History in the Making: 100 Years after the Armory Show AUDIO TOUR STOP 115. Henri Matisse Studio, Quai St. Michel (1916)

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1 History in the Making: 100 Years after the Armory Show AUDIO TOUR STOP 115 Henri Matisse Studio, Quai St. Michel (1916) As with Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin, Duncan Phillips initially decried the work of Matisse in the Armory Show, calling it crude, childlike, and detestable. It is not surprising that Phillips s poetic sensibilities led him first to acquire the more lyrical still lifes and landscapes from Matisse s serene Nice period. After a succession of purchases and trades in search of just the right Matisse, in 1940 Phillips finally settled on the masterpiece Studio Quai St. Michel. Matisse s solemn yet grand picture, showing his model splayed out on a bed in his Paris studio, is tame by comparison with the artist s boldly patterned Blue Nude, a painting which caused a great sensation in the Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP 116 Francisco José de Goya Repentant Peter (c ) The celebrated nineteenth-century Spanish master and court painter Francisco José de Goya was one of the privileged twenty-some old master painters included in the Armory Show. He was represented by an intensely expressive late watercolor on ivory entitled Monk Talking to an Old Woman. Although Goya s work had been familiar to Duncan Phillips prior to the Armory Show from a 1912 visit to the Prado in Spain, it was not until 1936 that Phillips would secure his first example for the collection, a moving portrait of the apostle St. Peter. It quickly became a companion to El Greco s St. Peter that he had acquired many years earlier. Phillips enjoyed juxtaposing the two paintings in his galleries alongside works by Manet, Cézanne, and Picasso to underscore Goya s role as a stepping stone between the old masters and the great moderns. In order to afford the purchase, Phillips traded his landscape Idyll of Tahiti by Gauguin. Perhaps his choice reflected misgivings about the picture and the artist whom he had once dismissed as half-savage in the 1913 Armory Show. Phillips remained without another Gauguin until his 1951 acquisition of the vibrantly colored Still Life with Ham. AUDIO TOUR STOP 117 Albert Pinkham Ryder Resurrection (1885)

2 While Duncan Phillips found little of redeeming value in the Armory Show, he reserved some of his highest praise for the work of nineteenth-century romantic painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. My glance fell upon a tiny canvas, unmistakably the work of Albert Ryder, he recalled. It was almost without color and with only a vague whisper of form, yet I was made to pause for a few moments enchanted by the air of old romance. Ryder played an important role in the Armory Show as an old master, showing the roots of the modern movement in nineteenth-century romanticism. From 1919 to 1940, Phillips eagerly formed a major Ryder unit for his collection that included examples from all aspects of his career. Today The Phillips Collection has one of the larger collections of Ryders in America. The museum s holdings include two Ryder paintings that had been included in the Armory Show: Resurrection, on view here, and Moonlit Cove. The latter will be included in the New York Historical Society s fall exhibition The Armory Show at 100. AUDIO TOUR STOP 118 Honoré Daumier The Uprising (1848 or later) In 1931, Duncan Phillips proudly proclaimed Daumier the greatest and most universal artist of this Century, and took credit for discovering him fifteen years earlier at a time when textbooks referred to him only as a satirical cartoonist. The ten paintings and forty-eight lithographs by Daumier that Phillips acquired over the years were a testament to the collector s highest regard for the artist. Phillips often referred to The Uprising as the greatest picture in the collection. Its revolutionary subject, suggested by the uplifted arm of the male figure who advances purposefully from the crowd, may have been inspired by the 1848 overthrow of Louis-Phillipe s monarchy. Daumier evoked a similar sense of outcry in his composition Third Class Citizen, the celebrated painting shown in the historical section of the 1913 Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP 119 Odilon Redon Mystery (1910) Duncan Phillips acquired his first work by French symbolist painter Odilon Redon in 1926 Mystery, a painting that is strikingly reminiscent in mood to the painting Silence, which hung in the Armory Show. Phillips could not have helped but notice Redon s prominence there in a gallery devoted to over thirty of his works. Highly lauded by critics and collectors alike, Redon set a sales record for the exhibition.

