Armory Show Shocks America: Modern Art Arrives in NYC

The International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City on February 17, 1913, displaying roughly 1,300 works by European and American artists that permanently shattered American artistic conservatism. Marcel Duchamp's cubist Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 became the show's lightning rod, described by one critic as 'an explosion in a shingle factory.' Former President Theodore Roosevelt visited and declared the art reminded him of a Navajo rug. The public was equally bewildered and fascinated; roughly 87,000 people attended in New York alone before the exhibition traveled to Chicago and Boston. Before the Armory Show, American art was dominated by academic realism and Impressionism. After it, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi were household names, and the American avant-garde had a vocabulary and a community that had not existed before. Every subsequent development in American modern art traces back to this single exhibition.