A groundbreaking re-examination of the seminal 1913 New York art show.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held Feb. 17-June 16, 2013, at the Montclair Art Musem, Montclair, N.J.

On February 17, 1913, the American Association of Painters and Sculptors opened the Armory Show in New York. The ad-hoc association had started out with the modest goal of showing some of the ¿new¿ art coming out of Europe--Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso and many more of today¿s acknowledged masters. What they ultimately created was a sprawling showcase of some of the most ground-breaking (many said subversive) art America had ever seen. This volume includes original documents from this exhibition, and collects the complete text of "For and Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show" (ISBN 978-0-9823257-1-1) and "The New Spirit: Pamphlets from the Infamous 1913 Armory Show" (ISBN 978-0-9823257-2-8)

This book was written by Mary Mills Lyall in collaboration with her architect husband Earl Harvey Lyall, who also illustrated it. "The Cubies' ABC" is a delightful and humorous satirical alphabet book that makes fun of Cubists while pretending to be a kid's book. Three unidentified individuals are called The Cubies. Each has green hair and is one of three different colors: blue, mustard, and magenta. Instead of using cubes to build them, Earl Lyall used pyramids. They frequently feature jack-o'-lantern-like leering grins, have red triangle eyes and mouths, and have triangular shapes. They frequently scowl and come out as purposefully dim-witted. They swoon over anything Cubist and mock objectivity throughout the entire book.

In this work, Green shows how two notable, seemingly quite disparate events of the pre-WW I era converged, both in time and place, and (more importantly) in their enthusiasm for radical art and radical politics. Champions of the Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant interpreted these events as liberating forces from bourgeois tastes and bourgeois economics. Their common cause notwithstanding, Green notes the lines of divergence between these two celebrations and among their supporters, both then and in the years that immediately followed.

The story of the most important art show in U.S. history. Held at Manhattan’s 69th Regiment Armory in 1913, the show brought modernism to America in an unprecedented display of 1300 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, A quarter of a million Americans visited the show; most couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. Newspaper critics questioned the artists’ sanity. A popular rumor held that the real creator of one abstract canvas was a donkey with its tail dipped in paint. The Armory Show went on to Boston and Chicago and its effects spread across the country. American artists embraced a new spirit of experimentation as conservative art institutions lost all influence. New modern art galleries opened to serve collectors interested in buying the most progressive works. Over time, the stage was set for American revolutionaries such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Today, when museums of modern and contemporary art dot the nation and New York reigns as art capital of the universe, we live in a world created by the Armory Show. Elizabeth Lunday, author of the breakout hit Secret Lives of Great Artists, tells the story of the exhibition from the perspectives of organizers, contributors, viewers, and critics. Brimming with fascinating and surprising details, the book takes a fast-paced tour of life in America and Europe, peering into Gertrude Stein’s famous Paris salon, sitting in at the fabulous parties of New York socialites, and elbowing through the crowds at the Armory itself.

On February 17, 1913, the American Association of Painters and Sculptors opened the Armory Show in New York. The ad-hoc association had started out with the modest goal of showing some of the "new" art coming out of Europe--Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso and many more of today’s acknowledged masters. What they ultimately created was a sprawling showcase of some of the most ground-breaking (many said subversive) art America had ever seen. "For and Against" is the frank and engaging account of this historic show's original reception, capturing the full range of impassioned opinion both for and against the new art. First published, remarkably, by the show's organizers and sold at its Chicago venue, "For and Against" has long been out of print, but this new, expanded edition brings the Armory story to life once again.