A Reaction to Modernism at the New York Armory Show

ROYAL CORTISSOZ, A Memorable Exhibition (1913)

The 1913 Armory Show held at the 69th Street Armory building in New York City introduced Americans to modern art, featuring European postimpressionist and Cubist painters like Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. These canvases challenged the more academic art Americans were accustomed to seeing by eschewing realism for a different aesthetic, one self-consciously abstract. Cubists, for instance, reduced nature to its elemental forms as seen in Duchamp’s scandalous painting Nude Descending a Staircase. The New York Herald Tribune’s art critic, Royal Cortissoz, dismissed much of the avant-garde as amateurish work, but many others caught the significance of the event as a cultural thunderclap.

It is enough to say that these “Independents,” keen upon having their own way, have done a good deal to put into the air the idea that “freedom” is not as wide-spread in the world of American art as it ought to be, and that something should be done clearly to establish a more liberal, more open-minded and sympathetic attitude toward every “new” thing. It was toward the advancement of this principle that the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, itself a new body, directed its efforts when it set out to make what soon came to be known simply as the Armory show.…

It was a fine and stirring exhibition. The collection of about a thousand examples of modern art included some of the most stupidly ugly pictures in the world and not a few pieces of sculpture to match them. But while these undoubtedly made the “sensation” of the affair it was plain that the latter was organized with no sensational purpose, and it was not freakish violence that gave the collection as a whole its tone. That tone was determined by nothing more nor less than a healthy independence in most of the types represented. The merely eccentric artists occupied a comparatively subordinate position. If at first this did not seem to be so it was only because things that are bizarre naturally make themselves conspicuous.…

Be it said to the credit of our countrymen that their indulgence in egotistical fatuity has as yet been slight. A few of them swagger about, so to say, making portentous use of their new-found “independence,” but, frankly, it is not to them that the show owed such fantasticality as it possessed. This was to be ascribed to the French Post-Impressionists and Cubists, with a few of their Spanish, German, Italian and Russian fellows. Those whirling dervishes, seeking, like the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,”1 to make our flesh creep, succeeded only too easily amongst some observers, though it is hard to see why they should have been taken so seriously. The Cubist agglomerations of line and color possess, sometimes, expressive qualities. It is like the monstrous potato or gourd which the farmer brings to the village store to see if his cronies can make out in certain “bumps” which he indicates the resemblance that he has found to General Grant or the late P. T. Barnum.…

[L]et us turn to the paintings of Cezanne. This well-to-do Frenchman … had no pot-boilers to paint, but could use his brush for his own amusement, had in him, despite wholesome personal traits, the taint of the amateur. He had some feeling for landscape and the figure. He groped toward an expressive treatment of form, and in his nudes you can dimly make out some rather handsome intentions, just as in his landscapes you can just discern the aims of a colorist and a designer. But Cezanne’s dreams didn’t “come true” and this not because he was in the throes of some new, abstruse conception of art, but because he simply did not know his trade. There are no esoteric glories about Cezanne, hidden from the vulgar. He was merely a second-rate Impressionist who had now and then fair luck in painting a moderately good picture, but would never have come into fame at all if the dealers had not taken him up and there had not been the usual band of scribes ready to applaud something new.… The only mystery we have to reckon with in his case lies in the fuss that has been made about him.…

It is not credible that Matisse has not known just what he was about. There is a legend to the effect that the man had some academic ability, and it is easy to believe that once, at all events, he knew how to draw. Vaguely, beneath what is monstrous in the paintings by him in this exhibition, one discerned the grasp upon form and movement which a man has when he has been trained in the rudiments and has used his eyes. But first going after some will-o’-the-wisp leading him into ways of wanton ugliness, and then, I infer, persuading himself that he had a “mission,” Matisse proceeded to paint his nudes and his studies of still life not with the naivete of a child, but with the forced simplicity of an adult playing a trick. In the process he would appear to have relinquished all respect for technique, all feeling for his medium, to have been content to daub his canvas with linear and tonal coarseness. The bulbous, contorted bodies in his figure pieces are in no wise expressive of any new and rationalized canon of form. They are false to nature, they are ugly as the halting efforts of the veriest amateur are ugly, and, in short, their negation of all that true art implies is significant of just the smug complacency to which I have alluded. Whether through laziness or through ignorance, Matisse has come to the point where he feels that in painting an interior like his “Panneau Rouge,” or nudes like “Les Capucines” or “Le Luxe,” he is exercising the function of an artist, and, of course, there are crowds of half-baked individuals who are ready to tell him that he is right. As a matter of fact, these things are not works of art; they are feeble impertinences.…

When we bid farewell to Matisse, whose nudes, preposterous as they are, yet suggest the forms of men and women, we find ourselves in the company of “revolutionaries” who are not dealing with form as we understand it at all. With them a man begins to look like something else, preferably like some mass of faceted or curved little bodies thrown together in a heap. The Cubist steps in and gives us not pictures but so many square yards of canvas, treated as though they were so many square yards of wall-paper. But the Cubist wants to eat his cake and have it, too. He paints you his riddle of line and color, and then, as in the case of M. Marcel Duchamp, calls it “Nude Descending a Staircase.” In other words, he has the effrontery to assert that his “picture” bears some relation to human life. Who shall argue with him? For my part I flatly refuse to offer him the flattery of argument. According to the Spanish proverb it is a waste of lather to shave an ass, and that criticism of the Cubists is thrown away which does not deny at the outset their right to serious consideration. Are we to be at great pains to explain that a chunk of marble is not a statue? Are we elaborately to demonstrate that a battered tin can is not in the same category with a goblet fashioned by Cellini? Are we to accept these Cubists as painters of pictures because they have covered canvas with paint? Are they indeed “forces which cannot be ignored because they have had results”? These “results” have nothing to do with art. Why should they not be ignored?

Royal Cortissoz, Art and Common Sense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 143, 145, 148, 151–152, 155–158.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS