1913: The Year of Modernism

On the one hundredth anniversary of this watershed year, this exhibition will present the complexities of the modernist revolution in art and literature with a selection of prints, drawings, photographs, rare books, and periodicals from the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum and the Princeton University Library.

Photographs of Parisian interiors and street views by Eugène Atget will be juxtaposed with a portrait of Jean Cocteau by Amedeo Modigliani, drawings by Marc Chagall and Giacomo Balla, artist’s books and prints by Fernand Léger and Man Ray, as well as avant-garde periodicals such as Der Sturm, Blast, and 291. The works on display will illustrate the productive tension between two poles: Paris, as a center and subject of modern art and literature, and the world beyond, as represented by artists throughout Europe and the United States at a time of global transformation.

The year 1913 was a pivotal moment in the development of modern art and literature in Paris and abroad: Guillaume Apollinaire established his reputation as a poet with the publication of Alcools (Alcohols) and crystallized the Cubist movement with his essay The Cubist Painters, Marcel Duchamp created his first readymade, Eugène Atget assembled his photographic album Les Zoniers (The Zones), Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay jointly produced the book La Prose du Transsibérien (The Prose of the Transsiberian), and Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes performed Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. One year later the First World War would break out, and the exhilaration of the prewar period would give way to an aesthetic that underscored the brutality and irrationality of modern life.