“Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the powers to make folly lucrative which the late P.T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.”—Theodore Roosevelt, “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition”

The New York Armory show of 1913 opened on this date that year. It had nothing to do with the National Guard, but the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized that year by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors needed a huge space, so the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue was secured. More than 1300 works by about 300 artists were featured.

The exhibition introduced the American public to paintings by Matisse and Picasso and Derain and sculpture by Duchamp. The public was scandalized, having seen very little avant garde art before. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a review for Outlook magazine in which he praised the American, realistic, paintings seen in the show, but said of the European works, “That’s not art!”
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