Lincoln Glenn in collaboration with Graham Shay 1857 is set to open Artists of the 1913 Armory Show at their joint 17 East 67th Street gallery on Saturday, October 12th. The exhibition will run through December 8th and the space will be open to visitors from 10am-6pm on Tuesdays-Saturdays. A complimentary exhibition catalogue comprising an essay by art historian Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D. accompanies the Upper East Side exhibition.
As the key organizer Arthur B. Davies pronounced while standing in one of the 1913 Armory Show’s galleries: “New York will never be the same again.” The 1913 Armory Show not only made a huge impact on the masses of passive viewers, but also on the American artists themselves, many of whom took in European innovations such as Cubism for the first time.
The earliest work in the exhibition is a watercolor of the seaside town of Dieppe in Normandy from the mid-1880s. Whistler, although deceased by the original 1913 Armory Show, was included in the exhibition by organizers who hoped to establish a historical trajectory for modernist directions in American art, which is exactly what this exhibition attempts to rematerialize. The show is dominated by the works of the organizers, including examples by John Sloan, William Glackens, Walt Kuhn, Jonas Lie, Ernest Lawson, George Bellows, George Luks, Guy Pene du Bois and Jerome Myers. The exhibition proceeds to the modernist inclinations of Agnes Pelton, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Oscar Bluemner, and Joseph Stella, before zooming fifty years into the future to a fully abstracted painting by Paul Burlin from 1963.
A few of the highlights of the exhibition presented by Lincoln Glenn include a river view landscape of New York, which is one of the only extant works by Arthur Freund, who died at age 33, just 10 years after the Armory Show. Another feature painting is Frosty Morning by the Norwegian-born Jonas Lie, and it was exhibited in Philadelphia, Dayton (where it was seen by 40,000 attendees at the Montgomery County Fair), and New York in the 1920s. In 1924, Michigan State Librarian, Miss Helen L. Earle, commented “Frosty Morning is brilliant with glittering snow on birch trees" and the painting retains its luster nearly a century later. The showstopper may be a small, early Maine landscape by modernist Marsden Hartley from 1909-10. The painting, which was originally in the personal collection of tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz, depicts the region of Stoneham Valley, near North Lovell, and likely constitutes one of the earliest examples of modernism in America. Similar examples reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colby College. Along the same vein of modernist pioneers in the exhibition, Manierre Dawson’s Upper Street, 1912 would be amongst the earliest non-representational paintings, and contemporaneous with the work of Arthur Dove and Wassily Kandinsky.
In the same room, Graham Shay 1857 displays bronze sculptures of maternal subjects by Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Abastenia St. Leger Eberle. While Eberle’s work was more connected to the Ashcan School and hardships faced by immigrants to the Lower East Side in the first quarter of the 20th century, Vonnoh’s oeuvre was typically more elegant. A marble carving by William Zorach constitutes the latest work in the exhibition from Shay’s inventory. In My Garden by Jonas Lie was shown in the same 1923 exhibition in New York at Ainslie Galleries as Frosty Morning.
Amongst the approximately 300 artists included in the 1913 Armory Show were 50 female artists, and this 2023 exhibition highlights the artistic contributions by Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Ethel Myers, and an extremely rare painting by Edith Dimock, widow of William Glackens, who burned the majority of her own work after his death.
Upstart gallery Lincoln Glenn who was originally based in Larchmont, staked down a second exhibiting space in May on the Upper East Side in a gallery already occupied by Cameron Shay of Graham Shay 1857. Together, the two galleries assembled the comprehensive exhibition. Douglas Gold, a co-owner of Lincoln Glenn, previously served as Shay’s director from 2017-2021 and the transition from a mentor/understudy relationship to cohabitants has been seamless. Gold stated “This exhibit goes beyond just the art we see on the walls and lining the halls, but is a personal journey for myself that I get to share in collaboration with a mentor to me, Cameron Shay, and one of my best friends and business partner Eli Sterngass. We have all spent thousands of hours together, discussing art, building our appreciation for the artists we are showing and the work they created.” Gold continued, “Cameron has taught me to understand sculpture and the great lengths artists would go to while producing their work.”
On the partnership with Gold and Lincoln Glenn co-owner Eli Sterngass, Shay said “For myself personally, this year bears some significance as 2023 marks my 40th anniversary in New York and in the American art business. Thirty-five of those years were spent at the fifth-generation firm, James Graham & Sons working with James Graham, Robert C. Graham, Jr. and many wonderful colleagues including this current collaboration with Douglas Gold and Eli Sterngass of Lincoln Glenn Gallery. The artists that exhibited in the original Armory Show that I’ve had the opportunity to handle works by is extensive and has informed my knowledge of and experience in American art immensely.” Amongst those artists that Graham Gallery had a particular interest and close involvement with are Arthur B. Davies, Arthur B. Carles, Leon Dabo, Guy Pene du Bois, and Henry Glintenkamp. Both galleries look forward to welcoming old friends and new visitors to view the exhibition.
For more information, please visit https://www.lincolnglenn.com/exhibitions/26-artists-of-the-1913-armory-show/works/.
