Literature
Paul Laurence Dunbar
James Weldon Johnson
Frances E. W. Harper
Pauline Hopkins
Alice Dunbar Nelson

Art
Edmonia Lewis
Meta Vaux Warrick
Henry O. Tanner
E. M. Bannister
May Howard Jackson

Music
Harry T. Burleigh
E. Azalia Hackley
Thomas G. Bethune
Scott Joplin
James Reese Europe
Will Marion Cook
J. Rosamond Johnson
Marie Selika
Flora Batson

Death of Cleopatra, 1876

Critical Response:

Miss Lewis is by no means a prodigy; she has great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and a simple, genuine taste. Her works are as yet those of a girl. She has read Evangeline, and some others of Longfellow’s poems, and has caught from them a girlish sentimentality, but has rather improved upon her author’s conceptions in the process of giving them shape and reality. By and by, when her horizon of knowledge becomes more expanded, and her grasp on it firmer, she will leave the prettinesses of poems, and give us Pocahontas, Logan. Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Jacket, and, it may be, Black Hawk and Osceola. Or if these may seem too near and real, and admitting less of effective accessories, there lie behind them all the great dramatic characters, Montezuma, Guatimozin, Huascar, and Atahualpa, to say nothing of the Malinche, that lost her country that she might save her love.”
~ J. S. Ingram 1876

The most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section was perhaps that in marble of The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis, the sculptress and protégée of Charlotte Cushman. The great queen was seated in a chair, her head drooping over her left shoulder. The face of the figure was really fine in its naturalness and the gracefulness of the lines. The face was full of pain, and for some reason – perhaps to intensify the expression – the classic standard had been departed from, and the features were not even Egyptian in their outline, but of a decidedly Jewish cast. The human heads which ornamented the arms of the chair were obtrusive, and detracted from the dignity which the artist succeeded in gaining in the figure. A canopy of Oriental brightness in color had been placed over the statue.
~ William J. Clark 1878

An even more remarkable sculpture from the hand of a female artist than Miss Foley’s fountain which was in the Centennial Exhibition was the Cleopatra of Edmonia Lewis. This was not a beautiful work, but it was a very original and very striking one, and it deserves particular comment, as its ideal was so radically different from those adopted by Story and Gould in their statues of the Egyptian Queen. Story gave his Cleopatra Nubian features, and achieved an artistic if not a historical success by so doing. The Cleopatra of Gould suggests a Greek lineage. Miss Lewis, on the other hand, has followed the coins, medals, and other authentic records in giving her Cleopatra an aquiline nose and a prominent chin of the Roman type, for the Egyptian Queen appears to have had such features rather than such as would more positively suggest her Grecian descent. This Cleopatra, therefore, more nearly resembled the real heroine of history than either of the others, which, however, it should be remembered, laid no claims to being other than purely ideal works. Miss Lewis’ Cleopatra, like the figures sculptured by Story and Gould, is seated in a chair; the poison of the asp has done its work, and the Queen is dead. The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant – and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been reproduced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments. … the real power of her Cleopatra was a revelation.

Belle da Costa Greene

Belle da Costa Greene summed up her individuality and allure in one phrase: “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.” The library profession was in its infancy, but this attractive and vivacious woman happened to be the curator of a library owned by one of the world’s most powerful men–J.P. Morgan. When Morgan, who had built up an impressive collection of art, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, and furniture, commissioned Charles McKim to build a library, his nephew Junius, then a student at Princeton, introduced him to Belle, who was working at the university’s library. Her particular specialty was both illuminated manuscripts and getting Morgan’s acquisitions past customs, and from 1905 until his death in 1913, she was his right hand in the construction of a library collection which continues to astonish visitors and scholars. In Belle, Morgan no doubt found his counterpart: she was both witty and remarkably self-confident, and unswervingly loyal to him, reading Dickens and the Bible to him, and even attending an all-night library session with him during the Panic of 1907.

However, Belle’s story didn’t end there. Though her profession and association with J.P. Morgan lent her stature in Gilded Age society, it was her secret which pushed Belle into posterity. For she was not Belle da Costa Greene, but Belle Marion Greener, the daughter of Richard T. Greener, the first black student and graduate of Harvard University, and Genevieve Ida Fleet. Sometime after her parents’ separation, Genevieve took the surname of Van Vliet and moved her children to New York where they passed as white. Belle, though very light-skinned with green eyes, dropped “Marion” for “da Costa,” claiming a Portuguese ancestor should anyone question her racial make-up. She then set about reconstructing her past, claiming a degree from the Pratt Institute, among other credentials, before taking a position in Princeton University’s library and then, of course, with J.P. Morgan.

