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Few interior views of the revolutionary 1913 Armory Show remain, but the Archives of American Art holds one of the most comprehensive collections of related documents, from organizers’ letters to critical response. Courtesy of Wikimedia

Posters advertised a heady guest list for the 1913 Armory Show held in New York City, including, Matisse, Brancusi, van Gogh and Cézanne. It would have been a once-in-a-lifetime gathering had it been true and not just a little bit of ornery fun on the part of organizers (unfortunately, van Gogh died in 1890 and Cézanne in 1906).  Even without them, the show, which celebrates its 100th anniversary February 17th through March 15th, managed to make history.

“Going to the Armory Show is kind of like going to a sideshow,” explains Mary Savig, a specialist from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Organized by artists Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach and Arthur B. Davies the show, which featured some 1,250 works of art from both European and American artists, is seen as the moment modern art took center stage in the United States.

Can you spot the woman in Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2? Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Everything from Impressionism to Cubism was included, sometimes to comical effect. Critics weren’t quite sure what to do with the radical new vision of art on view, particularly when it came to French artist Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic Nude Descending A Staircase. Audiences and critics alike became obsessed with what they thought must be an optical illusion or some sort of visual trick. Savig says, “There was this rhetoric in the newspapers formed around the idea that you would go and you would look for this woman in the painting and was she there? People couldn’t figure it out.” One critic in Chicago even held a very serious lecture trying to highlight precisely where the figure of the woman could be delineated. (For more about Duchamp and his painting, check out Megan Gambino’s document deep dive with materials from the Armory Show)

The New York Tribune declared it a “Remarkable Affair, Despite Some Freakish Absurdities.”

Other reactions were less kind. The International News Service published a cartoon by Frederick Opper that purported to explain art from the exhibition in four panels, including the room featuring “work by ‘nuttists,’ ‘dope-ists,’ topsy-turvists,’ ‘inside-outists’ and ‘toodle-doodle-ists,’ whom police are now trying to locate” and a dotted line which showed the “route taken by Old Masters after seeing advanced art exhibits.”

Critics had a grand time riffing the Cubist works on display at the Armory Show. Courtesy of the Archives of American Art

“That was also to the credit of the organizers of the show,” says Savig, “because they really wanted it to be sensational. They were really hoping to get these headlines that would grab people in to see for themselves what kind of unimaginable artwork was on exhibit.”

The show’s custom pins and buttons borrowed from revolutionary imagery to convey a spirit of freshness. Courtesy of the Archives of American Art

Savig, who curated the exhibit, “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913,” set to open at the Montclair Art Museum on Feb. 17, 2013, says that the show was also a personal mission on the part of the organizers. “[Kuhn] wanted American art to be equal to or eventually surpass the European works in the show. He really wanted. . .to show how avant-garde Europe was. But also, to show, hopefully, that Americans could also be at that level.”

Along with her colleague Kelly Quinn, who created an interactive, online timeline about the planning and execution of the Armory Show, Savig relied on the Archives of American Art’s extensive materials to get the behind-the-scenes stories. Kuhn’s letters back home to his wife, Vera, for example, detail his time spent scouring Europe for material to take back for the show. Writings from artists who volunteered at the show exclaiming over the inspiring works of art offer a personal testimony as to the impact the show had on the course of American art. And tiny details like a letter from a rabbi who lost his umbrella while attending the show, reveal, says Savig, the wide appeal of the show and the audience the exhibit was able to attract.

One example of the kind of passion the show could encourage comes from artist Manierre Dawson, who desperately wanted to buy some of the art on view. “There’s these really sweet pieces of his father saying that he can’t buy the Picasso because it would be outrageous to hang above the mantle and that really it would be better for him to spend his money elsewhere,” says Quinn. “But he had saved his money and he ends up buying a Duchamp drawing. He kind of consoles himself and says, it’s almost as big and almost as good as Nude Descending a Staircase.”

The show traveled to Chicago and Boston after New York. Despite requests from Baltimore, Des Moines and Seattle, the organizers only completed a three-city tour before getting back to their own art. But that was enough to accomplish the goal Kuhn and the others had set out for themselves: to revolutionize art in America.

