The 1913 Armory Show Trivia Quiz

Answer: Nude Descending a Staircase

When we look at images of Marcel Duchamp's painting today, it is difficult to understand why it inspired such shock and passionate controversy. This certainly was not because the figure was nude, since only the suggestion of movement and structure are represented in a series of abstract panels in shades of brown.

It has been called "cubo-futurist" because it was inspired both by the cubists, who similarly shattered visual assumptions, and the futurists, whose very name inspired the fear that the future of modern art was being pushed down a slippery slope toward aesthetic anarchy.

Answer: Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse later went on to finish the sculpture "Reclining Nude" in which the figure of a woman is similarly posed to the person seen in the famous painting. Accustomed to thinking of nudes in either erotic or almost reverent - certainly representational - terms, many viewers were repulsed by Matisse's "Blue Nude" with its lumpy, bluish gray, almost androgynous appearance. Bernard Berenson was the art historian who said of the painting in 1907, "If you can ever convince me of any beauty in that toad, I'll believe in Matisse." Actually, by the time of the Armory Show in 1913, Berenson was a believer. Picasso is supposed to have said that if Matisse "wanted to make a woman, he should make a woman" and if he "wanted to make a design, he should make a design.

This is between the two." However, it has been pointed out (by Tyler Green in "Modern Art Notes: The Response to Matisse's 'Blue Nude'") that Picasso retreated to his own studio soon afterward and came out with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" - a painting that similarly challenged visual representations of the nude.

Answer: Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1913, only the most privileged Americans could travel to Europe to see modern art exhibitions, and the Armory Show - while it included many pieces of art that did not challenge the boundaries - is best remembered for works by groundbreaking European artists (and a few Americans who had been exposed to them) who were doing art in a new way.

The American public was exposed to modern art not only as visitors but as readers of sensational newspaper reports of the shocking new ways of visualizing reality.

The first venue for the Armory Show was in a huge military storage facility (an armory) in New York City, after which it traveled to the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois (the first established art museum in America to show modern art), and to the smaller Copley Hall in Boston, Massachusetts.

But when museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art began purchasing the paintings, sculptures, and decorative pieces from the Armory Show, its influence was established. The National Gallery of Art is in Washington, D.C. (the similarly named National Gallery being in London).

The Guggenheim, while in New York, was not established until the 1930s.

Answer: Vincent van Gogh

Few Americans a hundred plus years after his death would fail to recognize Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" or "Bedroom at Arles" or other iconic paintings of sunflowers, irises, and cypress trees, but his work was just beginning to be known outside a small circle when the Armory Show exhibited his paintings in 1913.

A hundred years after the Armory Show, art historian Laurette E. McCarthy succeeded in "tracking down" Van Gogh's painting "Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset (The Weeders)" which had appeared in a contemporary news item with the title "The Laborers" and may have had other titles as well.

Its current owners knew it was a Van Gogh but were surprised to learn of its historical significance.

Answer: Bird in Space

"Bird in Space" (in French "L'Oiseau dans l'espace") by Constantin Brancusi is perhaps his most famous (and my favorite sculpture), which is why I included it in the question rather than focusing on his earlier works that appeared in the Armory Show. Inspired by a story in Romanian folklore that features a golden bird that can tell the future and heal the blind, Brancusi made at least 20 versions of "Bird in Space" over as many years in the 1920s-40s.

He also made different versions of the Armory Show pieces "The Kiss" and "Sleeping Muse" and is said of "Portrait of Mademoiselle Pogany" to "have constructed numerous versions of the sculpture [over 23 years], perfecting and simplifying Mademoiselle Pogany's elegantly refined image to its most pure form" (Philadelphia Museum of Art). "Fountain 1917" is one of Marcel Duchamp's urinals disguised as art, "The Thinker" is by Auguste Rodin, and "Maman" is by Louise Bourgeois.

Answer: Wassily Kandinsky

In addition to creating energetic paintings, Kandinsky wrote about the theory of art. His paper "On the Spiritual in Art" argued for the legitimacy of abstract art and claimed that all kinds of art could reach spiritual levels, seeing the artist as a sort of prophet.

He formed a group of radical artists called "The Blue Rider" (named after one of his paintings), and their publication "The Blue Rider Almanac" had a strong influence on the same artists who were excited by the art of the Armory Show.

Answer: Mary Cassatt

Women played a large part in the Armory Show as both artists and collectors, and arguably modern art would have a different history if it had not been for Gertrude Stein, who supported and collected the art of many of the most innovative painters and sculptors in her Paris home, and who sought to do in writing what cubists were doing in visual arts. Katherine Dreier, a reader of Wassily Kandinsky and a fan of Vincent Van Gogh, participated in the Armory Show both as a collector with a keen eye for the best of modern art and as an artist herself. Agnes Pelton's two imaginative paintings "Vine Wood" and "Stone Age" that were shown in the Armory Show have a romantic feel to them, but she later moved into more abstract art that Leo Katz characterized as "semi-materialized thought forms." Mary Cassatt, who by the time of the Armory Show was moving away from painting into fighting for women's rights, comes across as old-fashioned compared to the "publicity hounds" of modern art; however, the Armory Show exhibits included both the newest art and art that was new in its time, like Cassatt's Impressionism.

Answer: Gutzon Borglum

Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur B. Davies began the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to provide venues for artists whose work tended to be rejected by mainstream galleries. Borglum was one of twenty or more founding members of the AAPS, but resigned when he realized that avant-guard artists would comprise a major proportion of the exhibitors in the International Exhibition of Modern Art the organizers planned, which came to be called the Armory Show after its opening in the 69th Regiment Armory of the National Guard on Lexington Avenue in New York, New York. Kuhn and Pach used their connections in Europe to collect works that would be on loan for the exhibition, which would travel to Chicago and Boston but turn out to be the only show the group sponsored. Gutzon Borglum would agree with President Theodore Roosevelt, who said of the modern pieces: "That's not art!"

Answer: Ashcan School

While not an organized school of painters and sculptors, the ashcan artists of the early 20th century go together because of their implicit social criticism, and before the Armory Show they were the most influential art movement in the United States. Much like literary artists Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, these artists drew the veil on poverty, crime, and squalor.

The names most often associated with the Ashcan School are Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. Putting her ideals into action, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle set up her studio in the slum area where she found her subjects and provided play space for local children, in the spirit of the Settlement House Movement of the late 1800s, inspired by Jane Addams.

She helped support other artists with rent money from tenement buildings she bought in Greenwich Village and worked to support women's right to vote.

Answer: Joseph Stella's "Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras"

Joseph Stella's contribution to the Armory Show was a still life, inspired by the Fauvists he had seen while studying in Paris. However, Joseph Stella's swirling abstract image of the essential American amusement park, painted in 1913-14 in the midst of the excitement over the Armory Show, with which he was intimately involved, captures the spirit of the times.

It was and is labeled as a Futurist painting, and it was frightening to traditionalists. According to the Yale University Art Gallery, Stella himself described it as the "most intense dynamic arabesque that I could imagine in order to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating...violent, dangerous pleasures." He also mentions "the carnal frenzy of the new bacchanal"! No wonder they were scared. Frank Stella's "The Science of Laziness" was painted in 1984, and is also nice, but he wasn't yet born in 1913. Neither was Robert De Niro Sr. - father of the actor - who also is an Italian-American painter. Pablo Picasso, who should have been in this quiz but isn't, was an important modern artist whose works were exhibited in the Armory Show, but he was Spanish, not American.

Another artist who should have been included was Picabia. Maybe next time.