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Speaker 1: Welcome to this Day in History class, where we bring

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Speaker 1: you a new tidbid from history every day. Today is

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Speaker 1: February seventeen. The day was February seventeenth, nineteen thirteen. More

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Speaker 1: than twelve hundred artworks by around three hundred artists were

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Speaker 1: on display in New York City. Matisse, Gogan, Duchamp, Kathleen mcginnery, Picasso,

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Speaker 1: much Cezanne, de Gas, Hopper, and more American and European

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Speaker 1: artists all had work on exhibition at the sixty nine

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Speaker 1: Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in Street. It was all

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Speaker 1: part of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or what

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Speaker 1: came to be known simply as the Armory Show. More

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Speaker 1: than twelve hundred artworks by around three hundred artists were

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Speaker 1: on display in New York City. It's easy to recognize

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Speaker 1: these names now, and we'd consider their work valuable, But

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Speaker 1: back in the early nineteen hundreds, the cultural distance between

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Speaker 1: the United States and Europe was far greater. The American

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Speaker 1: art scene looked nothing like the European art scene at

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Speaker 1: the time. While art in Europe was getting pretty risky,

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Speaker 1: think Cubism, futurism, and abstract sculpture. Art in America was

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Speaker 1: still stuck within pretty rigid boundaries. More realistic art like

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Speaker 1: that of the Old Masters was still popular in the States,

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Speaker 1: and the people who could afford to collect art were

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Speaker 1: acquiring new pieces to affirm their status. The National Academy

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Speaker 1: of Design, a rather traditional arts organization, acted as a

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Speaker 1: kind of gate key for in the New York City

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Speaker 1: art world, only letting in the artists whose work stayed

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Speaker 1: in an acceptable lane of idealism. But there were artists

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Speaker 1: who refused to accept the stifling of experimentation and American art.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen eleven, artists Jerome Meyers, Elmer McRae, wal Kon,

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Speaker 1: and Henry fitz Taylor started meeting at Madison Gallery in

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Speaker 1: New York to discuss forming a society that would help

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Speaker 1: young artists exhibit their work in America. By the end

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Speaker 1: of the year, the four artists banded together with other

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Speaker 1: artists to form the Association of American Painters and Sculptors,

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Speaker 1: a blatantly anti Academy group whose goal was to exhibit

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Speaker 1: quote the works of progressive and live painters, both American

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Speaker 1: and foreign, favoring such work usually neglected by current shows

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Speaker 1: and especially interesting and instructive to the public. So Walt

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Speaker 1: Kun the organization's president, Arthur Bowen, Davies and artist Walter

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Speaker 1: Pack combed Europe looking for artworks to take back across

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Speaker 1: the pond. They found hundreds of works, and Davies and

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Speaker 1: Coon arrived back in New York near the end of

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Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, and in America, the Association had been gathering

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Speaker 1: the works of artists like Albert Pinkman, writer Edith DeMott,

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Speaker 1: Marston Hartley, and Ethel Myers. There was no jury for

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Speaker 1: the exhibition, unlike the Academy shows. In December, the association

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Speaker 1: sent out a call for artists to submit works in

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Speaker 1: any medium. Here's a line from that circular. The Association

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Speaker 1: particularly desires to encourage all artwork that is produced for

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Speaker 1: the pleasure that the producer finds and carrying it out.

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Speaker 1: They didn't take all the submissions, but they did take

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Speaker 1: a lot. Collector John In set the following at the

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Speaker 1: show's opening, the members of this association have shown you

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Speaker 1: that American artists, young American artists that is, do not

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Speaker 1: dread and have no need to dread, the ideas are

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Speaker 1: culture of Europe. They believe that in the domain of art,

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Speaker 1: only the best should rule. This exhibition will be epoch

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Speaker 1: making in the history of American art. On the night

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Speaker 1: it opened, the exhibition attracted four thousand guests, but as

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Speaker 1: you could imagine, people had wildly mixed reactions, ranging from

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Speaker 1: the utterly disgusted to the highly enamored. The show basically

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Speaker 1: went the early twentieth century version of viral Do Schamp's

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Speaker 1: cubist painting Nude descending a staircase, particularly have people in

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Speaker 1: a tizzy. The magazine Art News offered readers ten dollars

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Speaker 1: if they could figure out what it meant. One critic

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Speaker 1: said it looked like a an explosion in a shingle factory.

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Speaker 1: Another said it's looked like an academic painting of an artichoke.

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Speaker 1: In general, reviewers questioned whether the so called progressive work

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Speaker 1: could really even be considered art. All that said, the

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Speaker 1: show had a ton of fans. Before the Armory show

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Speaker 1: was over in New York and headed to Chicago for

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Speaker 1: its next run, it pulled in eight seven thousand visitors.

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Speaker 1: Change wouldn't happen immediately. The show made many American artists

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Speaker 1: feel like they had license to experiment, while others weren't

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Speaker 1: so sure of the longevity of the new art styles.

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Speaker 1: Galleries started carrying more modern and contemporary art, though they

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Speaker 1: favored European artworks, and the show did open up conversations

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Speaker 1: about art that had previously been limited to the elite.

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Speaker 1: The art world in America was headed for an upheaval,

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Speaker 1: and the kind of art I was considered good was

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Speaker 1: about to broaden drastically, and the show did open up

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Speaker 1: conversations about art that had previously been limited to the elite.

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Speaker 1: I'm Eve Steff Coote, and hopefully you know a little

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Speaker 1: more about history today than you did yesterday. As I

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Speaker 1: was researching this episode, I was just thinking about how

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Speaker 1: this whole event would cause a lot of Twitter madness today,

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Speaker 1: like even people who stuck up for the artwork at

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Speaker 1: the show had to take some heat. The Chicago Tribune

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Speaker 1: even published this poem I called the canvas cow with

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Speaker 1: could and hung it on the line. Although to me

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Speaker 1: twas vague as mud twas clear to Gertrude's dyed. Catch

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Speaker 1: you tomorrow for another episode.