Armory Show

The sixty-ninth regiment armory on Lexington Avenue served as the unlikely stage for a cultural earthquake in February nineteen thirteen. This vast, drafty drill hall was transformed into a maze of eighteen octagonal galleries, draped in burlap and decorated with pine trees and yellow streamers to house the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Over the course of a month, seventy-five thousand visitors crowded into this military space to confront radical European works that many contemporary critics dismissed as an explosion in a shingle factory. The event effectively shattered the dominance of conservative academic art in America and introduced the public to the bold, experimental forms of Cubism and Fauvism for the very first time.