5
In February 1913, the young journalist and critic Jeanne Robert Foster visited the Manhattan headquarters of the “Fighting 69th,” an Irish American infantry regiment that had served with distinction in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. The 69th Regiment Armory, the brigade’s sprawling home, had been known, since its completion seven years earlier, as one of the city’s more unusual buildings. Styled as an oversized Beaux-Arts mansion with a two-story mansard roof, the Armory took up an entire block of Lexington Avenue. It also featured a soaring, vaulted main hall that was two hundred feet long and nearly 130 feet tall.
The cavernous expanse had been designed as a staging ground for military exercises. But as one of New York’s largest indoor spaces, it had quickly found other uses as well. Shortly after the building was finished, the hall hosted an indoor lawn tennis championship; a few years later, a little-known Swede shattered the world indoor marathon record on a small track installed around its perimeter. Now, however, the giant enclosure had been procured for a far more controversial purpose: displaying the more than thirteen hundred works of modern art that Kuhn and Davies had spent the fall and winter gathering. Fueled by the extraordinary publicity effort that Quinn had urged on, the show had already attracted wall-to-wall attention in the press, and Foster decided she needed to see it.
In fact, despite its seemingly anodyne title, the International Exhibition of Modern Art had struck New York like cannon fire. Although there were many more paintings by American artists, the core of the show was the three hundred artworks that Kuhn and Davies had gathered in Europe—including dozens of avant-garde paintings and sculptures that were wildly unlike anything previously seen by the public. At a time when the circulation of images was highly limited and color reproductions of modern painting virtually nonexistent, the unveiling of this new art, right in the center of Manhattan, carried a raw force that is almost impossible to imagine a century hence. Thousands of people were lining up to get in; there were traffic jams on Lexington Avenue from morning till night. Already a lively debate had erupted over whether the works were to be taken as sheer entertainment or were a dangerous threat to civilization itself. (Royal Cortissoz, one of the city’s most prominent critics and a staunch conservative, worried about these “foolish terrorists” who were trying to “turn the world upside down.”) Perhaps no work captured the show’s radicalism with more visceral power than Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a kinetic Cubist work that observers likened to an explosion in a shingle factory or a “dynamited suit of Japanese armor.” Even as it attracted huge crowds, the painting, like others in the show, left visitors baffled and critics riled.[1]
Foster wasn’t baffled or riled, however; she was fascinated. Though she had seen very little of the new work, she had read about some of the new schools of art, and understood that the artists in the show were “art revolutionists” who were trying to capture some of the forces that were giving shape to the new century. She also understood that the show’s organizers were laying out a bold challenge to the American public. In visiting the Armory, she hoped to write a lengthy essay in The American Review of Reviews, the literary and current-affairs magazine where she worked. Amid all the smoke and fury, it was time, she felt, for a more considered appraisal.
Along with the art, she was curious about the prominent lawyer who had been one of the show’s driving forces and who had formally introduced it to the public. She had never met Quinn, but she had followed his outspoken statements in the press and his rousing, if somewhat over-the-top, opening night speech, in which, before an audience of four thousand guests, he described the show as “the most complete art exhibition that has been held in the world during the last quarter century.” She had also been warned about Quinn’s reputation with women. As a talented critic who was well known for her beauty, Foster was definitely Quinn material, and her friends thought she might be his next target. As she entered the exhibition, she wondered whether she would run into him.[2]
Inside the packed drill hall, Foster was confronted with a big opening gallery that led into a series of partitioned octagonal spaces, each one crammed with paintings. The hall’s two side flanks had been divided into six galleries each; these appeared to be filled mostly with American art. It was the central corridor, however, that drew visitors to the main attraction. In it was a series of larger spaces that loosely traced the history of European modernism from the nineteenth century to the present. At the start, there was a sampling of historical paintings and Impressionist works, from Goya and Delacroix to Renoir and Monet. Beyond was a gallery filled with works by Cézanne and Van Gogh, including the works recently acquired by Quinn, and another gallery featuring a broad assortment of French modernists. Foster was immediately taken by Cézanne, whom she found a towering presence in the show. But she was even more interested in the work of his contemporary followers.
The climax of the show was the galleries at the far end of the hall, where the newest French art had been installed. At first, Foster was as bewildered as anyone else by the paintings and sculptures that filled these spaces. They represented a disorienting array of movements, including post-Impressionists, Pointillists, Fauvists, Futurists, and Cubists; many of the works seemed violent or even offensive in the way they defied nature. A “runaway horse has not four legs but twenty,” she wrote. A nocturnal scene was painted with “orange stars bobbing in a green sky.” A supposed human figure resembled the “pleasing patterns of a rug.”
