Flashback to 1913!
On February 17, 1913, an exhibition of European and American artworks opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City.
Flashback to 1913! On February 17, 1913, an exhibition of European and American artworks opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City.
Known as the Armory Show, this watershed exhibition introduced many to European modernism and is often considered the beginning of "modern art" in the United States. Shortly therafter in 1914, artist H. Lyman Säyen mused on the topic of modern art, "These new ways of looking at pictures seem abstract and technical and confined to a few, but there is little doubt in my mind, that it will become more and more understood and what is popularly taken as a decadence is no more than a renaissance of the true spirit of the art of antiquity."
Säyen's The Thundershower is one of the works in our touring exhibition "Modernism & Abstraction" on view at The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, Florida through March 5, 2000.
Source: National Museum of American Art. (Washington, D.C. and Boston, New York, Toronto and London: National Museum of American Art with Bulfinch Press, Little Brown and Company, 1995).
Pictured: H. Lyman Säyen (1875–1918), The Thundershower,about 1917–1918, tempera, 36 x 46 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Lyman Säyen to his nation.