Call me a traditionalist, but I think the world’s most radical art was created a century ago. As we all look forward to 2013, I’ve been looking back at 1913–a revolutionary year in visual art, music, dance, and literature.
1913 was the year of the inaugural Armory Show, an artist-organized exhibition in the cavernous, 26,000-square-foot armory that still stands on 25th Street and Lexington Avenue. I walk by this site often and am reminded of its important place in art history: this is where Picasso and Braque’s Cubist paintings and Kandinsky’s abstract compositions were first revealed to the American public. The audience was scandalized. Similarly, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), which depicts a mechanomorphic woman slowly gliding down and across the canvas, shocked viewers. Many were disquieted by the fact that the woman was part machine and even more concerned by her so-called nudity (though she actually appears more armored than undressed). Nudes were meant to recline, bathe, or stand, but never descend a staircase. Then again, this work looked tame in comparison to Duchamp’s first readymades like Bicycle Wheel (1913), in which the artist mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool, rendering both objects useless, and called it “art.”
Various exhibitions and programs are now trying to explain the breakthroughs of and around 1913. The NPR special, Culture Shock 1913, which aired earlier this month, puts all of the aforementioned events in context. But if you’re like me, you want to experience this avant-garde art firsthand. Head to see Matisse: In Search of True Painting, now at the Met through March 17. The exhibition begins around 1900 and documents the artist’s painstaking process and enduring quest to “push further and deeper into painting.” Matisse’s bright color palette, which today seems joyful and exuberant, was, in the first decade of the 20th Century, considered confrontational and violent. In fact, when he first became famous in 1906, Matisse was the leader of a group that the critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the fauves, or wild beasts, due to their extreme palette. To learn more about this story, take my four-session class on Matisse, beginning in February (see classes).
I’m also eagerly awaiting MoMA’s upcoming exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which opens on December 23. It will chronicle the simultaneous birth of abstraction in Russia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands right around 1913. Similarly, Kandinsky 1911-13 , on view at the Guggenheim through April 17, charts the beginnings of abstraction in Germany, where artists were exploring the spiritual value of color before World War 1.
Today it is difficult to comprehend how truly outrageous this art was, but all of these exhibitions offer insight. As these shows make clear, the artistic revolutions of 1913–coupled with the recent inventions of electricity, the automobile, and flight–caused many to think that the world as they knew it was coming to an end. No year in the past century has caused so many jaws to drop in the halls of high culture.