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

"Chronicles how this landmark exhibition was put together, how it looked, and how it was received ... With twenty-one new color images and a completely updated catalogue raisonné of all the paintings, sculptures, and prints in the original show"--Cover.

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)

"Explores the career of Walter Pach (1883-1958), an influential figure in twentieth-century art and culture. As critic, agent, liaison, and lecturer, Pach helped win the acceptance of modern European, American, and Mexican art throughout the North American continent"--Provided by publisher.

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.

Walt Kuhn (1877-1949) is best known for his bold, modernist paintings of showgirls and circus performers. He was deeply involved with theater and the circus for much of his life, and his work was informed by years of close observation. Combining a modernist impulse with a showman's instincts, Kuhn created portraits that penetrate the veneer of burlesque shows and circuses as well as vigorously rendered still lifes. Kuhn was one of the principal organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, and from about 1922 to 1925, he also turned theater professional, writing and directing satirical skits and pantomimes. In the late 1920s, his mature style emerged through a unique melding of modernist principles with an updated realism. This first major exhibition catalogue of Kuhn's work in decades, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, brings his work back into the spotlight.

"Scholarly, sympathetic, lucid--and filled with fascinating detail--The Avant-Garde in Exhibition is as valuable as a reference as it is exciting as a narrative."--Arthur Danto

Art, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows indeed, and the development of an avant-garde in the U.S. depended as much on socializing as on aesthetics. This lively social history recounts the adventures and amours of America's first practitioners of the modern arts. Diagrams of the convoluted relationships, a chronology, a cast of characters, and much more shed additional light on an immensely appealing period. 220 illustrations, 20 in color.

It is well known that the poetry of Wallace Stevens reflected his interest in the visual arts, but until now no one has recognized the poet's close involvement with the art of his own era. In this book, Glen MacLeod shows how Stevens was engaged with contemporary art theory, artists, art dealers, and artworks, and argues that this interaction played a central role in his poetry, his poetic theory, and the unusual character of his poetic development. MacLeod demonstrates that Stevens' first book, Harmonium, reflects his involvement with New York Dada during the 1910s; that such major poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" record his interest in the rival doctrines of surrealism and abstraction during the 1930s and early 1940s; and that the highly abstract late poetry of The Auroras of Autumn parallels in surprising ways the contemporary Abstract Expressionist movement. Aspects of Stevens' poetry that have long troubled his critics - for example, his insistence that poetry must be abstract, his lack of interest in formal experimentation, and his personal "imagination-reality complex" - are clarified when they are seen in the context of his relation to avant-garde art. Stevens' awareness of contemporary issues in the art world helped to determine his subjects, his critical vocabulary, and the ways of thinking that he explored in both his poetry and his essays. In this light, his point of view seems less peculiar, more a part of the living critical discourse at the heart of American art and literature.