The Story of the Armory Show

Crowds of the cultured and the curious jammed into the 69th Regiment Armory in New York on opening night - February 17, 1913 - to see the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Soon nicknamed the Armory Show, it presented the astonishing sight of nearly 1,300 works by van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, plus hundreds of others, both European and American. Armory Show fever swept the country, grabbing the attention of American artists, art-lovers, and philistines alike as the show traveled from Manhattan to Chicago to Boston. For everyone except the tiny cadre of avant-garde artists who had already sought such work out in Europe and in the studios of their colleagues, the show was a revelation, a first exposure to Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and other then-radical styles. The papers accused the artists of everything from ineptitude to lunacy to the willful undermining of American democracy. The critics and academicians, along with Teddy Roosevelt, snorted their disapproval and blustered about the lunatic fringe. But no one in the art world could ignore the show, and American art was never the same again. The Story of the Armory Show chronicles how this landmark exhibition was put together, how it looked, and how it was received. From the first glimmers of the idea to the final settling of the accounts, Dr. Brown details with wit and insight the most important art exhibition of the century. With 21 color images and a complete catalogue raisonne of all the paintings, sculptures, and prints in the original show, this wonderfully entertaining volume is beautiful and informative. From the Baltimore Sun, "The Story of the Armory Show has the scholarly excitement of lost material come to light, a detailed account of dramatic events, an easy style and the fascination, as in stories of great battles, of human error, conflict, stupidity and genius; the fascination of events that irrevocably affected the image of our day."