Archives of American Art Blog

Architecture, Interior Design, and “The Cubist Room” at the International Exhibition of Modern Art

FIGURE 1: Installation shot of the Cubist room, 1913 Armory Show, published in the New York Tribune, February 17, 1913 (p. 7) from the Walt Kuhn scrapbook documenting the Armory Show, 1913. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The newly rediscovered Hagelstein Brothers photograph of “The Cubist Room” at the Armory Show (figure 1) provides clues as to what inspired the final floor plan of galleries at the 69^th Regiment Armory, as well as evidence of Walter Pach’s hand in designing the installation.

In the fall of 1912, Arthur B. Davies sent Walt Kuhn a letter that contained a drawing of a preliminary floor plan for the New York venue of the show (figure 2) that was composed of traditional rectangular or square rooms.

How then did the installation become the honeycomb–shaped design of polygonal galleries, shown in a blueprint (figure 3) and in the catalogue of the New York venue (figure 4)?

FIGURE 2: Armory Show floor plan, 1912 Oct. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

FIGURE 3: Blueprint of Armory Show floorplan, between 1912 and 1913. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

FIGURE 4: Catalogue of the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, 1913. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In the fall of 1912, the Cubist group of artists that included Raymond Duchamp–Villon, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Alexander Archipenko, and others held an exhibition called La Salon de “La Section d’Or” at the Galerie de la Boëtie in Paris (figure 5). Several works from this exhibition were chosen by Pach for the Armory Show including Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (figure 1).

FIGURE 5: Exhibit catalog for Salon de "La Section d'Or", 1912. Walter Pach papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

FIGURE 6: Photo of Raymond Duchamp–Villon’s sculpture La Maison Cubiste, circa 1913 / unidentified photographer. Photographic print : 1 item ; 13 x 18 cm. Walter Pach papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Simultaneous to La Section d’Or was the 1912 Salon d’Automne in which La Maison Cubiste was displayed. The architectural façade was designed in a Cubist style by Duchamp–Villon. Visitors walked through the façade into rooms designed by André Mare. These rooms included Cubist paintings. Also Gleizes’s Man on a Balcony and Archipenko’s Family Life, which can be seen in “The Cubist Room” at the Armory Show (see figure 1).

Enter Walter Pach—he saw both Parisian exhibitions, knew all the artists involved, and selected all of the works seen in figure 1, including a plaster maquette of the façade of La Maison Cubiste by Duchamp–Villon (figure 6), as well as the paintings and sculptures that were shown at La Section d’Or and the 1912 Salon d’Automne. 

I believe that “The Cubist Room” at the Armory Show was a deliberate conflation of these Parisian exhibitions put together by Pach; no one else could have designed this installation.

Pach also wrote a pamphlet for the Armory Show, “A Sculptor’s Architecture” in which he discussed Raymond Duchamp–Villon’s La Maison Cubiste as exemplary of a new architectural style for the modern era.

I would suggest that change in the floor plan from traditional rectilinear rooms as proposed by Davies to the polygonal galleries was Pach’s idea and reflects his understanding of Duchamp–Villon’s vision of Cubist architecture.

Furthermore, I believe that the refracted shapes of the polygonal spaces could be read as a modernist floor plan and installation design that, together with the architectural façade, paintings, and sculptures in “The Cubist Room” in particular (figure 1), formed an ensemble showing how Cubist architecture, interior design, and art could be replicated in anyone’s home.

Guest blogger Laurette E. McCarthy is an independent scholar and curator. She is an authority on Walter Pach and a leading Armory Show scholar.

Explore more:

• 1913 Armory Show: the Story in Primary Sources, digital timeline
• The Story of the Armory Show, online exhibition on the Archives of American Art's website
• Walter Pach papers, 1957–1980
• Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, 1859-1978, bulk 1900-1949
• A Century After Their Initial Publication, Rediscovered Installation Shots of the 1913 Armory Show Come to Light by Laurette E. McCarthy
• The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913, February 17, 2013 – June 16, 2013 at the Montclair Art Museum
• The Armory Show at 100, October 11, 2013 – February 23, 2014 at the New York Historical Society

Irving Gill’s Dodge House: a legacy of beauty and invention

[Dodge House 1916], 1965 / Esther McCoy and Robert Snyder. 16 mm : 1 film reel : sd., col. ; 16 mm.
Esther McCoy papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

As a writer researching a writer I revere, working with the Esther McCoy papers is an incomparable experience: the more I learn, the better it gets. Best–known for her landmark book Five California Architects (1960), McCoy identified the distinctly West Coast roots of American modernist architecture. Among that book’s featured five was Irving J. Gill (1870–1936), a master of machine age efficiency, essential forms, and refined aesthetics. Although Gill’s designs boldly anticipated mid–century modernism, his reputation was sadly eclipsed within his own lifetime.

When McCoy started researching Gill’s architecture during the early 1950s, she sought out his unheralded buildings, interviewed his surviving colleagues and supporters, published articles about his work, and curated a retrospective of his work (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1958). Following the Irving Gill trail through the McCoy papers is a riveting and often heart–breaking saga. Throughout the 1960s, McCoy spearheaded a campaign to save Gill’s Walter L. Dodge House (1916)—the first truly modernist residence in the West, a stunning 6,500 square foot house on nearly three landscaped acres in the heart of West Hollywood. In 1939, the house and grounds were acquired by the city of Los Angeles through eminent domain and a municipal order set to build a school on the site. The school plan, however, was soon abandoned and the property shuffled between city and county agencies. For years, the house remained intact and was used as classrooms by a technical college: institutional–scale baking was taught in the kitchen and apprentice car mechanics practiced their trade on the grounds.

