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Title details for Modern Art Invasion by Elizabeth Lunday - Available

Modern Art Invasion

Picasso, Duchamp, and the 1913 Armory Show That Scandalized America

by Elizabeth Lunday
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The story of the most important art show in U.S. history. Held at Manhattan's 69th Regiment Armory in 1913, the show brought modernism to America in an unprecedented display of 1300 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, A quarter of a million Americans visited the show; most couldn't make sense of what they were seeing. Newspaper critics questioned the artists' sanity. A popular rumor held that the real creator of one abstract canvas was a donkey with its tail dipped in paint.
The Armory Show went on to Boston and Chicago and its effects spread across the country. American artists embraced a new spirit of experimentation as conservative art institutions lost all influence. New modern art galleries opened to serve collectors interested in buying the most progressive works. Over time, the stage was set for American revolutionaries such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Today, when museums of modern and contemporary art dot the nation and New York reigns as art capital of the universe, we live in a world created by the Armory Show.
Elizabeth Lunday, author of the breakout hit Secret Lives of Great Artists, tells the story of the exhibition from the perspectives of organizers, contributors, viewers, and critics. Brimming with fascinating and surprising details, the book takes a fast-paced tour of life in America and Europe, peering into Gertrude Stein's famous Paris salon, sitting in at the fabulous parties of New York socialites, and elbowing through the crowds at the Armory itself.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 27, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781493000739

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781493000739
      • File size: 1871 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      October 1, 2013
      Lunday (Secret Lives of Great Composers, 2009, etc.) supplies a sharp narrative history of the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, which helped to introduce the American public to modern art. When the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue on February 17, 1913, the American public had no idea what was in store for it. Chiefly organized by three artists--Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach and Arthur Davies--disillusioned that the artistic establishment known as the Academy had shunned their work, the Armory Show was the first large-scale exhibition of modernist and avant-garde art in America. The organization these men helped found to oversee the show was called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and its primary goal was to take down the outdated Academy's stranglehold on the local art world. While modern painting had shaken up art establishments in Germany and France, Americans remained mostly unaware of the radical aesthetic movements taking hold. While the AAPS was optimistic about modernist art, many of the reviews and reactions of gallery visitors were less than understanding. Reviews often castigated the artists as insane and immoral, while attendees became obsessed with trivialities like finding the nude in Duchamp's show-stealing Nude Descending a Staircase. However, it didn't matter since the exhibition was a sensation. Lunday smartly refers to it in 21st-century parlance as a "meme" since it inspired so many crossover cultural references. But New York was kind compared to the show's touring stops in Chicago and Boston, which tried to shut it down on obscenity charges. While the author ably crafts a narrative out of the building of the show, she expertly follows its influence through the reactionary "Regionalism" artists of the 1930s to the culmination of its ideals in Jackson Pollock, whose abstract paintings epitomized a uniquely American sensibility. A vivid, compelling portrait of the Armory Show and its lasting influence on American art.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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