CHICAGO — In 1913, the Art Institute of Chicago was the scene of what is now known as a culture war, a spitting match between defenders of tradition and partisans of innovation. Each side was convinced that civilization’s fate had been sealed, for better or worse, when the museum hosted the International Exhibition of Modern Art.
“They came to study the pictures,” the Tribune reported of socialites at the opening night’s charity benefit, “and study them they did from the hideous, deformed women of the Matisse conception, to the cubistic dancers and marchers of Picabia and Duchamp and their ilk.”
That salvo on March 25, 1913, initiated a month of putdowns of Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and other European painters and sculptors who seemed to be polluting American art. The Tribune’s critic was in an uncomfortable position. Harriet Monroe had seen the International Exhibition when it first appeared in New York, and recommended bringing it to Chicago.
Once the exhibit was here, she had to juggle explaining it to readers while also reporting its frosty reception — which sometimes involved taking a jab at her own town.
On one hand, she wrote: “We are 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.”
But she also conceded: “Their art, if it is art, would seem to be in an experimental stage and time alone can determine if it will amount to anything.”
She called Paul Gauguin, who went to Tahiti to paint, “barbaric,” and described his work as “born of the grafting of a European mind upon savage superstitions.”
Monroe couldn’t pretend to be baffled that others saw artistic talent on display at the Art Institute’s display of 634 works of modern art. Culturally sophisticated, she founded Poetry magazine in 1912, which published cutting-edge work by writers including T.S. Eliot.
But other Tribune writers weren’t afraid to write about their confusion over the exhibition. One wrote: “This is the story of a ‘lowbrow,’ who visited the exhibition of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors,” that created the show.
By self-report, the Tribune’s envoy “went receptively, saw amazedly, and returned bewildered.”
The International Exhibition of Modern Art was intended to be a prescription for parochialism. Among those who organized the show was Walter Pach, an American artist influenced by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne who wanted to demonstrate that he and other modernists represented an approach to art that had passed from threatening to respectable in Europe.
The show was originally mounted at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, the artistic heart of the U.S. It was controversial there but even more problematic to conservatives in Chicago. As a museum, the Art Institute seemed to be putting the establishment’s imprimatur on modern art. With upward of 18,000 visitors a day, it seemed a now-or-never moment to push the avant-garde back behind the pale.
The Tribune joined the counterattack with a sarcastic report of responses to what it reported as “Paul Picasso’s ‘The Woman and the Pot of Mustard,’” a work whose title is more generally translated as “Woman With Mustard Pot.”
“It depicts the morning-after in the Desplaines Street police court,” one onlooker explained, “and the mustard pot is exhibit A.”
“But how did the mustard pot survive after such evident mutilation of the lady’s features?” an objector queried.
The story tried to soften such reactions with some words from Walt Kuhn, secretary of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors: “It is not necessary to depict a thing exactly to make a person see what is intended. It makes people think and therefore is a triumph.”
Yet that thought didn’t sit well even in some corners of the Art Institute.
Charles Francis Browne, a faculty member, filled the museum’s Fullerton Hall with an attack on the revolving door of aesthetic fads. “From the scratched stone of the cave dweller to the ‘Nude Descending a Stair (case)’ was but a step,” he said to great applause.
The prurient interest of Duchamp’s painting might have been limited by its cubistic dissolve of the female figure’s form. But the police and the mayor weren’t lenient. The morning after the Art Institute’s show opened, the proprietor of an art store on Wabash Avenue received a notice to remove from its window “September Morn,” Paul Chabas’ painting of a nude woman.
Sgt. Jeremiah O’Connor, described in the Tribune as “the city’s official art censor” had shown a copy to Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. “The executive blushed even as O’Connor had done,” reported the Tribune, which thought the incident a warning to the Art Institute about displaying the nudes in its storerooms.
It is one thing for cops to have conservative tastes, but the behavior of the Art Institute’s students in 1913 can be mystifying in the age of woke. Since the counterculture 1960s, students seem to be naturally rebellious.
Newton Carpenter, the museum’s secretary who had played a role in bringing in the exhibition, predicted its students would embrace avant-garde art, perhaps a tad too eagerly. He was wrong.
Students complained that he had turned the Art Institute into a circus. To show their disdain for the exhibition, students, professors and local artists took part in a “Futurist Party,” where “Stewed Descending a Staircase” was displayed and a pianist played “Running Water,” a sendup of Maurice Ravel’s music.
Students celebrated the exhibition’s April 16 closing by putting modern art on a mock trial and tossing copies of three Matisse masterpieces into a bonfire. The originals were among the works loaded on a train headed for Boston, the exhibition’s next stop.
“Promptly at 4 p.m. the students dressed in motley garb, emerged from the front door of the Art Institute and led the prisoner, white and terrified, to the south portico, where the trial was held,” the Tribune reported.
The defendant was addressed as Henry Hair Mattress, a burlesque form of the artist’s name. The faux prosecutor told him: “You are charged with artistic murder, pictorial arson, artistic rapine, total degeneracy of color, criminal misuse of line, general esthetic aberration, and contumacious abuse of title.”
The students intended to burn an effigy of Mattress/Matisse, but the cops intervened, and as the flames subsided, Pach, the exhibition’s organizer, made a prediction:
“Ten or twenty years from now some of these students will be eating crow if they are as truthful as their instructor Charles Francis Browne, who has been partaking of that dish ever since he derided the impressionist painters when he was a student in Paris.”
That probably proved prescient, as the art displayed at the exhibition was quickly accepted by the art world establishment. In 1926, the Art Institute became the first American museum to put a Picasso painting, “The Old Guitarist,” on permanent display.
Today, the Art Institute offers courses and advanced degrees in performance art. Essentially a theatrical discipline — as the artist is his art work — it is closer to the satirical Futurist Party of 1913 than the traditional arts that once monopolized an art school’s curriculum.
The museum’s Modern Wing, which opened in 2009 , answered a question posed at the 1913 exhibition. Noting that the image in modern paintings was becoming less and less discernable, someone asked if it might just disappear.
On display in the Art Institute’s new wing was a bare space on a wall credited to Felix Gonzalez-Torres titled “Untitled,” and described as: “Enamel paint on wall. Dimensions variable.”
