Director's Letter Spring 2013

1913 can fairly be called the “year of modernism,” not least because it was the year of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Held at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City and then in Chicago and Boston, the show was a catalyst for American artists, introducing them to the more experimental styles of the European avantgarde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. Over 1,300 works of art were displayed that not only brought works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude to the attention of American artists, but also shocked critics and the American public. Amid a tumult of accusations of insanity, immorality, and anarchy, no less a figure than former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared simply, “That’s not art!”

In many ways, the Armory Show threw down the gauntlet to American artists still happily painting in the shadows of the academy or of Impressionism. From its opening in New York in February 1913 to the birth of modernist groups throughout Europe, a developing consciousness of interconnectedness—along with the increasing mobility of artists, who created international networks of people and ideas—projected modernist work into the world. The Museum’s exhibition 1913: The Year of Modernism celebrates the centennial of this pivotal year and highlights key aspects of modernist movements through a rich selection of prints, photographs, books, and periodicals that trace collaborations between visual artists and poets, experiments in new genres, and innovations in print media. As a moment of crossfertilization between the arts, the year 1913 can also be seen as offering an updated model for cross-disciplinary collaboration—a model that the Museum will reflect this spring in an array of collaborations bringing together art, poetry, and theater.

Two other such moments figure in the Museum’s program this year. Works by Robert Rauschenberg currently on display in the Museum’s Marquand Mather Court offer a glimpse into one of the most productive artistic collaborations of the postwar period. Following in the spirit of Duchamp, Rauschenberg sought to occupy “the gap between art and life,” bringing together disparate objects and impulses in his studio through acts of “surprise and collectiveness.” His involvement in a number of crossdisciplinary experiments led Rauschenberg to become, from 1954 to 1964, the artistic director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the large-scale backdrops and sculptural objects he created with dancer/choreographer Cunningham and composer John Cage led to a radical rethinking of the parameters of art, dance, and music. A group of extraordinary loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, coupled with collaborations with our colleagues in the Program in Dance and the Department of Music, are bringing these impulses back to life for Museum visitors and creating dynamic possibilities in our galleries as we see one art form collide with another.

Looking to the fall, another such moment of crossfertilization will go under the microscope when we present New Jersey as Non-Site. Here, our focus attaches to a moment when New Jersey itself became both the venue for avant-garde art activity—following on the coining of the term “Happening” by Allan Kaprow in the spring of 1957 to describe the participatory art pieces taking place on George Segal’s farm outside New Brunswick—and the subject of that art. Like elements of both the Armory Show and of the Rauschenberg-CageCunningham experimentations, Happenings were by definition participatory, with no set rules and an outcome that depended on the audience and on chance. The exhibition takes it title from New Jersey native Robert Smithson and his work in the state’s industrial areas, which he saw as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. The linkages are both causal and intellectual: John Cage taught Allan Kaprow in the mid-1950s. But the New Jersey manifestation of these experiments occupies a unique place in American art making, a moment when New Jersey became the radical other to the artistic establishment of New York City.

We are delighted this year to offer three such rich windows into the spirit of collaboration that all but span the twentieth century and that embody our own desire to cross borders and be a catalyst for creativity.

James Christen Steward 
Director