American Modernism

Armory Show

Chicago, 1913

Paul CézanneFour Bathers

1879-1882

Pablo Picasso

Woman with Mustard Pot

1910

Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase

1912

Seeing New York with a Cubist

The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)

1913

Henri Matisse

Le Luxe II

1907-08

American ModernismHad to Deal With

The Place of Internationalism

The Schematic

Theory

What does it mean to be new?

Chicago

• Optimism

• A little uncivilized

Spectacle

“Step In! No Danger! Cubist Show Now On!”• "Remember, this is the uncensored sho. It's there--there--there--on the

inside, ladies and gentlemen. It's continuous. It's different, and it's art--art of the present and the future. A thrill every minute. Something new to tickle the fancy and feast the eye."

• That was all that was needed--just a real old-fashioned bally-ho at the head of the marble staircase in [the] Art Institute yesterday--to make the first-time visitor to the international exhibition of modern art believe he had done a Rip Van Winkle act and awakened in the old Clark Street Museum.

Chicago Record-Herald, March 25, 1913

Chicago Evening PostMarch 24, 1913

Colonel Henry Clay Medders of Kentucky in the Big City

“Let’s see now. I had two small ones before breakfast and—”

Crazy quilt art

Three modes of interaction

• Parody

• The law

• Obscenity

Alexander Archipenko

Le Repos

1911

Underlying Issues

• Spectacle

• Primitivism

• Difficulty

• Mimesis

Modernism As a Deliberate Break

Moment of modernism was unmistakable

Shaken faith in traditional modes

Implications of this break

Self-conscious modernism

Three sites of struggle

• Professionalism

• Public culture

• Modes of coping

Professionalism

• Definitions

• Specialization and technical innovation

• Self consciousness

• Rise of difficulty

Public Culture

• Mass culture

• Urbanization

• Democratization

• The avant-garde

Modes of Coping

• Finding order

• Subject/object and representation

• Romanticist or Classicist?