But Foster was a quick study, and her impressions began to shift even as she stood in the galleries. Confronted by Francis Picabia’s iridescent Cubist work La Danse à la source, she initially saw “a meaningless jumble of pink and red geometrical forms.” After gazing hard at it for a few minutes, though, she found it suddenly resolving “into two dancing figures audaciously composed of blocks of color.” Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Mlle Pogany, a breathtakingly simplified head in smooth white marble, had been ridiculed by one critic as a “hard-boiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar.” But Foster noted that Margit Pogany, the sculpture’s subject, was herself a dancer, and after examining the different sides of the work, she observed that Brancusi had reduced “the movement of the conventional ballet to its simplest form, an ascending spiral.” And then there was the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase. At first blush, she wrote, Duchamp’s disorienting painting appeared to be an almost indecipherable “arrangement in browns.” Yet if one understood the work as a sequence of six partly superimposed images of a figure in movement, she observed, it was not so difficult to “catch a glimpse of the lady.”[3]
As she lingered in the show’s Cubist gallery, she finally spotted John Quinn. She needn’t have worried about attracting his attention. He was deep in conversation with a large, distinguished-looking man with a mustache, clearly an old friend. With them were several of the artists who had organized the exhibition. As they peered at one startling picture after another, she kept hearing Quinn’s companion exclaim “Bully!” in an unmistakable high-pitched twang. It was former president Theodore Roosevelt. The scene left a singular impression on Foster. For whatever else might be said about him, there was nothing usual about Quinn. Here was a man who surrounded himself with young artist renegades and embraced the most challenging new work, but who also seemed to enjoy improbable proximity to the established seats of power. It was a combination that she was unusually well equipped to appreciate.[4]
—
At thirty-two, Jeanne Robert Foster already had a career behind her that was, in many ways, even more remarkable than Quinn’s. The daughter of a lumberjack and a schoolteacher, she had been born into poverty in the Adirondacks. She also had been born with a speech impediment that nearly prevented her from getting an education at all. With the help of a friend of her mother’s, however, she quickly overcame this barrier, and she proved to be such a quick learner that at fifteen she became the teacher of her one-room school. Already standing out among her peers, she soon after received a marriage offer from a businessman in Rochester, New York, who had roots in the town where she taught. It was an unprepossessing match—the man was older than her father—but she evidently decided that it would be her best path out of rural poverty. Like Quinn, she had greater ambitions for herself. “I feared the usual life,” she recalled later.[5]
In fact, the marriage proved unexpectedly liberating. Foster had almost nothing in common with her feeble, insipid husband, but Matlack Foster sought little more than companionship. He also had connections in New York City, where they began to spend time. During one such trip, Foster was spotted on the street by a Vanity Fair editor, who was utterly captivated by her large eyes and delicate features. At the time, fashion magazines and newspapers were filled with color illustrations of elegant women, and with her husband’s permission and a series of aliases, she began to model. By the early years of the new century, her likeness, rendered by celebrity illustrators such as Harrison Fisher and Charles Dana Gibson, was appearing in Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, and the fashion pages of The New York Times—even on the inside of cigar boxes. In 1903, she was selected as the Harrison Fisher Girl of the year. Sometimes she posed as heroines from short stories and popular novels, which Fisher was often commissioned to illustrate. Almost overnight, she had become one of the most sought-after faces in the country.
But Foster, impatient to develop her restless mind, soon grew bored with modeling. At first, she worked briefly as a fashion editor for the Hearst papers; Fisher had to warn her to stay away from William Randolph Hearst, for whom she was an all-too-apparent target. It was during a prolonged sojourn in Boston to care for her typhoid-stricken sister, however, that her intellectual interests began to move in uncanny parallel with Quinn’s. Finding herself with spare time, she enrolled at the Harvard Extension School—which, in contrast to the college, admitted women. Soon she was attending the lectures of William James and George Santayana, the philosophers Quinn had studied with a decade earlier; she also took a course with Charles Townsend Copeland, a dazzling literary scholar, who introduced her to English novels and Irish satire and awoke her to the imaginative power of prose. “The characters of history materialized, and fiddled, and danced, and shuffled to the music of his voice,” she wrote. In turn, Copeland quickly spotted her own talent. “You may…think of writing as a probable means of success,” he told her.[6] Soon after, she began selling articles to magazines and newspapers.
