Modern Art Meets Modern Marketing

Abstract

“Modern Art to my generation was a spiritual awakening,” the sculptor and painter William Zorach told a 1950s college audience, “a freeing of Art from the idea of copying Nature. We entered into a whole new world of form and color that opened up before us.”¹ The young arts journalist Floyd Dell could attest to that experience when he saw the International Exhibit of Modern Art, the famous Armory Show as it became known, on tour in Chicago. “Post-Impressionism exploded like a bombshell within the minds of everybody who could be said to have minds,” he wrote years later. “For Americans it would not be merely an aesthetic experience, it was an emotional experience which led to a philosophical and moral revaluation of life.”²

America in spite of its newness is determined to be the coming center.

—Walter Kuhn, in Milton W. Brown, “Walt Kuhn’s Armory Show,” in Archives of American Art Journal

If your stomach revolts against this rubbish it is because it is not fit for human food.

—Kenyon Cox, “The ‘Modern Spirit’ in Art: Some Reflections Inspired by the Recent International Exhibition,” in Harper’s Weekly