading Impressionist, Childe Hassam, viewingthe new trends from Europe with alarm, said, “This isthe age of quacks and quackery, and New York City istheir objective point.”Other observers adopted a more nuanced tone,

applauding the relative sanity of the American workscompared to the European “freak canvases” that gaveAmerican art “an enviable general air of conservativeworth and good old-fashioned charm.” One critichailed the show as providing “shocks to our aestheticsense” that “will clear away some of the cobwebs….”Several writers averred that the Americans heldtheir own amid the European art.Some 230 of the works on view were sold. Americans

of all social classes thronged the show in New YorkCity and in subsequent showings in Chicago andBoston.The American section included a few older painters

— Hassam, Alfred Pinkham Ryder, J. Alden Weir andJames Abbott McNeill Whistler, a number of TheEight, such older Modernists as Oscar Bluemner andAlfred Maurer, and a group of progressive youngermen, including Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles,Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper,John Marin and Charles Sheeler. Women artists,notably Katherine S. Dreier, Ethel Myers, Agnes Pel-ton and Marguerite Zorach, constituted 20 percent ofthe nearly 200 American artists in the show.While the work of the Americans was hardly shock-

ing, much of it reflected post-Impressionist, Fauvist

64 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — March 1, 2013

Painted when he was 29, Edward Hopper’s “Sailing,” 1911, featured the bold-ly simplified style that became his hallmark. It was the first painting he eversold. Carnegie Museum of Art

A stalwart of the Cos Cob art colony, Elmer MacRae played a key role astreasurer of the Armory Show organizing committee and contributed acharacteristically Impressionist work, “Fairy Stories (Fairy Tales),” 1912.Measuring 283/8 by 361/8 inches, it is in the collection of the Parrish ArtMuseum.

Responding strongly to the avant-garde, especiallyCezanne and Matisse, during his third trip toEurope, 1908–1910, Charles Sheeler incorporatedthick slashes of bright color and large elementalshapes into his paintings. In “Chrysanthemums,”1912, “The strong, striking, and expressive colorsand the concern for structural form…reveal theinfluence of European Modernism,” McCarthy says.Whitney Museum of American Art

Chicago artist Manierre Dawson created the only abstract paint-ing by an American in the Armory Show, untitled (Wharf UnderMountain), 1913. “As the only abstraction by an American artist, itwas likely the most progressive native contribution to the exhibi-tion,” says co-curator Gail Stavitsky. Norton Museum of Art

Deeply influenced by Cezanne, as well as his training as an architect, Oscar Bluemnerpainted vivid landscapes with simplified, well-defined geometric shapes and brightcolors. “Hackensack River,” circa 1912, offers a precise view of structures in New Jer-sey. Naples Museum of Art

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The New Spirit:

American Art In The Armory Show, 1913

and Cubist influences transplanted to American sub-jects. As co-curator Stavitsky puts it, revisiting theArmory Show puts to rest the “myth” that Americanart “was a relative monolith of conservatism. In fact,American art on view was vastly diverse — in media,style, gender and age. The untold story of the ArmoryShow is that it in fact displayed the dynamism anddiversity of American visual art.”The Eight were represented by works ranging from

William Glackens’s depiction of his family to RobertHenri’s expansively painted “The Spanish Gypsy” toJohn Sloan’s depictions of working-class girls dryingtheir hair on a tenement roof and the male milieu ofMcSorley’s Bar, as well as a series of graphic etchingsof contemporary life.To be sure, a number of the American works were of

a conventional, often Impressionist nature: D. Put-nam Brinley’s flower-strewn “The Peony Garden,”Dreier’s “The Blue Bowl,” Hopper’s “Sailing,” JonasLie’s “The Black Teapot” and MacRae’s “Fairy Sto-ries.”American Modernists, who had adapted European

avant-garde ideas to American scenes, were well rep-resented by a diverse group. German-born Bluemner’sarchitectural training and affinity for Cezanne influ-enced the precise lines and pure colors of “Hacken-sack River.” Bruce’s still lifes reflected the influenceof Cezanne and presaged the geometric forms tocome.Carles’s boldly painted church offered few hints of

the colorful abstractions that lay ahead. Nor didDavis’s sketchily painted watercolor, “Romance/TheDoctor” suggest the bold abstractions that defined hislater career.A sleeper standout was Edward Middleton Mani-

gault’s Expressionist painting of ghostly figures in aSymbolist landscape. Sheeler’s lush, Cezannesque“Chrysanthemums” augured well for a distinguished

career.An artist little known today, Manierre Dawson,

stood out for his forcefully delineated abstract com-position of a wharf under a mountain, “the onlyabstraction by an American artist,” says Stavitsky.Also in the vanguard of the avant-garde were Marin’sstaccato, dynamic watercolors of churches and sky-scrapers that reflected the energy and movement ofearly Twentieth Century Manhattan.The most important Modernist of them all, Marsden