From her mother, an activist for women’s rights who later joined the Socialist Party in upstate New York, Foster had acquired a powerful social conscience, and she soon began reporting on poverty, education reform, women in the workplace, and, in one major article, the condition of women in state prisons. At the Review of Reviews, her work was sufficiently impressive for her to be dispatched to Europe—an exceedingly rare opportunity for any female journalist at the time, let alone a onetime mountain girl who had grown up with little advanced education at all. Soon she was investigating tenement housing in Glasgow and reporting on the Czech independence movement. Living alone in New York City while her elderly husband stayed with her parents, who had settled in Schenectady, Foster also began to adopt Quinn’s habit of quietly bucking social convention. Amid her growing writing career, she began a secret affair with Albert Shaw, the magazine’s editor, who was also stuck in an unfulfilling marriage. It was yet another way to avoid the “usual life.” The relationship would gradually cool, but Shaw recognized her unusual discernment for contemporary literature and art—including the modernist poets and writers who were gaining fame in Europe. Eventually he made her the magazine’s literary editor.
By the time of the Armory Show, Foster was not only heavily engaged with the new writing that Quinn had long been championing, she was also personally acquainted with many of Quinn’s friends. A few years earlier, she had met John Butler Yeats, the artist father of William Butler Yeats, who was living in New York under Quinn’s patronage. Struck by the stunning young woman who had reported all over Europe, the elder Yeats took her on as a protégée and began to coach her on her poetry. (He admired her intensity of feeling, he said, but worried that the “love motive” was sometimes overworked.) “She is extraordinarily pretty and clever,” he wrote to W. B., who would soon meet Foster himself.[7]
Foster had also cultivated Lady Gregory, the Irish playwright, whose modern theater troupe, the Abbey Players, had brought Synge’s controversial The Playboy of the Western World to the United States in 1911 with Quinn’s assistance. During the tour, Foster organized a reception for Lady Gregory at the National Arts Club. (Unknown to Foster, Quinn was having an affair with Lady Gregory at the time.) Six months before the Armory Show, Foster had even traveled to Dublin, where, armed with introductions from John Butler Yeats, she met many members of Quinn’s Irish circle.
Given all their shared connections, it is remarkable that Foster and Quinn had never met. Now she was getting her first glimpse of him—standing in front of a Cubist painting with the former U.S. president. As he had promised his friends in the weeks before the opening, Quinn had been bringing as many important political figures to the show as he could. Already he was busy creating the irresistible legend that would one day surround the exhibition: Even former heads of state had been awakened to the potency of the new art. In fact, though, TR had known Quinn for years and was one of the few political figures who responded to Quinn’s invitation. And while he took in the show politely, he was hardly persuaded by what he saw. (“The lunatic fringe,” Roosevelt wrote after his visit, “was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.”[8]) As Foster herself recognized, her own readers were highly skeptical of the new art, and it would take much more than this one show to change American taste.
—
Today, the Armory Show is often regarded as a watershed in American culture. According to the standard account, on the eve of World War I, through shock and awe, modern art conquered the country. Artists were awakened to the work of the European avant-garde; collectors, for the first time, were given the opportunity to acquire advanced modern paintings. “It is quite natural,” the exhibition’s leading historian has written, “to think of the Armory Show as the turning point in American art of the twentieth century.” In the most heroic retelling, the United States had been set, virtually overnight, on an inexorable path toward world dominance in twentieth-century art. What is generally lost, however, is the extent to which the show’s extravagant reputation—and even the words that have been used to describe it—originated with Quinn and his fellow organizers.[9]
From the outset, Quinn had done everything he could to portray the exhibition as a transformational event. In his opening night speech, he not only described the show as “epoch-making in the history of American art,” but also suggested it would change the course of American history itself. Whether or not Quinn’s claims were true, they set the tone for an event that seized the city’s attention with titanic force—and did much to shape the subsequent legend. By size alone, the show was overpowering, and the vast drill hall augmented the dizzying sense of novelty. On many days, the crowd in front of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and other controversial works was so large that, as with the Mona Lisa today, it was hard to see the art at all.
