MONTCLAIR, NJ.- The Montclair Art Museum celebrates the centennial of the famous and controversial 1913 Armory Show with a major exhibition that opened exactly 100 years to the day from the original. The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913 is the first exhibition to focus primarily on the American artists represented in that show. It is on view until June 16, 2013 and is co-curated by Gail Stavitsky, MAM chief curator, and guest curator Laurette E. McCarthy. Works in the exhibition are drawn from a wide range of museum collections, including MAM’s, and from important private collections and galleries.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as The Armory Show, held at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue at East 25th Street in Manhattan, giving the show its unofficial name, comprised more than 1,200 works of art by American and European artists. While American art constituted two-thirds of the work on view, it was the European art that caused a stir and that has dominated discussion of the Armory Show ever since. Special attention centered on the European avant-garde artists Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse. It was their works that the press focused on, whipping their readership into a frenzy and igniting overwhelming curiosity, consternation, and concern among the public. Nevertheless, a significant number of the contemporaneous accounts were decidedly mixed and nuanced, yet over time, the emphasis on the foreign art in the show and denigration of the American as provincial and imitative became the dominant narrative. This exhibition challenges that myth.

Stavitsky said: “The usual emphasis on foreign art in the Armory Show is linked to the pervasive notion that American art before 1940 has played only a marginal role in historical narratives, especially in relation to French art, which became the standard for modern art. A myth therefore grew that the American art in the Armory Show was a relative monolith of conservatism. In fact, the American art on view was vastly diverse—in media, style, gender, and age. The untold story of the Armory Show is that it in fact displayed the dynamism and diversity of American visual art.”

In presenting mainly the American artists who contributed to the Armory Show, the exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum spotlights the diverse range of American art that was exhibited. It features 36 American artists and nearly 40 works in various media: paintings, sculptures, prints, watercolors, and other works on paper. The exhibition includes works by well-known artists like Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, and John Marin, as well as works by artists such as Manierre Dawson, Kathleen McEnery, and E. Ambrose Webster, who, despite their talents, remain at the periphery of mainstream American art history. The Armory Show is famously considered the first to expose American audiences to Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism on a large scale; however, the styles represented range quite broadly, from Ash Can School realism in works by William Glackens, Robert Henri, and John Sloan to Manierre Dawson’s highly abstract Untitled (Wharf Under Mountain). Women artists represented nearly 20% of the almost 200 Americans in the show, and several appear in MAM’s exhibition, including Katherine S. Dreier, Grace Mott Johnson, Ethel Myers, and others. The featured artists include those who had established reputations such as Maurice Prendergast as well as young emerging artists like Stuart Davis. Works by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse reveal the influence and context of European modernism. Special efforts have been made to recreate details of the original installation, including burlap wall coverings, decorative pine trees, and yellow-hued streamers overhead, forming a tentlike canopy for the exhibition space.

A significant part of the Armory Show story is the work of its artist-organizers, principally Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach, who worked feverishly and under crushing deadlines to bring about and publicize this exhibition of unprecedented scope. A related exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum features works from MAM’s permanent collection by the artist-organizers of the show.

The Montclair Art Museum has also collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art on a gallery devoted to rare and unique primary documents pertaining to the Armory Show. These include personal letters, an early floor plan, sales records, entry forms, catalogues, buttons, and invitations, as well as reproductions of the original installation. The Archives holds the largest accumulation of primary source material, ranging from official records produced by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which organized this landmark exhibition, to the firsthand—and often irreverent—accounts by visitors to the show. Since their discovery in the middle of the last century, these resources have enriched our understanding of the Armory Show’s indelible impact on American art.