Explore the Background of this artwork, Man with a Pipe.
The success of the 1913 Armory Show in New York can be seen by the influence of modern art on fashion design, home decoration and advertising that appeared during and after the exhibition. Store windows began displaying gowns styled after Cubist paintings. Women painted their faces and wore brightly colored wigs. Fashion design became a way of integrating modern art into daily life. Walt Kuhn, a painter and an organizer of the Armory Show welcomed the union between art and popular culture. The Armory Show according to Kuhn benefited everyone:The late President Coolidge once said, "America's business is business." Therein lies the answer. We naive artists, we wanted to see what was going on in the world of art, we wanted to open up the mind of the public to the need of art. Did we do it? We did more than that. The Armory Show affected the entire culture of America. Business caught on immediately, even if the artists did not at once do so. The outer appearance of industry absorbed the lesson like a sponge. Drabness, awkwardness began to disappear from American life, and color and grace stepped in. Industry certainly took notice. The decorative elements of Matisse and the Cubists were immediately taken on as models for the creation of a brighter, more lively America. (Walt Kuhn)
Department stores became hosts to modern art, holding the first exhibitions of Cubist paintings after the Armory Show, becoming perhaps the first corporate sponsors of an exhibition. After the Armory Show closed in Boston (April 1913), the American department store Gimbel Brothers (Gimbels) began organizing a Cubist exhibition that would travel to five different cities, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, and Philadelphia, over the course of one year. The Milwaukee exhibition of Cubist works—including paintings by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Jacques Villon—opened 11 May and lasted approximately six weeks, until late June 1913. Gimbels sponsored the show in Milwaukee, New York, and Philadelphia. In Cleveland, William Taylor Son & Co. continued the exhibition, inviting customers to view "original Cubist paintings by masters of the style" (Aaron Sheon, 93). Boggs and Buhl's hosted the show in Pittsburgh, enticing customers with a painting by Metzinger, Portrait of an American Smoker on the cover of its catalogue, and a balladry by Arthur Burgoyne published in the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph:Burgoyne's poem indicates his recognition of Cubism's appeal as an anti-bourgeois art form, essential to creating a market for the new art.Just as the Cubists at the Armory show in New York, Chicago and Boston, this traveling exhibition created an uproar in other major U.S. cities. Neither the public nor the critics minced their words. Metzinger's American Smoker was singled out in an article published in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, titled New Cubist Pictures, Latest From Paris Fail to Satisfy Art Enthusiasts in Cleveland, O.:Cubists' paintings, imported direct from Paris, now are being shown in the store in Cleveland, Ohio, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the hundreds of art enthusiasts who are thronging to the place have difficulty in understanding the pictures, owing to the meagerness of details in the catalogue.
For instance: Exhibit F shows an "American Smoker," by Jean Metzinger. Who is the American? Where is the rest of his face? Was it carved off in a duel at one of the foreign universities or did he dislike it and have it remodeled? Such are some of the questions being asked by those most interested—and the catalogue merely says "American Smoking."
Of Albert Gleizes's monumental Femmes cousant (Women Sewing), Kröller-Müller Museum, the anonymous author of the article writes:Then there is Exhibit H—"Harmony of Colors," which the catalogue describes as follows: "Subject three women sewing beside the road; to the right a large tree; in the background a landscape is seen through the arch of the viaduct."
Where are the women? Only one mouth is visible. Where are the others? Have they combined their identities and do they use only one mouth between them? Such are the questions but there are no answers.
That Gimbels and other department stores exhibited Cubist works to attract customers exemplifies the extent to which the exhibition of French Paintings and Sculpture in Gallery 1 of the Armory Show (dubbed the "chamber of horrors") attracted the attention of those outside the art world. Corporate sponsorship of modern art continued after the initial 1913 department store shows, with Wanamaker's, Macy's and Lord and Taylor's participating in exhibiting modern art during the 1920s."Now that the new art movement has found its way to a department store," writes Aaron Sheon, "there ought to be no further doubt of its establishment as part of our American daily life, and its ultimate acceptance must be considered only as a question of time". Cubism, far from institutionalized, had become accepted into a wider market, illustrating the reliance of early 20th-century art on massive commercial venues.
Jean Metzinger Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph Jacques Villon Cubist Fernand Léger Cubism Pittsburgh Armory Show Walt Kuhn Albert Gleizes Gimbels Kröller-Müller Museum