The New York Historical Society’s Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution returns us to a very specific moment in American history: the moment when New York eclipsed Boston as the cultural capital of the United States. Boston’s cultural leadership derived from its Revolutionary and Puritan past. Chicago, the site of an important literary community at the start of the century, was associated with the industrial and transportation revolutions that united the continent after the Civil War. New York staked its claim on the future. People who wanted to know the promise and perils of modern life now looked to New York for answers. By the end of the second decade of the 20th century, the city had even taken Paris’s place as the global capital of modernity. Leon Trotsky observed, New York is “the fullest expression of our modern age.” artes fine arts magazine

What distinguished New York from Boston, Chicago and Paris was its cosmopolitan mixing of peoples and cultures. Immigrants and their American-born children made up more than half of New York’s population in 1913. They shared the city with other newcomers: the white-collar workers who found employment in new skyscrapers; the writers, artists, and intellectuals who beat a path to Greenwich Village; and the activists who made New York a center for urban reform and radical politics. The collision of these people gave prewar New York an electric charge that sparked a moment of extraordinary ferment in the arts, intellectual life, and politics.

The organizers of the Armory Show were right when they spoke of a “New Spirit” in 1913. The event, held in the very heart of the city, called the world’s attention to the electric landscape of modernist New York, a city that believed in the promise of the “new.” To be a modern New Yorker meant to embrace the “new,” to believe with William James that there was “nothing outside the flux,” and that life in a cosmopolitan city of strangers demanded new ways of thinking and new ways of representing reality.

If New York became the global capital of modernity in the 1910s, Greenwich Village became the capital for argument about what modernity meant. The Armory Show at 100 traces connections between the “New Spirit” inside the Armory and the new, experimental spirit of the prewar Village scene. The young people who flocked to the Village believed radical politics, modernist art and literature, and a revolution in personal vales shared the same goal of liberating people’s capacity for self-expression. Members of this avant-garde community created new forums for debate like the Liberal Club and the anarchist Ferrer School. Salons, theaters and galleries sprang up, including Alfred Stieglitz’s “291,” and a number of new publications showcasing political and cultural criticism, along with experimental poetry and fiction, addressed readers sympathetic to the cause. The leading “little magazines” of the 1910s—The Masses, The Seven Arts and The Little Review—joined calls for a new American art to an internationalist vision. Their editors and contributors were committed to promoting an American cultural renaissance and at the same time reported on modernist developments in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Their articles helped shaped the debates that followed on the display of contemporary art and progressive theater performances, making New Yorkers aware of the “trans-national” cultural churn in cafes, union halls, universities, and city streets [1].

1913 was a year of modernist spectacle. The Armory Show opened February 17th, The “Rite of Spring” debuted in Paris on May 29th, and on June 7th one thousand striking textile workers from Paterson, New Jersey performed a play about their struggle at Madison Square Garden. The Paterson Strike Pageant may seem an incongruous entry in the year’s ledger of iconic events. But for the 15,000 in attendance, the Pageant was a thrilling moment when radical politics energized a revolutionary new theater.

Together with feminism, solidarity with Paterson’s multiethnic working class defined the politics of the Greenwich Village intelligentsia. In April, Village fixture Mabel Dodge suggested to Bill Haywood that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) stage a performance to call attention to strikers’ demands and the violent response of local authorities. Journalist John Reed rushed to Paterson, landed briefly in jail for resisting police, and then spent three hectic weeks collaborating with workers on a narrative of the conflict.

On June 7th, the strikers paraded up Fifth Avenue and into the Garden, continued through the audience and onto a stage set with a mural of the factory town reportedly painted by John Sloan. They re-enacted their experiences, sang in multiple languages, and led the crowd in the “Marseilles” and the “Internationale.” Spectators became participants, as the “fourth wall” between actors and audience dissolved along with the wall between “art” and “life.” A reporter found “a startling touch of ultra modernity…of futurism” in the event. Robert Edmond Jones’s program cover had a striker climbing out of the frame towards the viewer. Red lights hung on the Garden’s tower broadcast “IWW” into the darkness. “Crude and rather terrifying,” Randolph Bourne recalled, the Pageant “stamped into one’s mind the idea that a new social art was in the American world, something genuinely and excitingly new.”

These were also the critical years for the feminist movement, which forced debates about women’s autonomy at the very moment when portraits of the female nude were causing such controversy at the Armory Show. Feminists created the discussion group Heterodoxy, while Margaret Sanger and other advocates of birth control made the most intimate aspects of private life matters of public controversy.

Village regular and wealthy socialite, Mabel Dodge later wrote, “The essence of it all was communication. It was as if men said to other men: ‘Look, here is a new way to see things…and a new way of saying things. Also, new things to say’”: communication between different kinds of people, communication between different realms and registers of human experience. Dodge rounded up artists, intellectuals, and political activists who stood in her immense Fifth Avenue living room “stammering in an unaccustomed freedom a kind of Speech called Free.”

The new ways of seeing and saying things that Dodge identified as “Free Speech” promised to break down the conceptual walls Victorians had created to separate different realms of life. The divisions between elite and vernacular forms of expression, art and labor, theory and practice, men’s sphere and women’s sphere, self and society—all came under attack from the generation born in the 1880s and 1890s. Modernism attracted Villagers precisely because it set different registers of thought, expression, and experience in dialogue with one another, for a generation committed to the goal of self-expression.

The Armory Show was a critical event in New York’s coming-of-age as the capital of the new. The controversy it provoked made New Yorkers conscious of living in a cosmopolitan city, a city propelled into the “flux” of modernity, a city of vigorous argument about what the new century might hold. The French artist Francis Picabia captured it beautifully when he came here during the Armory Show: “New York is the cubist, the futurist city,” he wrote. “It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.”

By Casey Nelson Blake, Ph.D., Contributing Writer © 2013

Senior Historian, “The Armory Show at 100”

Professor of American Studies and History, Columbia University

Reference:

[1] Bourne, Randolph, “Trans-National America,” in, The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings, 1911-1919, ed. Olaf Hansen. New York: Urizen Books (1977), 263-64.

This article is based on remarks delivered by Professor Blake at the New York Historical Society, October 9, 2013, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition, The Armory Show at 100. Additional comments are drawn from his essay, Greenwich Village Modernism: “The Essence of It All Was Communication,” included in the exhibition catalogue.