Edouard Manet’s 1865-1866 depiction of a bull fight was included in the show. Courtesy of Wikimedia

Also on view, Paul Cézanne’s Bathers, 1877-1878. With big names like his included in the show, critics knew they were dealing with serious stuff, even if they didn’t quite understand it. Courtesy of Wikimedia

One of the many American artists whose work appeared in the Armory Show, George Bellows was known for his realist paintings, including his 1909 Both Members of This Club. Courtesy of Wikimedia

Artist Dorr Bothwell’s sketch of visitors at the San Francisco Art Museum in 1942 during World War II.

Imagine walking in the footsteps of an artist visiting an art gallery. Are you feeling inspiration or intimidation? And what would you think if you happened upon an unguarded guard bored and asleep at his post?

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, which collects the sketchbooks, letters, financial records and other ephemera documenting the lives of American artists, answers some of these questions in its new show, “A Day at the Museum,” which opened recently at the Lawrence A Fleischman Gallery.

Curator Mary Savig says that the multifaceted exhibit sheds light not only on the lives of the artists, but also on museums themselves—how they’ve evolved over time, as well as their roles as artistic incubators, educating and opening minds to art, history and culture. But before you dash away, alarmed by the didactic, consider some of the tales revealed here.

In one oral history interview, Conceptual artist Eleanor Antin recalls her childhood visits to the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. “I used to pick one picture. I’d look around seriously and I’d pick one picture that I would just study,” she says. “I’d look at other things, too, but I’d spend much of my time that day in front of that picture. I remember those [pictures] in great detail, because I really looked at them very deeply and with great pleasure.”

Sculptor Lee Bontecou also visited New York City museums in her youth. She tells the story of being stunned by a Van Gogh exhibit that she saw with her mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Both of us were bowled over. It was incredible,” she says in her oral history recording. “We both just held hands and went through the whole thing.”

Pioneering light artist Dan Flavin, who worked at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1960s, wrote to an art curator saying the museum’s exhibits inspired the early designs of his art. And it was collage artist Romare Bearden who visited Italy’s Museo Della Conservatori in the 1950s and found all of its guards fast asleep. “Anyone could have walked away with the whole museum,” he wrote to a mentor.

One document reveals that New York’s American Museum of Natural History, now one of the world’s most respected museums, was a bit more carnival than cultural when it opened. Painter Jervis McEntee wrote in his diary after a visit in 1877 that he enjoyed seeing a fat woman and a tattooed man.

“In a lot of ways, museum-going has changed,” Savig says, “so we want to show people the things that are the same or why things are different.”

The exhibit collects not only letters by famous artists, but diary entries, sketches from museum visits, and photos of the famous and digerati visiting museums. Other recorded stories delight us with the memories of special visits. In total, around 50 documents and recordings from the past two centuries are featured.

The main goal, Savig says, is to show how the range and depth of American art reflect the variety of experiences a person, artist or otherwise, might have at a museum: “Some people have fun going to see exhibitions with their children or their parents, and some people are just there to study, because they’re students, some people are guards. We really wanted to show a variety of experiences at museums, because that’s what our visitors will have.”

Savig encourages visitors to share their experiences, too.

“A Day at the Museum”—the museum exhibit about visiting museum exhibits—is open until June 2, 2013. The exhibit has its own hash tag, #DayAtTheMuseum, and a Flickr page on which museum-goers can post photos their trips to museums around the world. Check out some of the shared photos below.

Visitors at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. © Glyn Lowe Photoworks.

People and paintings in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Laurent Yokel.

Mixed reviews of a statue in Berlin’s Mitte Museum. © Mahoroba Foto.

A T-rex invades the Natural History Museum. © Tim Aldworth

A woman and her daughter study a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. © Huub Louppen

Arturo Rodríguez made this Van Gogh-inspired card for Helen L. Kohen, ca. 1980-1999. From Handmade Holiday Cards from 20th-Century Artists.

