“New Versions of Truth”

Harriet Monroe’s own words below are italicized and taken from her reviews in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Read from Monroe’s review, “A Live Exhibit at the Art Institute: Visitors’ Opinions Strong.”

[I]n a more profound sense these radical artists are right. They represent the revolt of the imagination…. They represent a search for new beauty, impatience with formulae, a reaching out toward the inexpressible, a longing for new versions of truth.

Harriet Monroe, “Cubist Art a Protest Against Narrow Conservatism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 6, 1913

One of Harriet Monroe’s most intriguing series of reviews—eight in total––addressed the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, later known as the “Armory Show.” At the end of her life, she regarded these reviews as her most important. The exhibition, organized by progressive North American artists, was a head-spinning survey of modern art, most of it European. The United States has never recovered from the shock of the 20th-century’s avant-garde, which continues to inform the arts today.

The Art Institute of Chicago, ca. 1913. Vintage postcard.

The Art Institute of Chicago, the only museum of the show’s three stops, showed about half the originally included 1,300 artworks. To their credit, museum organizers insisted on including the most controversial ones, especially those by the notoriously avant-garde cubist painters. In its brief, three-week stay from Monday, March 24, to Wednesday, April 16, 1913, a large portion of the city’s population turned out to view the show in rooms roughly where the Impressionist and Renaissance galleries are today. The unfamiliar art generated spontaneous outbursts of derision and laughter, public lectures meant to explain it, student protests on the steps of the Art Institute, and also genuine fascination.

The Cubist Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, International Exhibition of Modern Art (“Armory Show”), March 24 to April 16, 1913.

Monroe covered the Armory Show when it opened in New York and warned her fellow Chicagoans to “prepare our minds.” Her own experience of the exhibition—she was challenged, but not overwhelmed––thoughtfully gave voice to the reactions of attendees while articulating her own convictions about art, culture, and society. 

Overall, Monroe’s views of modern art were more advanced than most critics and viewers. In advance of popular opinion, Monroe lauded the art of the three dead masters of the ’90s, postimpressionists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, as manifestly great painters, great originals. The paintings of the latter, she observed compassionately in an era that simply regarded his art as evidence of madness, prove the powerful and tragic genius of this ill fated man.

Vincent van Gogh, Mountains at Saint-Rémy, 1889, oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum.

Monroe’s long-view call for patience regarding even the most radical art is noteworthy. We see the same strong opinions tempered with a reasoned magnanimity in her editorship of Poetry––which she had founded just months before––in which Monroe would bring the world around to contemporary literature. The insurgents in art will take possession of New York tomorrow, Monroe warned before the show opened. It represents the revolt of ... artists against the hidebound methods and conservative standards of older societies … and exhibitions.

Given her own entrepreneurial disposition, Monroe was sensitive about how the event came to be. She lauded North American organizers Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur B. Davies, who with little fuss or funds … throw a bomb into the entrenched camps, [and] give to American art a much needed shaking up, and achieve a live show which is sure of far-reaching influence. She also imagined what they would say about their selections:We don’t necessarily agree with every artist to whom we give space; but when a man seems to have something original to say ... we think he is entitled to a hearing.

Four days later, Monroe observed how in New York,

The crowd hurries first to the cubist and futurist room, eager to know the worst. There most of them are obliged to laugh, others are struck dumb with an open mouth stare, and a few are seized with deep despair.

Monroe’s reviews next described its reception at the Art Institute. Whatever its faults and merits, she admitted, [the exhibition] is at least a live wire. Every visitor has a strong opinion regarding the radicals there represented. She described how she wandered the galleries in search of, not eccentric things, but things expressive, personal, beautiful things which for one reason or another have style. These criteria also guided her choices in Poetry magazine.

As would be the case with nearly everyone in Chicago, including otherwise open-minded art students who burned his paintings in effigy, Monroe found Henri Matisse’s art repellent, describing his works as the most hideous monstrosities ever perpetrated in the name of long suffering art.

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), 1907, oil on canvas, Baltimore Museum of Art.

Monroe and others were offended by Matisse’s unconventional and apparently disrespectful depictions of the female nude. Still, she does not dismiss him entirely. Undoubtedly, he has ability, she admits, and he is a strong man, striking an attitude and talking … in a loud voice.

Slightly less offensive, and genuinely curious, were the cubist painters, including Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Pablo Picasso, who were, Monroe claimed,

propounders of riddles, whether in a spirit of bravado, or in a sincere effort to translate into color and form impressions more expressible ... in music or the dance.... Their art, if it is art, would seem to be in an experimental stage, and time alone can determine whether it will lead to anything.

