of the Tenderloin District, an area cluttered with brothels, dance
halls, saloons, gambling dens, and cheap hotels.Sixth Avenue depicts
a bustling intersection. Bracketing the throngs of people filling the
intersection are elevated train tracks on the left and a row of store-
fronts and apartment buildings on the right side of the painting.
These two defining elements of city life converge in the far center
background. Sloan’s paintings also capture a slice of American urban
life in the cross-section of people depicted. In the foreground of
Sixth Avenue,Sloan prominently placed three women. One, in a
shabby white dress, is a drunkard, stumbling along with her pail of
beer. Two streetwalkers stare at her. In turn, two well-dressed men
gaze at the prostitutes. Sloan’s depiction of the women allied him
with reformers of the time, who saw streetwalkers not as immoral
but as victims of an unfair social and economic system. At a time
when traditional art centered on genteel and proper society, Sloan’s
forthright depiction of prostitutes was categorically “Realist.”ARMORY SHOWOne of the major vehicles for disseminating
information about European artistic developments in the United
States was the Armory Show (FIG. 35-32), held in early 1913 (see
“The Armory Show,” above). The exhibition received a hostile re-
sponse from the press. The work the journalists and critics most
maligned was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2 (FIG. 35-1). The painting, a single figure in motion down a
staircase in a time continuum, suggests the effect of a sequence of
overlaid film stills. Unlike Duchamp’s contributions to the Dada
movement (FIGS. 35-27and 35-28),Nude Descending a Staircase has
much in common with the work of the Cubists and the Futurists.934 Chapter 35 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1900 TO 1945F
rom February 17 to March 15, 1913, the
American public flocked in large numbers
to view the International Exhibition of Modern
Art (FIG. 35-32) at the 69th Regiment Armory
in New York City. The “Armory Show,” as it
came universally to be called, was an ambitious
endeavor organized primarily by two artists,
Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) and Arthur B. Davies
(1862–1928). The show contained more than
1,600 artworks by American and European
artists. Among the European artists repre-
sented were Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Braque,
Duchamp, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Lehmbruck,
and Brancusi. In addition to exposing American
artists and the public to the latest in European
artistic developments, this show also provided
American artists with a prime showcase for their
work. The foreword to the exhibition catalogue
spelled out the goals of the organizers:
The American artists exhibiting here consider
the exhibition of equal importance for them-
selves as for the public. The less they find
their work showing signs of the develop-
ments indicated in the Europeans, the more
reason they will have to consider whether or
not painters or sculptors here have fallen be-
hind... the forces that have manifested
themselves on the other side of the Atlantic.*
On its opening, this provocative exhibition served as a lightning
rod for commentary, immediately attracting heated controversy. The
New York Times described the show as “pathological” and called the
modernist artists “cousins to the anarchists,” while the magazine Art
and Progress compared them to “bomb throwers, lunatics, de-
pravers.ӠOther critics demanded the exhibition be closed as a men-
ace to public morality. The New York Herald,for example, asserted:
“The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom consti-
tute so many perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of
precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the
republic of art in the same way.”‡
Nonetheless, the exhibition was an important milestone in the
history of art in the United States. The Armory Show traveled to Chi-
cago and Boston after it closed in New York and was a significant cat-
alyst for the reevaluation of the nature and purpose of American art.* Quoted in Herschel B. Chipp,Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists
and Critics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 503.
†Quoted in Sam Hunter, John Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler,Modern Art,rev. 3d
ed. (Upper Saddle Hill, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005), 250.
‡Quoted in Francis K. Pohl,Framing America: A Social History of American Art
(New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 321.The Armory Show
ART AND SOCIETY
35-32Installation photo of the Armory Show, New York National Guard’s 69th Regiment,
New York, 1913. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The groundbreaking Armory Show introduced European modernism to the American public.
Works like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase(FIG. 35-1) received a hostile reception in
the press.