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Rating: 
Summary: Good Read
Review: The Armory Show, which was held in the winter of 1913 in New York (it was later transported to Chicago and Boston, with significantly lesser impact), is arguably the single most important event pertaining to the plastic arts in American history -- along with being the prototype of the blockbuster exhibition. It featured more than 2,000 works by modernist artists -- mostly French and American -- and was responsible for introducing the general public to the major cutting-edge art movements of the time, including fauvism and cubism. Though it engendered a plethora of philistine wit (interestingly, Matisse seems to have been the primary target for journalistic ridicule) and precious little immediate intelligent connoisseurship, it, for better or worse, propagated the modernist credo on American shores forever. At the time, American art lagged significantly behind European art in terms of innovation, and the Armory show raised the bar so high that it would be decades before native artists would catch up. The effect was to start a vogue in America for all things French, until the advent of abstract expressionism a few decades later, which finally placed the ball of initiative in the court of America, for the first time in its history. One of the great glories of the show was to administer the coup de grace to the hyper-conservative American Academy. Overall, a vital segment of American cultural history brought back to life. Note: of special interest is the appendix which contains an extensive catalog of works included in the show, the majority of which are still highly-regarded by collectors.
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