This second effort was overshadowed by the German Sonderbund, which opened on 25 May 1912, in Cologne. This was another volcano – in John Rewald’s words, a ‘truly staggering exhibition.’ Unlike the London shows, it took for granted that people were already familiar with nineteenth-century painting and hence felt free to concentrate on the most recent movements in modern art. The Sonderbund was deliberately arranged to provoke: the rooms devoted to Cézanne were next to those displaying Van Gogh, Picasso was next to Gauguin. The exhibition also featured Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Erich Heckel, Aleksey von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele, Paul Signac, Maurice de Vlaminck and Edouard Vuillard. Of the 108 paintings in the show, a third had German owners; of the twenty-eight Cézannes, seventeen belonged to Germans. They were clearly more at home with the new painting than either the British or the Americans.6 When Arthur Davies received the catalogue for the Sonderbund, he was so startled that he urged Walt Kuhn to go to Cologne immediately. Kuhn’s trip brought him into contact with much more than the Sonderbund. He met Munch and persuaded him to participate in the Armory; he went to Holland in pursuit of Van Goghs; in Paris all the talk was of cubism at the Salon d’Automne and of the futurist exhibition held that year at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. Kuhn ended his trip in London, where he was able to raid Fry’s second exhibition, which was still on.7
The morning after Quinn’s opening speech, the attack from the press began – and didn’t let up for weeks. The cubist room attracted most laughs, and was soon rechristened the Chamber of Horrors. One painting in particular was singled out for ridicule: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp was already in the news for ‘creating’ that year the first ‘readymade,’ a work called simply Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp’s Nude was described as ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags,’ ‘an orderly heap of broken violins,’ and ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ Parodies proliferated: for example, Food Descending a Staircase,8
But the show also received serious critical attention. Among the New York newspapers, the Tribune, the Mail, the World, and the Times disliked the show. They all applauded the aim of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to present new art but found the actual pictures and sculptures difficult. Only the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune liked what they saw. With critical reception weighted roughly five to two against it, and popular hilarity on a scale rarely seen, the show might have been a commercial disaster, but it was nothing of the kind. As many as ten thousand people a day streamed through the Armory, and despite the negative reviews, or perhaps because of them, the show was taken up by New York society and became a succès d’estime. Mrs Astor went every day after breakfast.9
After New York the Armory Show travelled to Chicago and Boston, and in all 174 works were sold. In the wake of the show a number of new galleries opened up, mainly in New York. Despite the scandal surrounding the new modern art exhibitions, there were plenty of people who found something fresh, welcome, and even wonderful in the new images, and they began collecting.10
Ironically, resistance to the newest art was most vicious in Paris, which at the same time prided itself on being the capital of the avant-garde. In practice, what was new one minute was accepted as the norm soon after. By 1913, impressionism – which had once been scandalous – was the new orthodoxy in painting; in music the controversy surrounding Wagner had long been forgotten, and his lush chords dominated the concert halls; and in literature the late-nineteenth-century symbolism of Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, once the enfants terribles of the Parisian cultural scene, were now approved by the arbiters of taste, people such as Anatole France.
Cubism, however, had still not been generally accepted. Two days after the Armory Show closed in New York, Guillaume Apollinaire’s publishers announced the almost simultaneous release of his two most influential books, Les Peintres cubistes and Alcools. Apollinaire was born illegitimate in Rome in 1880 to a woman of minor Polish nobility who was seeking political refuge at the papal court. By 1913 he was already notorious: he had just been in jail, accused on no evidence whatsoever of having stolen Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre. After the painting was found, he was released, and made the most of the scandal by producing a book that drew attention to the work of his friend, Pablo Picasso (who the police thought also had had a hand in the theft of the Mona Lisa), Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and a new painter no one had yet heard of, Piet Mondrian. When he was working on the proofs of his book, Apollinaire introduced a famous fourfold organisation of cubism – scientific, physical, orphie, and instinctive cubism.11 This was too much for most people, and his approach never caught on. Elsewhere in the book, however, he wrote sympathetically about what the cubists were trying to achieve, which helped to get them accepted. His argument was that we should soon get bored with nature unless artists continually renewed our experience of it.12
Brought up on the Côte d’Azur, Apollinaire appealed to Picasso and the bande à Picasso (Max Jacob, André Salmon, later Jean Cocteau) for his ‘candid, voluble, sensuous’ nature. After he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a writer, he gradually earned the tide ‘impresario of the avant-garde’ for his ability to bring together painters, musicians, and writers and to present their works in an exciting way. 1913 was a great year for him. Within a month of Les Peintres cubistes appearing, in April, Apollinaire produced a much more controversial work, Alcools (Liquors), a collection of what he called art poetry, which centred on one long piece of verse, entitled ‘Zone.’13 ‘Zone’ was in many ways the poetic equivalent of Arnold Schoenberg’s music or Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings. Everything about it was new, very little recognisable to traditionalists. Traditional typography and verse forms were bypassed. So far as punctuation was concerned, ‘The rhythm and division of the lines form a natural punctuation; no other is necessary.’14 Apollinaire’s imagery was thoroughly modern too: cityscapes, shorthand typists, aviators (French pilots were second only to the Wright brothers in the advances being made). The poem was set in various areas around Paris and in six other cities, including Amsterdam and Prague. It contained some very weird images – at one point the bridges of Paris make bleating sounds, being ‘shepherded’ by the Eiffel Tower.15 ‘Zone’ was regarded as a literary breakthrough, and within a few short years, until Apollinaire died (in a ‘flu epidemic), he was regarded as the leader of the modernist movement in poetry. This owed as much to his fiery reputation as to his writings.16
Cubism was the art form that most fired Apollinaire. For the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, it was fauvism. He too was a volcano. In the words of the critic Harold Schonberg, Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet produced the most famous scandale in the history of music.17 Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May and overnight changed Paris. Paris, it should be said, was changing in other ways too. The gaslights were being replaced by electric streetlamps, the pneumatique by the telephone, and the last horse-drawn buses went out of service in 1913. For some, the change produced by Stravinsky was no less shocking than Rutherford’s atom bouncing off gold foil.18