By 1963, the Los Angeles Board of Education declared the Dodge House “surplus” and the County Board of Supervisors re–zoned the area from R–1 to R–4, from single–family homes to apartment buildings. While the street underwent a radical condominium–ization, the Dodge House was slated for the wrecking ball. Unannounced, on a February morning in 1970, the entire property was demolished. A neighbor who witnessed the destruction reported: “I went out in the morning and when I came back two hours later the wrecking crew was there. They beat it and beat it and it wouldn’t go down. It was like an animal being beaten. They kept beating and beating and it finally cracked up. The trees didn’t want to go either but they beat them until by late afternoon everything was gone.” Gill believed that a “house should be simple, plain, and substantial as a boulder.” The Dodge House, with its serenely unadorned surfaces and eight inch thick reinforced concrete walls, was the fulfillment of that vision. Then, in a single day, it was gone forever.

Among McCoy’s papers, I came across a print of the 1965 film she’d written and produced as part of her campaign to save the Dodge House. Directed by Robert Snyder (1916-2004), an Academy Award–winning documentarian and son–in–law of Buckminster Fuller, this film—like the house itself—was almost lost. The Snyder collection at the Motion Picture Academy holds just one print, a silent, reversal master that can’t be screened. Baylis Glascock, the young filmmaker who served as the project’s camera man/editor/general factotum, didn’t own a copy and had reached various dead ends while searching for one. McCoy’s personal copy, a 16 mm reel inside a splitting cardboard box held together by a desiccated rubber band, had been in archival storage for more than 20 years; and I had no way of knowing what shape that print was in, when it was last projected, or whether it had been damaged over time by ordinary household indignities—spilled coffee, dust bunnies, or ashes from stray cigarettes. When I expressed my concerns to Megan McShea, the Archives of American Art’s audiovisual archivist, she took McCoy’s Dodge House film under her remarkably sympathetic and tech–savvy wing.

With a grant from the Women in Film Preservation Fund, Megan ingeniously facilitated the restoration of this important film. In the autumn of 2011, I presented the new, beautifully restored print twice: at the R.M Schindler House (1922) on Kings Road in West Hollywood, a block away from where the Dodge House once stood, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during their annual film preservation program. Each time, the audience reaction was tremendously moving: people were astonished by Gill’s design, McCoy’s awareness and dedication, and Glascock’s tender view of a now vanished place. In the Dodge House, Gill had tinted the plaster walls to capture changing shadows and daylight. His windows and porches framed garden views, mosaic–tiled fountains, and distant mountain vistas. The house’s cabinetry conveyed a Shaker simplicity; the Honduran mahogany glowed as warm as amber. As architectural historian Robert Winter, a dear friend and colleague of McCoy’s lamented recently, recalling the demolition: “If only they had warned us. I remember Esther called and said, ‘if we’d known, we could have at least taken out the banisters and saved them.’ ”

In McCoy’s script for the Dodge House film, the final lines are strong and poignant: “We prize the distant past,” she observed. “But if the immediate past is ripped away there will be no distant past for the future. Our heritage is diminished. And there is a hole in the fabric of history.” Hearing those words, I’m reminded once again of my gratitude to the Archives of American Art and how I much I treasure McCoy’s life and work.

Explore more:

• Esther McCoy papers, 1876-1990, (bulk 1938-1989)
• Oral history interview with Esther McCoy, 1987 June 7 - Nov. 14
• SPANS: Photographs from the Esther McCoy papers at the Archives of American Art
• “Being There: Esther McCoy the Accidental Architectural Historian” by Susan Morgan, Archives of American Art Journal 48: 1-2

Writer Susan Morgan is a contributing editor at Aperture and East of Borneo. Her research into the life and work of Esther McCoy has received support from the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of Art and Architecture, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She is editor of the forthcoming anthology Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader and, with Kimberli Meyer, co-curator of Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design (MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House), closing January 29, 2012. Morgan lives in Los Angeles.

Eero Saarinen's To-do Lists

To-do list, August 16, 1961 by Eero Saarinen. Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1906-1977. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Lately I’ve been thinking about lists—to-do lists, membership lists, grocery lists, lists of paintings sold, lists of appointments made and met—and what they can tell us about the list maker and a moment in time.

Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), who designed such structural icons as the TWA terminal (1962) at JFK International Airport in New York and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (1965), was a great list maker.

Saarinen’s papers are peppered with lists of all kinds. In Roman numerals, I through IV, he set out the progress of his divorce, and from one to ten he listed the names of architects whom he considered to be his “subconscious board of directors,” that is, individuals with whom he may not agree, but nevertheless would like their approval.

Saarinen was also fond of enumerating his second wife’s good qualities–“generous, attractive, amusing, intelligent, talented, love-able, constructive, creative,” and the like, in multiple lists, often in red pencil.

His last to-do list (pictured), consisting of 52 separate items, is his most poignant. It was written on August 16, 1961, just five days before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and sixteen days before he died from complications of surgery. He was 51 and in the midst of major architectural projects, as well as his home renovation. His list of all that was left undone is evidence of a life cut short.

See our current exhibition Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at the Reynolds Center in Washington, D.C. and the Lists book published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Liza Kirwin is curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art. She will be giving a Gallery Tour of the Lists exhibition on Sunday, April 11 at 2:00 p.m.