Friday, November 23: ZooLights 

It’s that time of year at last, when we get to see all of our favorite Zoo creatures as giant, light-up sculptures! That’s right, folks, ZooLights is back at the National Zoo. So yeah, you can go and enjoy the wildlife and educational extras (and you should) but the real show starts at night when dazzling greens, yellows and reds bring the Zoo to life. The show attracts 100,000 visitors each year. And new this year, the Conservation Carousel done in the grand tradition of old-fashioned carousels with handcrafted representations of the Zoo’s animal icons. Model trains, snowless tubing and plenty of photo opportunities, ZooLights entertains young and old. Admission is free. Parking $9 FONZ members,
$16 nonmembers. Begins Friday 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. National Zoo.

Saturday, November 24: Booksigning with Mary Savig, Handmade Holiday Cards

Author Mary Savig will be signing her book, Handmade Holiday Cards from 20th-Century Artists. With 190 reproductions of holiday cards straight from the Archives of American Art’s collections, the book is an historical tour of commonplace commercial graphic design. From the Mondrian-inspired abstractions to Japanese prints, the collection provides an alternative take on holiday greetings with designs by famous artist, including Josef Albers, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Robert Motherwell. Talk with the author about her research process and maybe get some ideas for your own holiday card. Free. 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. The Castle.

Sunday, November 25: Metaphysical Baseball

David Stinson will be at the American History Museum signing copies of his book, Deadball, A Metaphysical Baseball Novel, about a minor league player possessed by visions of baseball greats gone by. Driven to the point of obsession, he begins traveling the country to see for himself the vanished stadiums and places that made baseball history. A novel thriller, the book also incorporates plenty of baseball history that fans will appreciate and enjoy. Free. 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. American History Museum.

The “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon” exhibit maps out a web of relatedness between Bacon and well-known artists, celebrities and historical figures. Photo by Kat J. McAlpine.

According to the theory of the six degrees of separation, she is connected to Albert Einstein, Cézanne, Eleanor Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Frida Kahlo and President Ulysses S. Grant.

But who is Peggy Bacon?

Bacon (1895-1997) was a New York artist and talented caricaturist of celebrities and artists, however, her name is by no means well known. The Archives of American Art specialists, who created the “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon” exhibit, do not expect people to know who Peggy Bacon is—in fact, that’s  the point.

While the original concept of the six degrees of separation dates back to Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who developed a radio telegraph system, the term became commonplace in 1990 when playwright John Guare debuted his production, “Six Degrees of Separation.” The play was based on the idea that no more than six acquaintances separate any two people.

Playing off the popular celebrity trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which players try to prove that any actor or actress can be linked to Kevin Bacon in fewer than six steps of film roles, the “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon” exhibit creators hoped to show how a relatively unknown but well-connected artist was linked through archival documents to many of art and society’s most influential people.

“We wanted it to be surprising,” says Mary Savig, the exhibit’s curator and an archives specialist at Archives of American Art. “We chose Peggy Bacon because we knew nobody would know who she is.”

On display June 27, 2012, through November 4, 2012, in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, demonstrates how artists inform and inspire each other. “They don’t just work alone in their studios,” Savig said.

The exhibit is also intended to demonstrate the “shrinking world theory.”

The advent of radio technology, telecommunications and most recently, social media, has vastly increased the connectedness among the world’s inhabitants. In fact, Savig says, a study conducted last year by Facebook and the University of Milan demonstrated that social media has reduced the average degree of relatedness between each person on Earth to a mere 4.74 degrees.

The woman at the heart of it all, Peggy Bacon, photographed circa 1920. Photo by Soichi Sunami, courtesy the Archives of American Art.

“These documents show exactly how people are personally connected,” Savig says, pointing to a layout of correspondence and photographs connecting Bacon to artists like Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Janice Lowry, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Archival letters and materials provide paper trails to document each of the connections in Bacon’s web of six degrees.

The incredible ability to present such detailed documentation stems from the concerns of former Director of the Detroit Institute of Art E.P. Richardson and art collector Lawrence A. Fleischman. Richardson and Fleischman founded the Archives in 1954 in Detroit as an effort to address the lack of archival material documenting American art and artists. The Archives of American Art became a part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1970, and today holds more than 16 million items in the world’s largest collection of primary resources relating to the history of American art.

The Archives’ fastidious documentation and research of their collection is what allowed for the success of “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon.”

In fact, on the exhibit’s opening day, a member of the public was shocked to find her former babysitter incorporated into Bacon’s web of relatedness.

