Armory show

An art exhibition, officially entitled The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1913. It introduced modern art to the USA.

Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" that opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, on February 17, 1913, ran to March 15, and became a legendary watershed date in the history of American art, introducing astonished New Yorkers, accustomed to realistic art, to Modern art.

About the show, President Theodore Roosevelt said,

The Armory Show displayed some 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists.

Among the scandalously radical works of art, pride of place goes to Marcel Duchamp's Cubist/Futurist style Nude Descending a Staircase, painted the year before, in which he expressed motion with successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures.

Duchamp first submitted the work to appear in a Cubist show at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, but the Puteaux cubists, including his two brothers, asked that he withdraw the painting, or paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else.

Starting with a small exhibition in 1994, by 2001 the "New" New York Armory Show, held in piers on the Hudson River, evolved into a "hugely entertaining" (New York Times) annual contemporary arts festival with a strong commercial bent.