Quinn contributed much to the hype. He went to the Armory almost every night of the show’s monthlong run, hosted artist dinners at the newly opened Vanderbilt Hotel, attended parties, talked to journalists, and gave personal tours to important guests like TR. Midway through the show, he and the other leaders of the association staged a huge beefsteak dinner for the New York press corps at Healy’s restaurant—a utensil-free, men-only event in which the guests, wearing white aprons, were given giant cuts of beef while getting another earful from Quinn about modern art. On the evening of the final day, Quinn himself led the association artists and their friends on a snaking victory march through the Armory’s great hall, with a fife-and-drum band and a dozen Irish policemen in tow. As they passed the Duchamp, they paused to cheer the nude woman on her vertiginous descent. Then they gathered in the captain’s room for thirty quarts of Quinn’s champagne. At the party, Quinn stood up and proclaimed the end of the ancien régime, likening the show’s triumph to the sinking of the Spanish fleet at Santiago de Cuba in the Spanish-American War.[10]
For all this posturing, however, the actual impact of the Armory Show was far more ambiguous. Critics, for the most part, were negative; some, like Cortissoz, went further, insinuating that many of the avant-garde works were socially deviant and politically dangerous. The reaction of the country’s leading collectors and art patrons, including many supposed progressives, was hardly more heartening. The Washington patron and museum founder Duncan Phillips was so horrified that he walked out. “The Cubists are simply ridiculous,” he declared. “Matisse is also poisonous.” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the heiress and sculptor, stayed away from the show entirely, complaining that “a chunk of marble is not a statue.” Even Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the fearsome Philadelphia tycoon who would one day compete with Quinn for modern paintings, was largely unmoved, and ultimately decided that Cubism was “dead.”[11] Instead of waking people up, the exhibition seemed to cause many to circle the wagons. On the day after the closing, a New York Times editorial warned that what was shown at the Armory “is surely part of the general movement, discernible all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but literature and society, too.”[12]
Far worse was to come when the show traveled on to Chicago and Boston. In theory, Chicago should have offered a rare opportunity. Unlike in New York, Davies and Kuhn had arranged for the show to be installed in the city’s main museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, thus obtaining the imprimatur of the cultural establishment. Even before the show opened, however, the local press had whipped the public into near hysteria. The director of a local medical institute diagnosed several of the European artists as suffering from locomotor ataxia—the inability to control one’s body movements; civic leaders denounced the “indecent, vulgar, and obscene” works that were defiling the museum. Finally, the newly formed Illinois State Vice Commission, set up to root out prostitution, opened an investigation into the corrupting influence of “distorted nudes” in the show—a step so extreme that Quinn at first refused to believe it. (“Do you think that vice commission was a joke or was it in earnest?” he asked one of his friends.[13]) Such was the public outcry about the show that the Art Institute’s director took an unplanned vacation and disavowed any involvement in it.
But the most disturbing attack came from a group of students from the Institute’s own art school. Among the show’s most controversial paintings were several large Matisses, including the androgynous Blue Nude, the almost savagely aggressive early 1907 canvas that seems to have helped spur on Picasso’s Demoiselles a few months later.[14] Outraged by these Matisses, the students took matters into their own hands and, on the last day of the exhibition, staged a ritual execution of the artist on the steps of the museum. As visitors filed out of the Institute’s lofty Tennessee-marble-clad entrance hall, they were confronted by shouts of “Kill him!” and “Burn him!” Surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, the students led the “accused” in front of a mock jury and pronounced him guilty of capital crimes against art. Then they threw copies of the offending paintings on the ground and set them on fire. It was an elaborate burlesque, but the rancor was real. The Chicago Daily Tribune ran a banner headline, students burning futurist art and celebrating cubists’ departure, accompanied by a four-column-wide picture of the mob with the smoldering remains of the three ersatz Matisses. Only by strenuous effort were the show’s organizers able to talk the students down from burning the artist himself in effigy.
For Quinn it was a bitter reckoning. The Matisse riot amounted to the first organized act of violence against modern art in the twentieth century, and it had taken place in America’s second-largest metropolis. In his opening speech in New York, Quinn had asserted that “American artists—young American artists, that is—do not dread, and have no need to dread, the ideas or the culture of Europe.” Yet young students from one of the country’s premier art schools had proven to be the show’s most hostile opponents. Less than two years after Matisse was proclaimed a “grand master” in Moscow, his paintings were being condemned to hellfire in Chicago. “This thing of trying to educate Chicago was a ridiculous thing,” Quinn lamented to the expatriate American sculptor Jacob Epstein. “There isn’t likely to be great art produced in this country in five hundred years, and perhaps not even then.”[15]
By the time a rump version of the Armory Show opened in Boston, the art was considered so beyond the pale that the press and the public did their best to ignore it altogether. In the end, even some of the artists in Davies and Kuhn’s association turned against the show. “So disturbing was the exhibition to the society of artists that had sponsored it that many members repudiated the vanguard and resigned,” the midcentury art historian Meyer Schapiro observed.[16] In fact, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors itself was remarkably short-lived, and would never put on another show. Two years later, Frederick James Gregg, who had been the Armory’s chief publicist, would sum up the experience in Vanity Fair: “The International Exhibition of 1913 surprised New York, disgusted Chicago, horrified Boston.”[17] It was a dismal end for a show that was supposed to transform American taste.