Hartley, was represented by several richly paintedstill lifes and a series of drawings that suggested thestrong and expressive work that lay ahead.Since venues for American sculptors to display and

sell their works prior to the Armory Show were limit-ed, their presence in the exhibition was vital for thatmedium. Although the American work was not asradical as Brancusi and other Europeans, “it was notat all academic or traditional,” observes McCarthy.Among the highlights were Rodinesque pieces byChester Beach and Jo Davidson and figure studies byAshcan School pioneers Abastenia St Leger Eberleand Myers.All in all, curators Stavitsky and McCarthy make a

good case for the vitality and quality of the Americanworks that for so long have been overshadowed bythe hoopla over the European avant-garde art at theArmory Show. It was indeed a landmark in the devel-opment of American art, but many of the nation’sfinest artists were already “keenly aware of Euro-pean Modernism and adapted its technique to theirart” 100 years ago, concludes McCarthy.An interesting complementary exhibition, “Modern-

izing America: Artists of the Armory Show,” is onview at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington,N.Y., through April 14. Drawn from the museum’spermanent collection, it features works createdbefore, during and after the 1913 extravaganza by

artists who participated in the show. Included areexamples by older artists of The Ten and the AshcanSchool; painters like Hartley, Marin, Maurer andPrendergast, who were already steeped in EuropeanModernism, and younger artists who were greatlyinfluenced by the European works at the exhibition,such as Davis, Sheeler and Joseph Stella. As theHeckscher organizers observe, “While the impact ofthe Armory Show varied, one thing was certain: as areporter from The Globe declared, ‘American art willnever be the same again.’”The Heckscher is also exhibiting “Mirrored Images:

Realism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”that explores realist movements from the FrenchBarbizon group through the Hudson River Schooland the Ashcan School leading up to the ArmoryShow.The Montclair is also be exhibiting “Oscar Bluemner’s

America: Picturing Patterson, New Jersey” throughJune 16.The 160-page Montclair exhibition catalog is lavish-

ly illustrated and contains insightful essays by co-curators Stavitsky and McCarthy. Distributed byPenn State University Press for Montclair, it sells for$29.95, hardcover. The museum is at 3 South Moun-tain Avenue. For information, or 973-746-5555www.montclairartmuseum.org.

March 1, 2013 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — 65

At 19, one of the youngest participating artists, Stuart Davis reflected histraining under Robert Henri in this 1912 watercolor, “Romance/The Doctor.”After seeing the art of Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso at the Armory Show, heabandoned Realism for a Modernist manner of simplified, flat, overlappingforms. Collection of Earl Davis

William Glackens’s monumental “Family Group,” 1910–1911, displayshis conversion to the high-keyed palette of Pierre-Auguste Renoir.Measuring nearly 6 by 7 feet, it was described by one observer as “ascream of color.” National Gallery of Art

Marsden Hartley’s immersion in European Mod-ernism and his admiration for Cezanne infusehis richly painted “Still Life No. 1,” 1912. He,along with other American artists, was exposedto the avant-garde at the famous salons ofGertrude Stein and her brother in Paris. Colum-bus Museum of Art

Robert Henri, the charismatic leader of the Ash-can School, earned praise for his vigorouslypainted “The Spanish Gypsy,” 1912. One criticwrote that it “glows with smoldering color.” Met-ropolitan Museum of Art

Kathleen McEnery reflected her exposure to Mod-ernism during her two years in Paris in “Going tothe Bath,” circa 1905–1913, with its flattened forms,strong lines and bold palette. As McCarthyobserves, “This vision of two large, full-lengthfemale nudes placed in a shallow space, with oneboldly confronting the viewer, must have beenseen as quite daring for the time.” SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum