How the New York Secession, the 1913 Armory Show, Became the Prototype for the Contemporary Art Fair

Abstract

The 1913 Armory Show has long been celebrated as the moment when America was introduced to modern art. This formalistic understanding of the event, though, would miss another equally important development which would only be observed through a historical materialist methodology that would see it as a response to a crisis of over-supply in the art market. It remains the single primary exhibition staged by the short-lived Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), a secession from the National Academy of Design. Though they would not succeed in creating a long-term alternative to their rival, their exhibition expanded upon innovations by the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. Through an archival examination of the Armory Show’s sourcing methods, a paradigm shift can be observed leading away from the nineteenth-century salon model by changing the system of artists submitting works to a jury, to one of marketing artworks provided by dealers. This new role for dealers would lead the way to the contemporary art fair model where galleries are the key exhibition decision-makers.

1. Introduction

The 1913 Armory Show has long been regarded as the vehicle by which the sheltered American art world was dragged into a jarring confrontation with European modernism. This formalist understanding, that this event shattered American conservative tastes by exposing it to avant-garde movements such expressionism and cubism, would misunderstand both its root causes and its ultimate achievement. By employing historical materialist methodology and examining the records and sourcing system, it is possible to instead understand the one-time exhibition as a wider phenomenon of artists struggling for access to the market, and that the result of that struggle would be the establishment of the key components of the late-twentieth-century art fair. The event, officially called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, lasted one month at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave before moving on to short visits in Chicago and Boston.1 This series of exhibits remain the primary output of the short-lived Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), a New York-based incarnation of the European secessions which had been revolting against the hegemonic salon system for decades already. The AAPS’s challenge to the Academy’s preeminence aimed to found a permanent secession, which was intended to expand the market’s capacity in New York and provide more opportunities for exhibiting and selling. In this endeavor they failed. The organization would not hold any more meaningful exhibitions, and a successor organization, the Society of Independent Artists (SIA), also failed to make any significant imprint on the market.

The battles between salons and their rebellious secessions across Europe leading up to 1913 would show the possibilities and limitations within the system of large-scale mass-participation exhibitions. Through constant conflict and experimentation, the ever-expanding workforce of artists produced variations that emphasized greater degrees of exclusion and inclusion but failed to develop any viable long-term solutions to the crush of producers over-supplying an already flooded marketplace. The organizers of the 1913 Armory Show were operating in the same context and were guided by a similar outlook that saw salon-style exhibiting as still their primary goal. What would only be realized decades later were the unintended consequences of their endeavors. They managed to work out the template for a profound paradigm shift of lasting significance: they created a new model of art commerce, the contemporary art fair.

Although the 1913 Armory Show has already received an extraordinary amount of study, the focus has generally given attention to its formalist achievements where an American art world that was largely defined by the conservative academic tendencies of the National Academy of Design was drawn into a shocking confrontation with a European avant-garde and would initiate a belated process of gradually embracing modernism, such as the recent work by Elizabeth Lunday (2013). The events and articles surrounding its centenary anniversary in 2013 generally phrased it in this context, and the primary source on the event, Walt Kuhn’s unpublished manuscript (Kuhn 1938) The story of the Armory Show, would focus on his own personal narrative and would feature prominently in Milton Brown’s book of the same title (first published in 1963), but more recent study, especially on the role of Walter Pach in Laurette E. McCarthy’s monograph (McCarthy 2011), would highlight his role as an impresario and connection to continental dealers. What has been missing from this discussion, and which provides the essential necessity for this paper, is the role of the struggling artist proletariat which is desperately seeking their economic survival in a market coping with excessive oversupply. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to place the 1913 Armory Show within the evolution of art commerce structures and their dynamic revision resulting from an incurably dissatisfied mass of artists.

The search for the root causes of the near-constant disruption in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century salon system cannot be understood by strictly stylistic and formalistic approaches, and instead the answer must be found in more prosaic conditions that afflicted most artists. The approach of addressing artistic phenomena from a historical materialist perspective derives from the foundational work by Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (Hauser 1958), particularly in the way that class relations will determine esthetic outcomes. The seminal studies by Albert Boime on the Salon des Refusés (Boime 1969) and the role of the entrepreneurial dealer (Boime 1976) initiated a more concerted study of the economic forces that drove the art world’s trajectory. The comprehensive study of the Paris Salons by Fae Brauer (2013) and their decline by Patricia Mainardi (1993) explored the permanent dissatisfaction that pervaded the system. The essential monographs on the Munich Secession by Maria Makela (1990) and the Berlin Secession by Peter Paret (1980), as well the core original source on the early years of the Vienna Secession by Ludwig Hevesi (1906) and the comprehensive study of artistic centers in Central Europe by Elizabeth Clegg (2006), all helped the understanding of the process of secession as it informed my own work on the Hungarian art market (Taylor 2014). The current work here, then, should be seen in this progression on understanding art as existing within its own peculiar economy and which is indeed an industry with its workers who struggle to earn a living. The irony of the narrative of the 1913 Armory Show would be in how it emerged from a pattern of secessions which were ultimately predicated on a quest for access to the market, but ultimately created an even more elitist and exclusive structure, the contemporary art fair.

2. European Salons and Secessions in Europe

The salon system would dominate the European art worlds for most of the long nineteenth century, and its structure always necessitated a decision-making entity to determine which artworks made it onto its limited wall space. Battles over this essential question would produce numerous secessions that have often been interpreted in terms of formalistic esthetic questions, but, in fact, their disputes usually had far more prosaic economic questions at heart. When looking at the causes that spurred the creation of alternative exhibition societies, time and again, we can observe the most pressing issue will be the opportunity to exhibit and to exhibit in a way that could catch a collector’s attention and ideally their purchasing power. Ultimately, no matter how juries were configured, they could not address the ever-growing disparity between supply and demand, i.e., too many artists and too few buyers.

Fairs, as a form of a large-scale commercial event for selling artworks, can cite their origin to the Pand market, which was located in the courtyard of the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp in Flanders (today’s Belgium) in the 1400s but would largely be limited to printed works (Ewing 1990). The trade in oil paintings in the early modern period generally remained controlled by the local Guilds of St. Luke, which was restricted within a city’s domain to works produced by local masters (Montias 1977). This market only began to liberalize with the creation of the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which was, in many ways, a means by which painters could circumvent the guild monopolies through the protection of royal privilege (Landois [1751] 2003). When in the seventeenth century, the Academy began staging exhibitions of the new works by the teachers and their students, it created the model for art commerce that would last up through to the beginning of the twentieth century. The Paris Salon, named for the Salon Carré, where the early exhibitions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts were held, became, by the eighteenth century, a massive, once-a-year show of contemporary art (Crow 1987). Following the French Revolution, exhibitions were opened to all artists. By the later eighteenth century, other art centers would imitate the model. For example, in London, the Royal Academy was founded and began holding exhibitions in 1768 (Sawbridge 2019). Local patrons and civic leaders would found art unions [Kunstvereine] throughout Central Europe, which created smaller versions of the same salon system (Romain 1984). By the later nineteenth century those art unions would be superseded by national organizations representing the entire population of the new nation states, and those organizations would often be identified with their purpose-built Kunsthalle, such as the Vienna Künstlerhaus (Neuwirth 1961) or the Műcsarnok in Budapest (Taylor 2014).

Although the number and capacity of these salons grew exponentially through the latter nineteenth century, they proved unable to adequately serve their membership, and they would face a pattern of secessions, or alternative exhibition societies, as they were overwhelmed by waves of artists struggling to make a livable income from their work, a sort of artist proletariat. The evolution of all Western art markets at this time would see them first pass through a progression of market pluralization, driven by these break-away secessions. An ever-growing stream of ambitious young men and women throwing themselves into the career of being an artist created relentless supply-side pressure on the salon system. The market did not so much break as it shattered into many facets—official salon, alternative salon, self-staging movements, and new commercial galleries. These all essentially represented endeavors to access demand when confronted with such a glut of supply. As salons and secessions battled for dominance in a saturated market, increasingly it was the entrepreneurial dealers (Jensen 1997) who could better resolve the most pressing question in the art market: how to allocate the most precious asset, its wall-space. The dealer would be the ultimate victor in the dialectic confrontation between multiple institutional variants, a process in which the 1913 Armory Show will play an essential role.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, cracks had already formed in the Paris Salon monopoly model. Gustav Courbet staged his Pavilion of Realism next to the Paris 1855 Exposition Universelle in order to be able to show the full scope of his work, including his monumental works Burial at Ornans and The Artist’s Studio. The Salon des Refusés, which took place in Paris in 1863 and was itself a product of the government’s market-constricting policies, drew riotous laughter at such notorious pieces as Éduard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Boime 1969). These two earliest examples of rebellion set the pattern for the two varieties of revolt: one striving towards a greater focus on fewer artists, while the other aims at expanded inclusion. New institutions can claim to be both at the same time, but quite soon the stresses of economic survival force the institution to declare an orientation, either towards elitism or inclusion. The first Impressionist exhibition, held under the title Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (1874), began in something of both directions, providing space for 30 artists to each exhibit multiple works (Tucker 1986). Of those who showed, only seven or eight achieved the world-wide stature associated with the movement, and the other artists were quickly dropped so that later exhibitions, once they had willingly assumed the label of Impressionism, could focus even more exclusively on those core figures.

By 1881 the Paris Salon itself was undergoing a massive constitutional re-alignment as its governance came under ever-more democratic control, with its citizenry drawn from the broad-based Société des Artistes Français. The structure proved to be inherently designed for dissatisfaction, as demands upon its limited display capacity could never be adequately satisfied, regardless of the decision-making structure (Brauer 2013). In 1884 the Société des Artistes Indépendants was formed in Paris, taking up a name that had previously been used to describe the Impressionists. The new society operated under the motto “Sans jury ni recompense” [No jury or awards] and began to hold an essentially institutionalized Salon des Refusés called the Salon des Indépendants. In 1890 Ernest Meissonier, Puvis de Chavannes, and Auguste Rodin led the founding of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which further diversified a permanent pluralistic market of competing institutions by holding what became known as the Salon du Champs-de-Mars, usually opening a fortnight after the already existing Salon de Champs-Élysées. Their walk-out had largely been in protest of reforms by the president of the Société des Artistes Français, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, which attempted to implement expanded access to the Salon at the expense of more established artists. The Salon du Champs-de-Mars would come to be regarded as the aristocratic salon, as opposed to the egalitarian Indépendants. The 1903 Salon d’Automne then emerged in opposition to all the preceding salons; in that it showed an openness to the avant-garde but employed a stringent jury (Brauer 2013). Any one of these departures could be regarded as the “Paris Secession”, depending how one chooses to characterize the term: whether this sort of revolt should be seen as egalitarian or elitist in nature and whether it should have an esthetic agenda, would then determine whether the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon du Champs-de-Mars, or the Salon d’Automne would be the one to best match the model.

The terminology—largely drawn from political discourse, with the “revolts”, “revolutions”, and “secessions” projecting the salon in the role of the state—only partially elucidates disputes that are in fact economic in nature. Each of these new institutions, regardless of their orientation and selection process, advanced a process of market pluralization, and secessions should be better understood in those kinds of terms. In each case, the seceding artists believe that they have a superior commercial model, which will provide a better opportunity for fuller esthetic expression and also ensure their own livelihood. The model might advocate no juries, or it might demand more severe juries, but whether egalitarian or elitist, the new institution expanded the market by adding a new competitor, and on a very practical level it expanded the exhibition and distribution capacity of the economic playing field. The Central European eponymous secessions should be regarded with a similar attention to these two tendencies, egalitarian and elitist, as those markets progressed through the same pluralization.

It would be in Central Europe where the term secession was coined, and the word (to the confusion of art history students) would also come to be used in the region as a stylistic label for architecture and applied arts, often translated to Art Nouveau or Jugendstil. Initially, however, the term envisioned a group of artists seceding from a dominant institution to form an alternative exhibition society. In Central Europe this term gained usage through three particularly seminal institutions: The Munich Secession founded in 1892, the Vienna Secession founded in 1897, and the Berlin Secession founded in 1898.

In Munich, the second most important art center after Paris, tensions within the Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft had been building since the First Munich Annual Exhibition of 1889, when foreign artists had been widely represented but German painters had been severely juried, and many regular exhibiters were either refused or relegated to “death chambers” (bad locations in back rooms) within the Glaspalast [Glass Palace], the city’s large industrial hall (Makela 1990). By 1892 the continuing exacerbation of grievances between a dissatisfied local Kunstproletariat and the organization’s pro-foreigner orientation resulted in a vastly altered exhibition policy that saw it return to its egalitarian roots and reinstitute a three-work limit for all participants, no matter how famous. The response from many of the most successful artists was to secede and form the Verein Bildender Künstler Münchens [Munich Society of Visual Artists], which repudiated the democratic ethic of the Genossenschaft, and would subsequently become better known as the Munich Secession. By 1900 the elitism of the new institution was causing it to regularly reject aspiring artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, forcing them into a widening array of further splinter groups such as the Neue Künstlervereinung München, formed in 1909, and from which Der Blaue Reiter group. would break away in 1911–12 (Grohmann 1958; Klee 1973). What drove Kandinsky and his future Blaue Reiter comrades to depart was very similar to the “three-painting” rule that ignited the first Munich Secession. In this case, the dispute revolved around very specific details of access to wall space because the Neue Künstlervereinung maintained a “Vier-Quadratmeter-Klausel”, a clause which would have allowed Kandinsky, as a director of the group, the right to show up to 4 square meters of canvas jury free. This prerogative was rejected by the membership and Kandinsky left (Hoberg and Friedel 1999). Seen in this light, Munich’s most famous art movement, Der Blaue Reiter, should be regarded, in essence, as a secession of a secession of a secession.

In its initial conflicts and departure from the Verein Berliner Künstler, the Berlin Secession followed a similar dynamic, in that it too represented a small elite of artists and connoisseurs. As the historian of the German Genossenschafts, Heinrich Deiters, wrote in 1906:

[The Munich Secession] was created by issues related to the exhibitions, and […] it was these same considerations that lay at the root of subsequent splits in other chapters, where the ambition of the individual artist made him forget that in any association that is not organized on authoritarian principles, the majority must decide.

(Deiters 1906)

Like the Munich chapter, the Berlin Secession differed most from the salon in its exhibition policies: no style or theme was excluded, works were given more space and less crowding, the juries judged more severely, and foreign artists were openly welcomed (Paret 1980). The president of the Berlin Secession, Max Liebermann, expressed the orientation quite clearly in his forward to the catalogue for their first show in 1899:

We are convinced that the massive accumulation of art offends the interests of the public just as much as the art itself. The beholder’s eye is only too quickly fatigued by a long flight of halls filled with pictures, and the truly good pictures, of which there are naturally only a few, are crushed by the sheer mediocrity.

(Liebermann 1899)

Liebermann was presciently describing what would become one of the most essential reforms of twentieth-century exhibition practice, which lay in a recognition that more was not better. His comments reflect an emerging understanding of the art consumer’s limited attention span and that for that attention to be held, pictures needed to be shown in moderation and with a degree of isolation.

The Vienna Secession, the best-known of all the secessions, however, would provide something of a hybrid to its German cousins. The rupture, in fact, featured elements from both the egalitarian and the elitist models for market pluralization. With the exception of the venerable water-colorist Rudolf von Alt, the Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs, as the Vienna Secession was originally known, was composed mostly of younger artists dissatisfied with the exhibition policies of the Künstlerhaus (Vergo 1975). The young artists were dismayed by the treatment of landscapists and, in particular, by the Künstlerhaus’s unwillingness to hold a retrospective of the plein air painters Theodor von Hörmann and Josef Engelhardt (Hevesi 1906). At the same time, though, like the Munich and Berlin versions, a desire for greater internationalism and a receptivity to foreign exhibitors was expressly declared. Furthermore, Vienna’s Secession soon acquired a permanent venue in 1898, an asset Munich and Berlin also would come to acquire, but which many other corresponding institutions in other cities would never secure. The Vienna Secession also featured the familiar pattern of repeated ruptures, with the first one occurring in 1905, again along the battle lines of egalitarian versus elitist. This dispute originated with a disagreement over the role of the artist Carl Moll, who was also employed as the director of the Galerie Miethke. The result of the so-called “Moll Affair” was that the “Klimt Group” departed, leaving the organization in the hands of its lesser masters. Gustav Klimt’s new incarnation in the form of the Kunstschau of 1908 was not a permanent exhibition society but rather a spectacular one-off event, and in that way, it more resembles the 1913 Armory Show (Husslein-Arco and Weidinger 2008).

The Munich and Vienna models show that secessions can embody many agendas. The Munich precedent was a revolt of elite artists against the masses who painted kitsch subjects, or Lederhosen painters as they were derided. The Vienna example, to the contrary, shares characteristics of a Salon des Refusés model of denigrated painters arranging an alternative exhibition space for themselves. The Munich model is elitist; the Viennese, however, possesses elements of the egalitarian tendency. They both address the problem of rising numbers among the artist proletariat, which afflicted every Western art center during the period, but with different responses. In Munich the proletariat was excluded. In Vienna a certain type of marginalized painters, the landscapists, were defended. In Munich the solution was to be more restrictive, in Vienna, to be more inclusive of certain tendencies, particularly landscape, and in fact, this tendency would ultimately take control of the Vienna Secession in 1905. Balancing the need for inclusion and excellence would ultimately never be resolved by any of the salons or secessions as long as they relied on juries. The solution would ultimately lie in the concentrated authority of the impresario curator and the dealer. It was a solution that had already grown apparent as dealers were increasingly playing a dominant role in the dissemination of modern art. Paul Durand-Ruel had been supporting the Impressionists and their exhibitions, as well as having discovered a lucrative market in the United States (Thompson 2015). Ambroise Vollard continued to discover and market new talents in avant-garde tendencies out of his gallery in Paris (Dumas 2006). When professional dealers had been directly involved in the management of secessions, however, it would alienate the mass of members who considered it contrary to their interests and would lead to the break-up of the organizations, as was with the case of Galerie Miethke in Vienna (N. N. 1905) or Paul Cassirer’s role in the Berlin Secession (Uhr 1990). A secession emerging in western Germany, the Sonderbund, would enshrine a wider role for these specialists, and particularly the role of dealers, and it would be this late-arriving secession that would have such a pronounced influence on the New York incarnation of secession, which is what the 1913 Armory Show was aspiring to be.

3. The New York Secessions

Paris experienced multiple secessions, and the pattern would repeat in the Central European centers of Munich, Vienna, and Berlin, with eponymous secessions, but the essential phenomenon of disgruntled artists forming alternative exhibition societies also occurred throughout Western art centers, in, for example, Prague (Clegg 2006), Budapest (Taylor 2014), and St. Petersburg (Melnik 2015). The United States would not remain immune to these forces, which were driven by a crushing surplus of artists and artworks. In fact, New York had a history of competing salons from its earliest days as an art center. The National Academy of Design, which was attempting to hold its position as New York’s and the United States’ dominant salon, had itself begun in 1826 as a secession from John Trumbull’s earlier American Academy of Fine Arts (founded 1802), and he had indeed called them “seceders” at the time of their founding (Cowdrey 1953). The National Academy would also fight off a challenge to their authority in the form of the American Art-Union (1839–1851), which had been founded on the Kunstverein model (Baker 1953), but ultimately they were dissolved because their raffle system, which was used to distribute works to subscribers, was deemed to represent a lottery and, therefore, an unlicensed form of gambling (NYT 1852). Later the Society of American Artists, founded in 1877, would hold competing exhibitions (J.B.F.W. 1879), though often involving the same artists, and in later years in the same building, until it merged with the National Academy of Design in 1906 (Clark 1954). This merger would in fact lead directly to the crisis that spurred the 1913 Armory Show.

In the early twentieth century attempts to form a permanent New York secession began to take hold within the struggles for new esthetic directions. A grouping of leading Impressionists, including John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam, dismayed by the Society of American Artist’s hostility to Impressionism, would expressly “secede” from the society (NYT 1898) and would subsequently exhibit under the name Ten American Painters, or simply known as The Ten. Their inaugural exhibition, held appropriately at the New York gallery of Durand-Ruel (1898), would feature only 43 works and be characterized by the decluttered hanging style pioneered by James McNeil Whistler in his exhibitions in London in the 1870s and 1880s (Jensen 1997). The group would continue to exhibit in the ensuing twenty years, either at Durand-Ruel’s gallery or the Montross Gallery as well as at traveling shows in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Providence, and Washington (Brockett 2007).

Alfred Stieglitz, when arranging an inaugural exhibition of American Pictorial Photography at the National Arts Club in 1902, decided to attribute the arrangement of entrants to the “Photo-Secession” as a way to both market the exhibition and obfuscate his own role in their selection (Homer 2002). He had already been exhibiting in Vienna and Munich in the 1890s where the expression of Photo-Secession had emerged as the medium of photography was embraced as part of the wider process of acceptance and appreciation for applied arts. The term, which he had promoted in an article in 1899 (Stieglitz 1899), would also prove prophetic when in 1905 his organization was confronted by a rival photography group, the American Federation of Photography holding “The First American Photographic Salon” at the Clausen Galleries that had been juried by leading artists William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri (Greenough 2000). His inability to secure a large venue for all the members to show led him in 1905, reluctantly at first, to follow the suggestion of his friend Edward Steichem, who had an apartment on the fifth floor of 291 Fifth Avenue and rented three small rooms across the hall. The limited space at the venue, now called The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, necessitated that instead of a single comprehensive exhibition, he would hold a series of “small but very select shows” (Stieglitz 1905). Those shows would largely be singularly selected and curated by Stieglitz with an orientation towards producing sales. In 1907 the gallery would begin to exhibit non-photographic works (Doty 1960), and by 1908, after a move to an even smaller space on the same floor, would it rebrand itself as the 291. In that incarnation, it would truly establish itself as the first modernist gallery in the United States, and through this process, from secession to gallery, Stieglitz’s institution neatly embodies the art market’s evolution that would occur in the first half of the twentieth century.

By 1900, Robert Henri had already spent considerable time in Paris and knew its salon system, which had already succumbed to multiple divisions and reorganizations. He had also formed his own distinct variant of modernism focused less on technical experimentation than that of Impressionism and more on an uncompromising realistic exploration of their contemporary condition. Through the first decade of the new century, Henri would stage multiple attempts at a New York secession. His first venture, a group exhibition that would initiate the gathering of Ashcan school members by including John Sloan and William Glackens, was held at that Allan Gallery in 1901 (Perlman 1991). The exhibition sought especially to address the problems of the less-than-ideal hanging which often plagued Academy shows, and although it achieved hardly any sales and only a single review (FitzGerald 1901), it would signal the initiation of America’s first authentically modernist art collective. In subsequent years he continued the endeavor, showing in 1903 at the Colonial Club and in 1904 at the National Arts Club with what would already be six of the future members of The Eight (Leeds 1996).

Despite Henri’s membership at the Academy of Design, he could not prevent large-scale rejections of fellow Ashcan artists and so staged a sort of Salon des Refusés at the MacBeth Gallery in 1908, which became one of the seminal exhibitions in American art history (Perlman 1991). Choosing the name The Eight, the exhibition proved to be a critical success, unlike its Paris precedent, and would then tour multiple cities. During their formative stage, The Eight had even hoped to acquire their own permanent venue (Gregg 1907), and following that success, Henri began rallying his fellow painters towards an Exhibition of Independent Artists. They would eventually procure an improvised space in a vacant building (a precursor to the Pop-Up) at 29–31 West 35th Street and open in 1910, featuring 103 artists and 260 paintings, 20 sculptures, and 219 drawings and prints displayed over three floors (Perlman 1991; Henri 1910). Those same artists would attempt further iterations through the next eight years, with the 1911 one held at the MacDowell Club and Henri attempting to found an Association of American Painters. Subsequently Rockwell Kent tried to pursue an even more strident version of secession that absolutely precluded any involvement by their artists with the rival National Academy of Design (Homer and Organ 1969).

In some ways, the story of the Armory Show, named for the 69th Regiment Amory in which it was held, begins with another military building, the Arsenal in Central Park. Following the merger with the Society of the American Artists, the National Academy of Design had pooled their assets, and in 1909 they began to lobby the New York State legislature to receive the property of the Arsenal in order to erect a Kunsthalle and school facility located next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYT 1909a). The National Academy of Design argued the pressing need for such a building, noting that even Toledo, Cleveland, and St. Louis have better exhibition halls (NYT 1909b). They had sold their Venetian Gothic Reconstruction era structure on 23rd street but had not yet found the proper location for their new building, and furthermore, the temporary school location had suffered a tragic fire in 1905 (NYT 1905). Their first exhibition after the merger was still being held at the Galleries of the American Fine Arts Society on 57th Street, and that location was proving entirely inadequate with the 1907 show exhibiting only 429 of 1434 submissions received, meaning an acceptance rate of below 30% (Clark 1954). The National Academy of Design believed the solution to this crisis of over-supply and limited capacity would be for them to operate a large permanent year-round Kunsthalle.

Other artists in New York had quite different ideas. An emerging cadre of modernists had grown frustrated with their inability to break the conservatives’ hold over the organization and its jury. One artist described the National Academy of Design shows as looking like an exhibition of life insurance calendars (NYT 1907). Walt Kuhn, one of these frustrated modernists, decided a competing organization was needed and gathered thirteen other artists willing to found the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), declaring itself to be openly at war with the National Academy of Design (NYT 1912). Although they had ambitions to erect their own building eventually, at the moment they had nothing, but with the fortunate generosity of one of their founding artists, the well-established Arthur Davies, they could rent the massive 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave for a 4-week run in 1913 (Kuhn 1938). What would distinguish the exhibition they were planning would be its focus on modern art and especially currents from Europe. Fortunately, for the planners, one of the newer European secessions was holding a large exhibition of modern art in Cologne, and Walt Kuhn could just catch the last day if he left right away. What Kuhn would take from that show would profoundly change art marketing in the twentieth century.

4. The Sonderbund

The Sonderbund (Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler) emerged as a relatively late-arriving secession, being formed only in 1908 in the city of Düsseldorf. A first Sonder-Austellung [Separate Exhibition] in 1908 used the talents of the builder of the Vienna Secession building, Joseph Maria Olbrich, who had moved to Germany to found the Darmstadt colony and was working in Düsseldorf to build the Tietz Department Store and develop a “Corporate Design”. He had already been involved in staging exhibitions for the Weiβer Nessel group where paintings were hung on walls backed in white canvas (Kepetzis 2012). The typeface that Olbrich designed for the 1908 Sonder-Austellung represented one of the many features of the Vienna Secession’s Gesamtkunstwerk ethos that had migrated with him, and the 1912 Sonderbund’s catalog design would directly inspire the Armory’s (Schaefer 2012). Although Olbrich would tragically die that year at only age forty, the role he filled would become one of the Sonderbund’s defining features. Unlike other art-exhibiting societies, which tended to be artist-run, the Sonderbund was marked by the out-sized roles of its non-artist members, especially museum experts, curators, collectors, and especially dealers (Aust 1961). If capitalist industrialization was characterized by the increasing specialization of the labor force within particular industries (Glaser and Rahman 2014), then art production in the nineteenth century followed the same pattern. Much of the picture-making process, canvas-stretching, paint-mixing, brush-making, had all been outsourced to specialized firms—the artists need only paint. The need for professionals to manage these large-scale exhibitions was already being advocated by critics, as Karl Scheffler had written about the Berlin Secession: “Good painters can paint but can’t organize. The Secession needs to be directed by a nonartist” (Scheffler 1912). The organization of the Sonderbund exhibitions represented a new stage in the professionalization of the art trade, taking it out of the hands of artists and giving it over to specialists.

The organizing committee of the 1912 exhibition reflected this new professionalization of exhibition curatorship. The Sonderbund’s chairman, Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, had already been providing a beachhead for French Post-Impressionism in Germany for ten years. The organization’s treasurer was the collector, soon to become prolific dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, and as treasurer he looked after sales from shows and so became intimately acquainted with the commercial possibilities for the trade in modernism (Sonderbund 1912). The national sections of the 1912 exhibitions were chosen by experts familiar with their local scene, often drawn from the museum sector (Schaefer 2012). Such concentrated authority did not prove popular with artists, and Franz Marc complained about their lack of input—so much so that his Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden suggested perhaps there should be a Salon des Refusés from the Sonderbund Austellung at his new Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. In fact, the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon that he would stage the next year in Berlin served as his own rebuttal to the Sonderbund’s lack of attention to the most advanced trends in the avant-garde but would very much re-emphasize this shift to professional decision-makers as it would bear his distinctive imprimatur as to the future of modernism. In fact, the role of dealers remains another significant innovation of the Sonderbund. Whereas the role of the Galerie Mietke in the Vienna Secession proved so divisive to the organization it caused a disastrous rupture (Hevesi 1906), dealers were enthusiastically embraced by the Sonderbund. Their 1909 Sonderbund show featured fifteen works of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism lent by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune from Paris, and the organization could count Josse Bernheim Jeune as a member, along with dealers Felix Feneon and Fritz Bismeyer (Sonderbund 1910). The Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer would lend eight works to the 1912 exhibition, and his brother lent two more. Flechtheim, soon to become a dealer in his own right (Schmitt-Föller 2010), lent twelve works.

After holding their earlier shows at the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast, the Sonderbund chose to hold the 1912 exhibition in the larger city of Cologne at its new Städtischen Ausstellungshalle am Aachener Tor. This building allowed for over three times the number of works as compared to what had been shown in Düsseldorf.2 This building was not exclusively used for art exhibitions as a Kunsthalle but would also be used for industrial and mercantile expositions as well (Bachem 2012). It would prove that the prevailing obsession at that time with having a wholly owned Kunsthalle was in fact short-sighted. The ownership of a dedicated Kunsthalle in fact made little difference in preventing the impending irrelevance of both salons and secessions. Neither the Armory Show’s organization, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), nor the Sonderbund would ever acquire their own venue, nor would they last much beyond their seminal exhibitions. The Sonderbund would fold in 1915, but their long-term achievement, much like the achievements of the modernist masters they adulated, were unknown to them at the time. The First World War would cause a catastrophic unraveling of the international milieu of modernism, both in its cosmopolitan centers like Montparnasse (Silver 1992) and the wider networking of centers across the continent. The German market for modernism, leveraging an increasingly interconnected Europe, had grown exponentially in the years leading up to the War and was on the verge of becoming a significant rival to France, but would suffer a dramatic degradation due to the conflict. The Weimer period would see a significant recovery (Joyeux-Prunel 2015), but that progress would be completely snuffed out by National Socialism. Germany did, however, provide an essential paradigmatic transmission to the future center of the art world that had much to do with the little noticed arrival of a painter from New York on the 1912 Sonderbund show’s closing day (Kuhn 1938).

5. The 1913 Armory Show and Its Essential Innovations

The parallel cannot go unnoticed that much like the Kölner Kunstmarkt served as a forerunner to the Art Basel fair which has come to be embody the late-twentieth-century model, the event that occurred in Cologne half a century earlier served as predecessor to the event in New York that is the pivotal moment of transition from the salon to art fair. The 1913 Armory Show took the key tendencies of the 1912 Sonderbund and dramatically expanded them. Both of these events were branded as secessions in the model that had been evolving now for over 20 years across the Western art world. The important developments that these two events pioneered, though, would be the decisive role played by art professionals in the selection and curation of the exhibition and the role that dealers would play in supplying the artworks.

Walt Kuhn would learn of the Sonderbund show just in time to catch a steamer and arrive on its closing day. The experience, however, would be profound, as he became familiar with the now already canonized masters of Post-Impressionism, especially Cezanne and Van Gogh, and would also observe that these works were lent by dealers. Following his visit to Cologne, Kuhn would travel through Holland, Belgium, and France, making contact with the dealers there. Most importantly he would be connected through Arthur Davies, the association President, with the American expatriate artist Walter Pach, who had supported himself in Paris by working as a critic and an art agent. Pach’s role in the transformative nature of the Armory Show cannot be overstated. Although indeed he considered himself a painter, it was his other skills as a critic and most importantly as someone already well established in the art trade that allowed him to shape the curatorial and commercial outcomes of the exhibition.

Pach had acquired a strong grounding in the art centers of Europe (London, Dresden, Madrid, and Florence) during the years 1904–1910 through participating in and then organizing a series of study trips for the schools of William Merrit Chase and Robert Henri. These trips also afforded him a chance to familiarize himself more and more with Paris and led him to settle as an expatriate artist there from 1910 to 1912. He became a regular at the salon held by Leo and Getrude Stein, through which he would be acquainted with Pablo Picasso and Pierre Matisse. In addition to exploring the major salon exhibitions, Pach frequented the galleries that were increasingly emerging as the primary venues for advancing the careers of modern artists, including Kahnweiler, Bernheim Jeune, Vollard, Druet, and Durand-Ruel (McCarthy 2011). The fact that he had forged these personal bonds with the galleries would be essential to their willingness to trust a new exhibition society on the other side of the world with their valuable inventory.

By 1908, he had also begun writing art criticism and would publish with Scribner’s the first major article on Paul Cezanne for a US public (Pach 1908) as well as an one in the same year on Claude Monet, and in 1910 he published on “Edouard Manet and Modern American Art” where he would connect American artists like Arthur B. Davies to the founder of modernism (Pach 1910a). Even more importantly, he began serving as an art agent by 1910 connecting American buyers with the Parisian dealers he had come to know (Pach 1910b). He had nearly pulled off a sale of a Cezanne self-portrait for the Metropolitan Museum through a purchase by Benjamin Altman (McCarthy 2011), but a year later he would again access his connections to Ambrose Vollard and successfully sell one to Lillie Bliss (through the agency of Davies) (Davies 1912). During this extended visit Pach transitioned from American outsider observing the Paris art world to being a fully invested participant, especially in its avant-garde movements. He formed close friendships with its leading figures, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Gino Severini, Constantin Brancusi, Andre Derain, Odilon Redon, and Raul Dufy. He would become particularly close with the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp, becoming the only American member of the Puteaux Group, which would evolve into the most stridently intellectual grouping of cubist artists and would eventually hold the Section d’Or exhibition. Although Pach did not exhibit at the show, he visited it many times, and he would draw upon those connections for the Cubist works brought to New York.

Much of the decision-making process for European artworks would occur through Pach’s influence. Davies traveled over to Paris at Kuhn’s request, and the two of them were toured through the galleries and studios of Paris, largely through a curated guiding by Pach. The decisions of what to exhibit from Europe were largely made through an integrated process of the dealers offering to provide certain works, and Pach would then further select what to offer for Kuhn and Davies to choose from. In fact, some of the American artists had been bristling at their lack of involvement, with Robert Henri being particularly dissatisfied with the European selections (M. Brown 1988). This new decision-making role of the impresario being played by Pach, with essential curatorial and sales decisions made by dealers, represents the essence of the new business model created by the 1913 Armory Show.

As a result, Pach would secure much of the European works from galleries who make for a who’s who of the early-twentieth-century art trade in modernism: Thannhauser of Munich would send 20 works. Bernheim-Jeune of Paris supplied six. Flechtheim, one of the key organizers of the Sonderbund, now becoming a dealer in his own right, sent two pieces. The seminal dealer of the avant-garde, Ambroise Vollard, would provide 25 works (MacRae 1913), and the dealer of cubism, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, sent 17. The Impressionist patron, Paul Durand-Ruel (who was already well established in New York) provided 16. The Dutch gallery Artz & de Bois gave 26 artworks. The greatest number, however, came from Eugène Druet, who provided a staggering 98 works.3 In addition to sourcing from continental dealers, the Armory Show also made use of their own emerging modernist venue, Stieglitz’s 291, which lent six Matisse drawings, as well as a drawing by Picasso and the artist’s iconic bronze cubist sculpture Head of a Woman (1909). Leo Stein would lend three pieces, and his brother Michael lent two more, and although more identified collectors, Leo Stein nonetheless would sell much of his initial collection later to Dr. Albert C. Barnes and Durand-Ruel (Bishop et al. 2011) and in that way blurred the line between collector and trade.

Pach would return to New York to be present at the show and also to supervise the Boston and Chicago iterations of the exhibition (McCarthy 2011). He would compose the published criticism that served as its marketing material, including, for example, a 20-page tract on Odilon Redon (Pach 1913). He would also actively undertake the role of sales manager, and his sales books attest to the energetic deal making between collectors and the dealers. On three occasions in the second of his sales books he emphatically scrawled: “Write Vollard”, and he maintained correspondence about the sales with the other dealers such as Thannhauser (1913) and Druet (1912). Pach’s role within the Armory Show would come to embody the role taken up by latter-day dealer/impresarios like Art Basel’s founder Ernst Beyeler: They sourced artworks, contextualized and marketed them through the publication of criticism as well as face-to-face salesmanship, and then connected them with collectors who purchased them through a large-scale short-term public exhibition. The entrepreneurial dealer would, in this model, be bonded not just to their gallery venue, but also to the grand spectacle of the commercial contemporary art fair.

The 1913 Armory Show is named as such with its date because it only happened once, but the movement it spurred on would lead to the creation in 1916 of what indeed would be New York’s enduring secession-type organization, the Society of Independent Artists (SIA) (Lunday 2013). When they finally held their first exhibition in 1917 at the Grand Central Palace, it proved to be vastly larger than the early Independent-titled events of the preceding two decades, with its catalog listing 1129 artists and 2103 works, which is nearly double that of the Armory Show (SIA 1917). With its conscious imitation of the Société des Artistes Indépendents in France and its ethos of “No jury—No prizes”, the society allowed anyone who paid membership to exhibit. It attracted enormous attention with 20,000 people visiting it in the first four weeks, but it did not produce significant sales and ended as a financial failure (Naumann 1979). Far greater impacts would be made in educating the American public about the avant-garde through the Société Anonyme (also deriving its name from a French predecessor—in this case, the original name of the Impressionist group), that emerged from an acquaintance made through the SIA between Marcell Duchamp and Katherine Dreier, an artist who had also shown at the Armory Show. Dreier, like Pach, had been living in Europe as an expatriate artist and like Kuhn had visited the 1912 Sonderbund, envisioned a traveling museum without walls, and would show their growing international collection in multiple venues and cities over the next two decades (Josenhans 2021).

The Society of Independent Artists, New York’s last great attempt at a secession, would be best remembered for the work that it did not show, R. Mutt’s [Marcel Duchamp’s] Fountain (Goldfarb Marquis 2002). In fact, that work, which is lost, now largely exists in the public’s mind because it was documented by a dealer, Stieglitz (Duchamp et al. 1917), and then recommissioned by another dealer, Sidney Janis, in 1950. Though the narrative of Fountain remains one of the most widely discussed events in art history, the salon to which it was submitted has largely been forgotten. The organization would continue to hold exhibitions for another 26 years (Marlor 1984), but it would contribute little to the development of avant-garde art in America (de Duve 2013). The point that Duchamp was making with his submission of Fountain to the SIA was a direct confrontation to their open, egalitarian submission process. That it would be dealers who would ultimately canonize his work, then, most cogently encapsulates the lesson of the Independent exhibitions and the Armory Show: the dealer, not salons or secessions, will be the one to guide the future of art.

6. Characteristics of the Contemporary Art Fair

The contemporary art fair model that emerged from the Kölner Kunstmarkt (1967) and the first Art Basel (1970) would dramatically alter the platforms for retailing primary market art from that point until the present day. The prior fair model, that of the nineteenth-century Paris Salon, could best be described as art by committee, since juries that selected the works submitted directly by artists were essentially a committee of artists. A fundamentally different version of the salon emerged in the later twentieth century on what can be termed the Art Basel art fair model (Kramer 1972). The defining characteristics of the Art Basel model would be its concept of a decision-making structure and its approach to venues. None of the leading fairs today rely on purpose-built nineteenth-century Kunsthalles to hold their event. Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach take place in their cities’ respective convention centers. The current-day Armory Show fair had been held in bland wharf warehouses on the Hudson River but has now switched to New York’s massive Javits Center. Of all the major art fairs, only FIAC and subsequently Art Basel Paris had been holding its events in the same location as the city’s nineteenth-century salon (Brady 2022).

The evolution to this new iteration of the salon would be based on the 1913 Armory Show, especially with its crucial new role for the dealers and art professionals. In fact, the current-day art fair could be described as the reincarnation of the salon, but where the jury is no longer composed of artists jurying artists, but rather dealers jurying other dealers (Bowley 2015). This type of dealer, the entrepreneurial dealer, to use the term coined by Albert Boime (1976), took a long-term economic interest in the careers of their artists through concerted patronage and investment, and they began to appear in the later nineteenth century, just as the salon system was entering its extended and inexorable crisis. By the 1960s their business model had come to dominate the trade, and so they reconfigured the salon into the art fair, with them holding the central role. At this same time, the logic of consolidated control in the hands of a few, rather than many, was becoming apparent in the emerging non-commercial salon-type events as well. Documenta had only just begun holding their once-every-five-years exhibition, and in the late 1960s, the Venice Biennale had begun to evolve towards its non-commercial model. Both of these events rely on a concentrated selection process in the hands of a few curators, and frequently just one (K. Brown 2022). The legacy of the 1913 Armory Show lies in the emerging importance of the dealer and the expanded decision-making authority for a select group of tastemakers to shape the art fairs of today. The capacity to determine what artworks are shown is left up to galleries which have been selected to have stands at the fair, and they make executive decisions based on their goals for advancing their artists’ careers and their own commercial strategy. This concentrated power in the impresario’s hands allows for more challenging esthetic visions to be promoted, which might not have been approved by more democratic processes. These new management techniques were deployed by the 1913 Armory Show, and this would be what distinguished it from the salons based on the Paris model. At the time of the event, however, it might not have appeared to be dramatically different than the salons that preceded it or the European secessions on which it was predicated. The dramatic paradigm shift inherent in its sourcing and decision-making structure would only become apparent gradually over the ensuing century.

7. Conclusions: The Paradigm Shift of the Armory Show

The name of the event, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, like so many seminal art names, earned its better-known moniker by chance, as a result of the curiosity of staging it in an unlikely venue. The location of the spacious, undefined interior of the Armory, though, carried forward another innovation of the Sonderbund, most importantly because it allowed for an exhibition that was three times larger than the usual National Academy of Design salon.4 The 1913 Armory Show, in fact, began as a battle over space, and in particular the quest for a wholly owned dedicated Kunsthalle in New York. As a result of the show, one would never be built in New York, and to this day the city remains the center of the art world with no clear need for one. The irrelevance of the purpose-built Kunsthalle went hand-in-hand with the rapid irrelevance of salons and secessions. In fact, it would be the dealers of New York who would be the ones who learn from their European peers as to the essential importance of modernism and subsequently embracing its home-grown variants (Hao 2020; Guilbaut 1985).

By 1913 the death of the salon system as well as its competing secessions had already been well underway. In its place would emerge the commercial entrepreneurial dealer to take control of the trade. The rise of the dealer and the hegemony of modernism occur simultaneously because only the petty despotism of the sole proprietor would allow for the bold promotion of an uncompromising vision. In the subsequent century that followed the show, New York would emerge as the undisputed center of the global art world, but it was not because of its salons—it was because of its dealers: Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Leo Castelli.

The 1913 Armory Show has to be referenced by its year because, to New Yorkers, there are multiple “Armory Shows”. The city’s version of an Art Basel-type art fair since 1994 consciously chose that name to harken to the seminal event, though it does not take place in an armory (Carrigan 2020). This causes some confusion, because the fair, for many years, had served as anchor to the New York Art Week when the Art Dealers Association of America held their competing fair in the Park Avenue Armory. This building might be the closest New York does have to a Kunsthalle because it also hosts other art fairs, including the U.S. incarnation of the Maastricht TEFAF. The legacy from the 1913 event, though, for these newer Armory Shows and shows in armories, is that they make use of large open short-term spaces for temporary installations of artworks for sale selected by dealers, and not by artists. In a visual indication of the current system, the large space is subdivided into stands with temporary walls, and each of those stands is rented to a gallery, and within those walls, the gallery is again the sole-proprietor petty despot deciding what to exhibit. In this way, the salon of artists was transformed into the salon of dealers.