3 Although Phillips was not among those who purchased Redon out of the Armory Show, he grew to appreciate the importance of Redon s spiritual expressionism on the development of modern art. Look for Redon s portraits of Bonnard and Vuillard on view in the adjacent gallery. These are artist proofs for two of the lithographs by Redon included in the Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP 120 Walt Kuhn Flowers-Bouquet (Tulip Buds) (between 1920 and 1923) American artist Walt Kuhn was one of the co-organizers of the Armory Show who worked closely with Walter Pach on securing loans for the European section of the exhibition. This painting by Kuhn, Flowers Bouquet from the early 1920s, paved the way for Kuhn s place within The Phillips Collection. The year after he purchased it in 1926, Duncan Phillips wrote Kuhn to express his fondness for the little picture that was hanging in his room where he could see it every day. In reply, Kuhn readily dismissed the work as a slight fragment but Phillips remained convinced of its merits, and chose to include it in his 1926 exhibition Eleven Americans with an Important Work by Odilon Redon. Through the example of Kuhn, Hartley, Dove, O Keeffe, and others, the Eleven Americans exhibition sought to demonstrate how cubism was being drastically modified by artists in America. Unlike the intellectual cubist experiments of Picasso, Braque, and others that had left Phillips cold, the American moderns more expressive approach had won Phillips over, as it did Washington audiences: I wish you could see the present exhibition making converts among the people of Washington to abstract art, Phillips boasted in his letter to the editor of Art News. AUDIO TOUR STOP 121 Wassily Kandinsky Sketch I for Painting with White Border (Moscow) (1913) Kandinsky and his fellow German expressionists received scant attention in the Armory Show, which was heavily biased toward the French avant-garde. Kandinsky managed to get one work included: the colorful Improvisation 27, Garden of Love II. The painting suffered the same ridicule as the cubist pictures in the exhibition; people struggled to understand its meaning. American photographer and promoter of modern art Alfred Stieglitz snatched up the picture for a reduced price of $500. Duncan Phillips took a while to warm up to Kandinsky, and he made his first purchases in the 1940s. Thanks to a bequest from the estate of Katherine Dreier, Phillips was delighted to have the chance to acquire one of Kandinsky s early breakthrough abstractions, Sketch I for Painting with White Border.

4 AUDIO TOUR STOP 122 Pablo Picasso The Blue Room (1901) Duncan Phillips was baffled by Picasso and all of the cubists in the 1913 Armory Show. That they are doing something new cannot be denied, he noted, although just what it is that they are doing no one has yet perceived. It was not until 1927 that Phillips would acquire his first work by Picasso, The Blue Room. Rather than acquiring one of the artist s austere cubist compositions, Phillips selected one from Picasso s earlier more serene blue period. He admired The Blue Room for its expressive approach to form and color and viewed the unreal quality of Picasso s distorted female bather as entirely appropriate for the scene. How would Phillips have reacted to Picasso s even more unreal Standing Female Nude exhibited in the Armory Show? AUDIO TOUR STOP 123 Paul Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire ( ) A year before the Armory Show, Duncan Phillips had one of his first encounters with Cézanne and other post-impressionists at the Paris Salon Trienniale. No more than a bunch of damned fools, he called them in a page of his travel journal. Over a decade passed before Phillips saw things differently. Beginning in 1925, he touted the formerly foolish French master as a towering genius. That same year, the first work by Cézanne entered The Phillips Collection: a classical landscape painting of Mont St. Victoire, the spiritual mountain range near Cézanne s home in southern France. By 1955, Phillips s Cézanne holdings had grown to include six important late paintings. One of his later purchases was Seated Woman in Blue, also on view in this gallery. Cézanne s rendering of the woman in blue may have reminded Phillips of the artist s earlier Old Woman with a Rosary ( ), his most talked about painting in the Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP #124 Theodore Robinson Two in a Boat (1891) American impressionist Theodore Robinson was represented by five paintings in the Armory Show, including this one, Two in a Boat. Robinson painted the small canvas during his fifth summer in Giverny, where he became a close friend of Monet. Robinson s work appeared in one of the Armory Show s most inclusive galleries of French, English, American, and Dutch paintings. The installation brought Robinson s work together with his contemporary John Henry Twachtman as well as old masters: Puvis de Chavannes, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Corot, Courbet, and Whistler, among others.