Belle had virtual carte blanche to purchase works of art and priceless objects of which she felt Morgan would approve, purchases which required frequent visits to Europe. There she dazzled the more Bohemian elements of society with her striking gowns and her exotic looks. She also clashed with the male-dominated art world, possessing an intelligence and intuition which allowed her to steal away wonderful finds from beneath the noses of her competitors. She never married (when a lumber magnate proposed, she cabled “all proposals shall be considered alphabetically after my fiftieth birthday”), but she did conduct torrid affairs, the most lasting with Bernard Berenson, a preeminent art critic with an expertise in the Renaissance, who himself masqueraded as “white” (born as Bernhard Valvrojenski) during this time of ethnic/racial conflict.

This is not to say that Belle’s ambiguous appearance and choice to choose her racial classification was wholeheartedly accepted. Morgan’s art rival Isabella Stewart Gardner, was known to have hinted about Belle’s race in her letters to friends, and artist Marcel Duchamp is said to have created art under his pseudonym “Rrose Sélavy” to poke at her secret. After Morgan’s death in 1913, he willed her $50,000 (a considerable sum for 1913) and she retained her position at the Morgan Library until her retirement in 1948. When Belle died two years later, at the age of 67, she burned all of her papers. Despite the limitations placed on those of African descent, Belle was an enigma and an anomaly not simply because of her position with J.P. Morgan, but because of her own savvy and determination to create her own life outside of societal color lines, gender lines, and sexual lines.

Modern and avant-garde art introduced itself to 1913 New York much against the latter’s will. Since the emergence of Impressionism, many other shocking developments in artistic expression set the world afire. However, these movements were smaller, grounded by one or two artists, and usually returned underground after the public’s initial outrage. By the 1910s, these smaller art movements began to convene and morph until two distinct styles of art bubbled beneath the mainstream–Expressionism and Cubism. Both began in Europe–the former in Germany and Austria, the latter in France–and were the culmination of the fascination turn of the century society held for “primitive” and “foreign” art.

In one way, the rise of Expressionism and Cubism could be seen as a reaction to the globalization of society. As colonialism spread throughout Asia and Africa, as well as the South and North poles, Europeans and Americans came in contact with peoples only hardy explorers of the past were able to meet. Also, this time witnessed the birth of modern anthropology. Though scientific racism retained its hold upon greater social thought, exploration began to turn its emphasis from conquer to the study and cataloging of non-European peoples and their customs.

The seeds for the Armory Show were sown at one of the artistic “Evenings” held by Mrs Mabel Dodge, a “400″ socialite who worked her darndest to become the “queen of Greenwich Village.” The 69th Regiment Armory for the National Guard located at on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets was chosen by organizers Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach as the perfect venue for this show of modern art. Though the Metropolitan Museum of Art bravely purchased Paul Cézanne’s Hill of the Poor to symbolize their willingness to accept modern art, others were not so happy with the descent of art from nice, safe portraits, landscapes and still-lifes into dots and dashes across the canvas. Despite the rumbling of dissent, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors trundled on. The date for the show was from February 17th to March 15th, 1913, and the armory was home to approximately 1250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 European and American artists.

Among the artists whose work was to be shown were Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Many of the artists were known and respected, so the audience and art critics waiting to view these 1250 paintings were not too alarmed by the roster. But when they did feast their eyes upon the exhibition, most of New York was stunned. Lloyd Morris recounted the “outrage and protest [which] flared up in newspaper headlines” and “Cubism, futurism, post-impressionism became issues in a battle that engaged the general public.” Critics were baffled by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and were incensed by Matisse’s nudes, Picasso’s cubist paintings, and Constantin Brancusi’s roughly-hewn block. Former President Theodore Roosevelt condemned all modernists as lunatics, and many critics considered the more provocative art exhibited to be the work of degenerates, and described the Armory Show a “bedlam in art,” comparing cubism to prehistoric cave drawings.

In the midst of this furor, modern art did have a small, but growing number of supporters, which included Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who was to receive lasting fame for her art studios in Greenwich Village and the museum she founded in 1931. Many art collectors found much to admire in this new art movement, and more than a few wealthy art patrons included early Picassos among the then-priceless works by Rubens and Holbein the Younger. Ironically, for all the castigation the show received in the press and the public, it went on to tour Chicago and Boston to equal doses of acclaim and horror. The outcome of the Armory Show was but one of the many pre-WWI forces that shaped both modern culture and society in the coming decades. The Modernists took inspiration from non-European arts and looked forward rather than looking back to old masters, thereby forging not only a new path for art, but enabled them to stand on their own merits as artists.

Further Reading:
1913: an End and a Beginning by Virgina Cowles
Online exhibition recreating the Armory Show
ArtLex on the Armory Show
The 69th Regiment Armory Show
The 69th Regiment Armory