For now, like other journalists covering the exhibition, Monroe indulged in some witty insults. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912),she quipped, looks like a pack of brown cards in a nightmare or a dynamited suit of Japanese armor. 

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, #2, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Likewise, Picabia’s Dances at the Spring (1912) resembled a pile of red blocks in an earthquake.

Francis Picabia, Dances at the Spring, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Beyond the jibes aimed at specific works, Monroe insisted that, despite their radical formal qualities, the question was one of quality. Either these pictures are good or they are not. If they are good, they will make their way in spite of objections; if not, they will perish without the aid of objections.

Monroe found the cubists too literary, too bent on telling a story, even though the terms in which they tell it are new and different,and she warned of the dangers of ideology.

There is nothing so dangerous as a theory of either art or life, for both art and life are bigger than any theory which can be made to contain them; they break through its barriers and prove it ridiculous.... These cubist pictures are all theory; they are so completely the product of a theory that there is little picture left.

She would later express this same resistance to ideology in her editorial decisions at Poetry, favoring instead an intuited eclecticism and openness to alternative approaches, which allowed her to consider the verdict of history.

[A]s experiments in a new and untried field [the Cubist paintings] are interesting. They may be the first dim gropings toward an art of pure color which may delight the twenty-first century…. After all, the future will not be ours, incredible, impossible as the fact is.

Pablo Picasso, Woman with Mustard Pot, 1910. oil on canvas, Gemeente museum, The Hague.

Another artist Monroe admired at a time when knowledge of him was not universal was the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) and his dream-born pictures.This great modern master, she opined, has been content to paint and let the slow world find him out when it would. In recognizing the reclusive Ryder and his reception in this way, Monroe revealed her acute sense of contemporary and future audiences.

Monroe’s glowing description of the art of another Armory Show artist, the French symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916), evoked the poet in her.

Here is an intensely imaginative artist whose symbolism is lighter, less savage, than Gauguin’s, and whose style—his feeling for color, subject, etc.—is far less stern, more delicate, than Cézanne’s or van Gogh’s. He is indeed singularly original; [his art is] a sensation quite new and fine.

Odilon Redon, Le Silence, 1900, pastel, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She drew a comparison to his friend [the poet Mallarmé], describing how Redon is a dreamer of delicate dreams, which his style captures so lightly as not to bruise their butterfly wings.… he never fails to suggest also the deeper mystery, the higher poetry of our inexplicable existence.

Among the other artworks in the Armory Show, Monroe praised the large painted screens of Robert W. Chanler (1872–1930), which, she said, introduces to Chicago with great éclat an American painter of most original genius.In a later review, she called him the most exciting, newly discovered American. Still, she was suspicious of his sources. About one of Chanler’s screens with Indigenous themes, she wryly observed that it is a cross between the historic fact and the dime novel Indian of our childish dreams.

The landing at the top of the grand staircase at the Art Institute before entering the Armory Show galleries (to the right). The dark paintings are screens by Robert W. Chanler; the relief sculpture at center right is Henri Matisse’s Back (1909).

Repeatedly viewing the Armory Show’s enormous survey of modern European art gave Monroe the authority to critique the state of art in the United States, as well. She leveled a challenge, justifying the radical art against conservative taste—and she may as well have also been speaking about the state of American literature at that time.

American art, under conservative management, is getting too pallid, nerveless, coldly correct, photographic. Better the wildest extravagances of the cubists than the vapid works of certain artists who ridicule them. Better the most remote and mysterious symbolism than a cameralike fidelity to appearances. We are in an anaemic condition which requires strong medicine, and it will do us good to take it without the kicks and wry faces.

For Monroe, more than its individual artworks, it was the event itself that was important. For once, she observes, attendees were debating a question which has nothing to do with money, floods, reforms, clothes, or any of the usual trials and preoccupations of our little corner of the world. She observed that Chicagoans were fighting one of those battles of the intellect—those of us who have any—which are common enough in Paris, but altogether too rare in our provincially shortsighted and self-satisfied community.

In a final review, Monroe ponders what it all meant. The ultimate effect cannot be foreseen, but it can hardly fail to be stimulating and far reaching. It is good for us. She reminds her reader––perhaps looking forward to the effect Poetry will have––that any movement begins with a few. Do you think Bach’s contemporaries appreciated his purely abstract music? At first only a few see the point, but they bring the world around.