5 Duncan Phillips prized Robinson for his sensuous and subtle use of color. He called him a painter s painter because his palette was as individual as that of any painter of his time. He purchased Two in a Boat in 1920, seven years after seeing it in the Armory Show. The loose brushstrokes and light coloring are emblematic of the European Impressionist style that influenced Robinson, but the careful rendering of the figures in the boat shows his admiration for the nineteenth-century realist tradition of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. AUDIO TOUR STOP 125 Allen Tucker Red Barns (1923) Although little known today, Allen Tucker, the American post-impressionist painter who studied under John Henry Twachtman, was hailed in the early twentieth century as the American van Gogh. A founding member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Tucker was responsible for the catalogue that accompanied the Armory Show and had five works included in the exhibition. Duncan Phillips met Tucker soon after the 1913 Armory Show, through their common affiliation with the Century Club in New York. His landscapes are vibrant... with the dynamic force of passionate personal expression, Phillips enthused the year of his first purchase, Red Barns, in That same year Phillips noted his wish to add to his collection an example of the inventive genius of van Gogh, the artist he had previously pronounced an unbalanced fanatic in the 1913 Armory Show. Tucker s swirling brushwork and expressive use of color in Red Barns must have reminded Phillips of van Gogh, and may have conjured a distant memory of the Mountains at St. Remy that had caused such a stir in the Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP 126 Installation Photographs These interior views of the New York Armory Show give a sense of how the exhibition was designed and installed. To accommodate the vast quantity of over 1,200 loans for the New York presentation, Arthur B. Davies arranged for the exhibition to be held in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. Its open drill hall with 30,000 square feet of display space was transformed into eighteen octagonal galleries decked with greenery, pine trees, bunting, yellow streamers, and flags. Some galleries showcased American and European artists in the same space; however, most were solely dedicated to Americans or Europeans. Take a close look at the ceiling in the picture to your left. An interesting feature of the design was the inclusion of greenery that had been donated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Garlands were strung across the gallery partitions while swags of greenery hung from the balcony with evergreen trees behind them. Kuhn devised the pine tree to be the show s emblem on all printed

6 materials including a campaign button. An astute marketer, Kuhn adopted the pine tree from the Massachusetts flag that was carried into battle during the Revolutionary War. In its new context, the uprooted pine tree announced the new spirit in art ushered in by the Armory Show. AUDIO TOUR STOP 127 John Sloan, The Picture Buyer (1911) John Sloan, Night Windows (1910) At the time of the Armory Show, American painter John Sloan was a well-known member of the progressive group of realist painters known as the Eight. Like his fellow former newspaper associates who had cultivated a journalistic eye for storytelling, Sloan turned his attention to subject matter drawn from the everyday life of the urban masses. With the exception of Everett Shinn, all of his associates (including Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast, and George Luks) participated in the Armory Show and served as members of its organizing body, the Association of Painters and Sculptors. Night Windows and The Picture Buyer, on view here, were among the works by Sloan featured in the Armory Show. Admiring his gifts as a graphic artist, Phillips acquired nine of Sloan s etchings in addition to three oil paintings. He believed that Sloan was the American standard bearer for the art of contemporary satire just as Daumier had been for France. AUDIO TOUR STOP 128 Arthur B. Davies, The Flood (c. 1903) As president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Arthur B. Davies presided over the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show in which he was represented by six works. Within three years of that landmark presentation, Duncan Phillips acquired his first examples by Davies, mystical and dreamlike landscapes that showed the artist s gift for color and line. Over the ensuing ten years, Phillips s obsession with Davies resulted in more than thirty acquisitions. Phillips admired Davies for his adventurous spirit and strong anti-academic stance; yet, he found the artist s brief experiments with cubist theories and methods an unfortunate detour in his otherwise distinguished career. In addition to writing an early essay on Davies in 1916, Phillips published a monograph on the artist in The pastel shown here is one of fifty that Davies made to accompany the limited deluxe edition of the monograph, shown in the case below.

The Armory Show of Modern Art, New York City in 1913

The Armory Show of Modern Art, New York City in 1913 A.J. Smuskiewicz The Armory Show of Modern Art was the first major exhibition of modern art (nontraditional art that began to be produced in the mid-