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The Women of the Legendary 1913 Armory Show

Some 300 artists exhibited. 50 were women.

From February 17 to March 15, 1913, New York art audiences experienced a seismic shift. “The International Exhibition of Modern Art” filled the cavernous 69th Regiment Armory on 25th Street and then seeped into the city’s consciousness and across national newspaper pages. Word had come back from Europe—particularly Paris—that unheard of things were happening in art. People wanted to see it for themselves, so a group representing the Association of American Painters and Sculptors with connections abroad made their way to France. When they traveled back across the Atlantic, they crossed a cultural Rubicon. The Armory Show, as it came to be known, was a watershed moment for art.

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It was either a screaming success or a laughable failure. Everyone had an opinion. One New York critic likened Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase to “an explosion in a shingle factory.” An article in the Chicago Tribune quoted an observer as saying the show made him “fear for the world.” On the final day of its run at the Art Institute of Chicago, students held a mock trial, found Henri Matisse guilty of artistic murder and prepared to burn an effigy of his Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra).

Some 1,300 works by 300 artists filled the Armory. Cubists, Futurists, Fauvists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Expressionists all clamored for attention, and attention they got. But among the Picassos, Brâncușis, van Goghs, Cézannes and Matisses, there were works by five European and 45 American women artists. Most are not well known, but in recent years, overdue attention has begun to be given to them.

Fifty out of 300 is hardly parity, but 16.6 percent is a greater showing than many later art exhibitions could claim. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed their art collective in response to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” which featured only 13 women out of 165 artists (or 7.9 percent).

It all comes down to persistent and pervasive gender inequity, Katie Wat, the Deputy Director for Art, Programs and Public Engagement and Chief Curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts told Observer. “Considering the uneven statistics of today, contemporary audiences will likely be shocked to know that there were any women in a major show in 1913, let alone 50.”

Some were famous in their time, like Mary........

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