The 1913 Armory Show: Much Ado About Everything In the 1940s,
modern art came to New York. Jackson Pollock dripped shimmering
skeins of paint onto capacious canvases. Mark Rothko constructed
sublime floating rectangles of diaphanous color while Willem de
Kooning mutilated the female form using frenzied brushstrokes
loaded with frighteningly vivid hues. Gone were explicit
references to the figurative, recognizable perspective, and
narrative- in their place were amorphous shapes, splashes,
drips, and “zips.” This new art, “abstract expressionism” as it
was deemed by a critic, did not spring up in a vacuum; it was
possible because modern art had already come to New York almost
thirty years earlier. In 1913, a single exhibition changed the
face of American art forever. The International Exhibition of
Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, endeavored to combine the
newest and most striking examples of European art with their
American counterparts in a magnificent, unparalleled show. It
has often attracted general a