In October 2018, I took a research trip to the Fonds Roland Barthes at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I had just started writing a book on Barthes, and I wanted to learn more about the amateur painting and doodling that flits through Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: for example, an early drawing in marker whose pleasure and stupidity Barthes comments on in the lower left corner

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.

“Do you like illustrated articles?” asked The Western Home Monthly in 1901. [1] The answer was obvious, but drawing attention to illustration reminded prairie and northern readers what a magazine subscription offered that small-town newspapers largely did not. In 1903 editors boasted that WHM was going to be “Amply Illustrated”—special articles in particular, “so that they may be of greater value along the line of instruction”—and that the cover newly printed in two colors and larger format would specifically “give better attention to illustration.” [2] WHM also doubled as a showpiece for parent company Stovel Printing, which offered art services: some WHM illustrations are signed by Stovel Studio. An examination of illustration tells us much about publishers’ and audiences’ values—and about the power of the visual, material object to define identity and to act rhetorically.

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people outside of academia can be more of a challenge: