Peer Reviewed
From the Print Journal
In early 1912, when Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur Davies convened to begin planning the International Exhibit of Modern Art, they decided that the show would need to include the most important artists working in the contemporary avant-garde. The 1913 Armory Show, as the exhibit came to be called, effectively brought experimental European art to the United States; for the first time in a major exhibit, artists like Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp were brought together for American audiences. While the show wasn’t received gracefully—many viewers and critics denounced the work on display as scandalous, unseemly, or simply bad—its impact was profound. This was in part because, as Milton Brown has written, “The American art world was not ready for the armory show. . . . The public had not had a generation to get used to the older revolution which might have prepared it for the new; it got everything at once and it is no wonder that the total was unimaginable.” The New York Times held that “no one within reach of it can afford to ignore it,” and the Boston Globe announced that “American art will never be the same again” (Brown, Armory Show, 87, 88). The exhibit launched the careers of the brothers Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp; the latter’s Nude descending a staircase no. 2 was among the most provocative works in the exhibit and “served as the favorite butt of the joke-masters” (Brown, “Retrospect,” 37). To be included in the Armory Show was to be claimed as a certified member of the contemporary avant-garde, to have your work validated as among the most important work being produced in the period. Being excluded from the show, by contrast, could be damning. The American artist Rockwell Kent was among those excluded, and he felt the slight sharply. In his autobiography It’s Me O Lord, Kent tellingly denounces the show, proclaiming that its effects were deleterious: “the sensational Armory show of 1913 that brought ‘Cubism’ to America,” Kent writes sarcastically, “lured [Arthur] Davies with many another good painter of too fragile a humanity and unstable mind into the sterile, dead-end byways of abstractionism.” But the ostensible disinterest in the Armory Show Kent projects is misleading and reveals the complicated emotions he felt in realizing that he was, in the eyes of his peers, out of sync with the aesthetic movements of the period. Just a few years earlier, both Kent and Davies had been included in the Exhibition of Independent Artists, co-organized by Kent’s teacher Robert Henri and, not incidentally, Walt Kuhn. That exhibition, in 1910, had been fundamental in defying the stodgily conservative National Academy of Art and Design and defining the American avant-garde. The following year, Davies helped Kent organize the Independent Exhibition of the Painting and Drawings of Twelve Men, which included work by Kent, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, George Luks, and Maurice Prendergast, the latter two being secured by Davies. Kent must have felt personally rejected when, in 1912, Davies didn’t think to invite him to the Armory Show, and his characterization of Davies as “fragile” and “unstable” is due, no doubt, to the personal animus spurred by his exclusion. The Kent of 1910 and 1911 thought of himself as among the vanguard of modern art; by 1913, he realized he was being relegated to the domain of the traditional.
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