Even more dispiriting were the sales. One of Quinn and his friends’ primary aims was to demonstrate that ordinary Americans were ready to buy moderately priced modern art, just as their counterparts in Germany and elsewhere had been doing. Yet despite the huge crowds they managed to attract—some three hundred thousand people in three cities—very few avant-garde artworks found takers; in Chicago and Boston, there were hardly any sales at all. In fact, with few exceptions, the most active buyers were those who had sponsored or supported the show in the first place.[18] Along with Davies, Stieglitz, and a few other diehards, many of the purchasers came from a small coterie of wealthy women whom Davies had persuaded to make financial contributions to the show; one of them was Lillie Bliss, a Manhattan heiress who would one day loom large in Davies and Quinn’s plans for modern art in New York. But these were generally small efforts. As would so often be the case in his modern art ventures, Quinn found himself the dominant figure on both sides of the ledger, serving dubiously as both the biggest lender and the biggest buyer.
By the end of the show, Quinn had spent close to $6,000 on more than two dozen oils and sculptures, and many more minor works. Nor was he particularly daring in his choices, having only just begun to collect modern art. Left unsold were a museum’s worth of artworks by Van Gogh, Braque, Picasso, Brancusi, Fernand Léger, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, and many others, some of which could be had for a few hundred dollars or less. The lone exception to this neglect was an innocuous Cézanne landscape, which Metropolitan Museum curator Bryson Burroughs managed to purchase under the noses of his trustees, who were none too pleased about it. Of the four Picassos in the show, however, the only one that sold was a minor watercolor—a small, uncharacteristic, inoffensive picture of two trees—which Davies, the show’s co-organizer, bought for himself.
Yet Quinn was not so easily defeated. If the Armory Show had failed to change America, it had at least conquered the sensibility of its chief backer. “After seeing the work of the Cubists and Futurists,” he wrote George Russell, “it makes it hard to stomach the sweetness, the prettiness and cloying sentiment, of some of the other work.” He was beginning to find the “radium” he sought, and by the end of an evening at the Armory, he often found himself almost intoxicated. “When one leaves this exhibition,” Quinn told Russell, “he goes outside and sees the lights streaking up and down the tall buildings and watches their shadows and feels that the pictures that he has seen inside after all have some relation to the life and color and rhythm and movement that he sees outside.”[19]
Nor was Quinn alone. A small but determined group of initiates came away with the sense that the new art was accomplishing something that had been entirely absent in American culture. “How timid seemed our poetry and our drama and our prose fiction,” the Columbia philosopher Joel Spingarn wrote after seeing the show, which he called “one of the most exciting adventures” he had experienced.[20] Among the converts, not least, was Jeanne Foster. In the lengthy essay she wrote for the Review of Reviews, she observed that some of the art had transported her “to regions where there is more actual reality than can be found in the objective, visible world.” To her, many of these artists were seeking “the inner meaning behind the bodily form—the divine essence in nature.”[21]
In the end, Foster left the Armory without talking to Quinn. Yet clearly he had left a strong impression. In her review, she pointedly quoted him—not in his gloating claims for the show’s importance, but in his more sober reflection on the many works in it that fell short. But her main interest was to consider—among the hundreds in the show—the half dozen or so artists whom she felt had succeeded. She singled out the vibrating colors of Seurat and the purposeful naïveté of Matisse. She dwelled on the remarkable Van Gogh Self-Portrait, which, unknown to her, belonged to Quinn. (“The bristling red hair, the greenish eyes, the pallid skin boldly and loosely brushed in as if with rapid, nervous strokes, depict the emotional stress that finally shattered the mind of the artist who desired to paint symbols of eternity,” she wrote.)
She paused on Brancusi and she made a point of highlighting the artist whom the catalog referred to as Paul Picasso. Though he was not well represented, she identified Picasso as “one of the most gifted” of the show’s numerous Cubists. “He has the audacity of a gamin combined with great mastery of technique,” she wrote. Then she also noticed, shoved between some late-nineteenth-century French masters, an obscure artist named Henri Rousseau, who painted, “without much technical skill, strange beasts in combat in tropical forests.” Almost to the man, she had identified the artists we would recognize today as the leading European figures in the show. She had also hit upon the artists who would soon come to obsess Quinn.