“The woman pointed to the picture of Mary Chapin Carpenter and said, ‘She used to babysit me,’” Savig explains. Carpenter, a folk and country music singer, is bubbled into Bacon’s web as a sixth-degree connection.

Carpenter is included on the web for her connection to Joseph Cornell, who was the inspiration for her 1996 song “Ideas Are Like Stars.” Cornell is connected to Ad Reinhardt for their shared Christmas Eve birthdays and the fact that both artists’ works were displayed in art dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 Collages exhibit. Reinhardt described in a memoir how in 1938 he listened to loud jazz music carrying through the walls of the neighboring studio to his, occupied by Stuart Davis.  Davis was represented by art dealer Edith Halpert who represented his work at The Downtown Gallery for close to four decades. Halpert opened her gallery in 1926 at which time she displayed the works of Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And Kuniyoshi developed a friendship with Peggy Bacon while the two attended classes together at the Art Students League.

The visitor’s relationship with Carpenter drives home the entire point of the exhibit, Savig says. “We all really can connect to Bacon.”

Search through the letters, photos and more from the exhibit here. Or, join the circle and become her friend on Facebook.

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? Ask Smithsonian.

Our inquisitive readers are rising to the challenge we gave them last month. The questions are pouring in and we’re ready for more. Do you have any questions for our curators? Submit your questions here.

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? — Marjorie Mathews, Silver Spring, Maryland

That’s the most popular question we get, but we don’t really satisfy people by giving them a number. There are a number of answers, but the best one is that we honestly don’t know. It’s a little bit like Liz Taylor’s jewels being sold in December—all kinds of people guessed at what they would sell for, but everybody I know was way off. Only when those pieces were opened up to bidding at a public auction could you find out what their values were. When they were sold, then at least for that day and that night you could say, well, they were worth that much. The Hope Diamond is kind of the same way, but more so. There’s simply nothing else like it. So how do you put a value on the history, on the fact it’s been here on display for over 50 years and a few hundred million people have seen it, and on that fact it’s a rare blue diamond on top of everything else? You don’t. – Jeffrey E. Post, mineralogist, National Museum of Natural History

What’s the worst impact of ocean acidification so far?- Nancy Schaefer, Virginia Beach, Virginia

The impacts of ocean acidification are really just starting to be felt, but two big reports that came out in 2011 show that it could have very serious effects on coral reefs. These studies did not measure the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but rather its effect of making the ocean more acidic when it dissolves in the ocean. Places where large amounts of carbon dioxide seep into the water from the sea floor provide a natural experiment and show us how ocean waters might look, say, 50 or 100 years from now. Both studies showed branching, lacy, delicate coral forms are likely to disappear, and with them that kind of three-dimensional complexity so many species depend on. Also, other species that build a stony skeleton or shell, such as oysters or mussels, are likely to be affected. This happens because acidification makes carbonate ions, which these species need for their skeletons, less abundant.

Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist
National Museum of Natural History

Art and artifacts from ancient South Pacific and Pacific Northwest tribes have similarities in form and function. Is it possible that early Hawaiians caught part of the Kuroshio Current of the North Pacific Gyre to end up along the northwest coast of America from northern California to Alaska? — April Amy Croan, Maple Valley, Washington

Those similarities have given rise to various theories, including trans-Pacific navigation, independent drifts of floating artifacts, inadvertent crossings by ships that have lost their rudders or rigging, or whales harpooned in one area that died or were captured in a distant place. Some connections are well-known, like feather garment fragments found in an archaeological site in Southeast Alaska that appear to have been brought there by whaling ships that had stopped in the Hawaiian Islands, a regular route for 19th-century whalers. Before the period of European contact, the greatest similarities are with the southwest Pacific, not Hawaii. The Kushiro current would have facilitated Asian coastal contacts with northwestern North America, but would not have helped Hawaiians. The problem of identification is one of context, form and dating. Most of the reported similarities are either out of their original context (which can’t be reconstructed), or their form is not specific enough to relate to another area’s style, or the date of creation cannot be established. To date there is no acceptable proof for South Pacific-Northwest Coast historical connections that predates the European whaling era, except for links that follow the coastal region of the North Pacific into Alaska.

William Fitzhugh, archeologist
Natural History Museum