BWW Reviews: THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100 Commemorates Revolutionary Modernist Art

In 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened to sizeable crowds--87,000 visitors by the final tally--and even more sizeable controversy. Set up in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and known ever after as the "Armory Show," the showcase brought together older respected painters like Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier, newer respected painters like Gauguin and Renoir, and a bunch of shameless lunatics parading as painters. Those lunatics? Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia--men whose current reputations and current painting-by-painting values put them light years beyond the more accepted artists in the Armory's display.

Canvases by these Europeans were but a fraction of the roughly 1,350 artworks exhibited, yet rule-breakers like Matisse's Blue Nude (1907), Picabia's Dances at the Spring (1912) and especially Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) explain why the Armory Show once hit the American scene with such violence. ("A bomb from the blue" was the image used by one 1913 critic.) Once, and only once. Today, if you climb the front steps of the New-York Historical Society, you will pass by a large colored cutout modeled on Duchamp's Nude. As an advertisement for what's inside--the exhibition The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution--it's fairly clever and endearing. And, frankly, kind of sad. Originally a vertiginous critique of conventional beauty, the Nude has become one of our own conventions, one of our own era's normals, something you can pose your kids next to for pictures, just the way you pose them next to the John Lennon or the Michelle Obama in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.

Based on that Duchamp facsimile, I was expecting The Armory Show at 100 to be deeply problematic--a cute time-capsule survey at best, and a presentation cynically devoted to its own mythology at worst. But while the exhibition that curators Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt have crafted isn't perfect--too many styles, too little about American modernism, a whole room of show-organizer documents that no casual visitor will ever read--it is an exhibition superbly in touch with what it can and can't accomplish. The Armory Show at 100 offers a few lessons for today's avant-garde artists, but it really isn't much of a guidebook. It's more like a heavily asterisked, heavily annotated, abidingly intelligent set of notes on a particular time and a particular place--a discover-on-your-own exhibition replete with posters, cartoons, letters, figurines, and flat-out masterpieces.

Only a fraction of the original Armory Show pieces (just over 100 of the original 1,350) are on display, less than appeared at the 1963 Armory Show retrospective (clocking in at 356). The organizers thus have a lot of room for filling out the context, and their work here is a bit unexpected, but ultimately satisfying. With all this talk of Revolution, I was expecting a close-up charting of the shockwaves that the Armory Show sent through stateside art. No such luck, unless you prime yourself with the Art and Revolution catalog and stroll over to MoMA. Alternately, you could click on the curatorial site (armory.nyhistory.org) and sink even deeper into Armory lore.

Ultimately, Kushner and Orcutt have worked a rather small exhibition into a definitively informative study of the Armory Show. Their catalog is among this exhibition's triumphs: 512 pages, thirty-one essays, enough and different enough plates to let you draw up a few arguments of your own, and an essay-by-essay unwillingness to offer cheap and easy answers about the Armory Show's influence. Or about which canvases "fit in" and which didn't. As you'll discover, the early 1910s saw the completion of the ornate Woolworth Building (rendered in a tender 1912 watercolor by John Marin) and the printing of weird, Gothic propaganda poster after weird, Gothic propaganda poster. (There are dozens of these near the exhibition entrance, and they are not to be neglected.) Seen in retrospect, perhaps Picabia and Matisse fit these baroque times much better than Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, and the other fairly conservative painters and sculptors who kick off the Historical Society's showcase.

There's a lot of never-great, never-quite-horrible art in these early rooms, along with the fascinatingly atrocious The Way Down to the Sea by Augustus E. John. By the time you start moving towards the moderns, though, you will be confronted with a steady procession of Cézanne landscapes, Odilon Redon phantasmagorias, and Gauguin Tahiti scenes, including the estimable Faa Iheihe and Words of the Devil. The first of these combines the sugary, saturated feel of the tropics with the grandeur of a long medieval scroll; the second, which poses naturalistic figures in an acid-puddle background, is as jolting as anything the Armory radicals had to offer.

Still, don't assume that the most radical art at The Armory Show at 100 is necessarily the most interesting art. A few rooms over from Matisse and company are a few large selections by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a then-popular painter of idyllic groupings, porcelain figures, and eerily autumnal atmospheres: a Fra Angelico-meets-French Symbolism combination that doesn't quite work, but doesn't exactly disappoint. And don't assume that the avant-garde's many critics were nothing but outraged dullards; on occasion, those critics could strike an effective balance between absurdist humor and damning dismissal. Dances at the Spring and other Cubistic compositions were compared to an old woman's needlework, Nude Descending a Staircase to a crowded subway. Matisse's body of painting was lambasted as "an attempted return to childhood" that involved "an avowal of disbelief, not only in his own growth, but in the growth of the race."

Such criticisms may not have been wholly inapt (come to think of it, Dances at the Spring does look like a quilt), but they certainly illustrate one of the pitfalls of criticizing innovative or scandalous art. As depicted by the satirists, Duchamp and company look weird and obnoxious and often quite stupid. The problem is, these artists don't look boring. Boredom is normally the critic's silver bullet, good for taking down anybody from Walter Gropius to Andy Warhol to Christopher Wool to Ai Weiwei but strangely ineffectual against a lot of modernism. Remember, even the haters couldn't tear their eyes away from those wacked-out Parisians. Then as now, accusations of outright dullness are useless against Matisse's off-kilter figures and coruscating lines, against Duchamp's powerhouse compositions and clockwork details, and against all the other once-revolutionary, still-revelatory paintings that reunited for The Armory Show at 100.