The Women of the Legendary 1913 Armory Show

September 21, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

The 1913 Armory Show broke new ground for art and for women. Photo: Percy Rainford, public domain

From February 17 to March 15, 1913, New York art audiences experienced a seismic shift. “The International Exhibition of Modern Art” filled the cavernous 69th Regiment Armory on 25th Street and then seeped into the city’s consciousness and across national newspaper pages. Word had come back from Europe—particularly Paris—that unheard of things were happening in art. People wanted to see it for themselves, so a group representing the Association of American Painters and Sculptors with connections abroad made their way to France. When they traveled back across the Atlantic, they crossed a cultural Rubicon. The Armory Show, as it came to be known, was a watershed moment for art.

It was either a screaming success or a laughable failure. Everyone had an opinion. One New York critic likened Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase to “an explosion in a shingle factory.” An article in the Chicago Tribune quoted an observer as saying the show made him “fear for the world.” On the final day of its run at the Art Institute of Chicago, students held a mock trial, found Henri Matisse guilty of artistic murder and prepared to burn an effigy of his Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra).

Some 1,300 works by 300 artists filled the Armory. Cubists, Futurists, Fauvists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Expressionists all clamored for attention, and attention they got. But among the Picassos, Brâncușis, van Goghs, Cézannes and Matisses, there were works by five European and 45 American women artists. Most are not well known, but in recent years, overdue attention has begun to be given to them.

Fifty out of 300 is hardly parity, but 16.6 percent is a greater showing than many later art exhibitions could claim. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed their art collective in response to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” which featured only 13 women out of 165 artists (or 7.9 percent).

It all comes down to persistent and pervasive gender inequity, Katie Wat, the Deputy Director for Art, Programs and Public Engagement and Chief Curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts told Observer. “Considering the uneven statistics of today, contemporary audiences will likely be shocked to know that there were any women in a major show in 1913, let alone 50.”

A painting of a woman in a green dress holding a young girl in a red dress on her lap, with a green landscape visible through the window behind them. — Mary Cassatt, *Reine Lefebre and Margot before a Window*, 1902. Wikimedia Commons

Some were famous in their time, like Mary Cassatt and Marie Laurencin. Others have begun to receive the recognition they deserve recently, like Agnes Pelton, whose ethereal abstractions have been discussed in relation to the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most were simply not included in the history they helped make.

“Women have historically been overlooked by the western art canon, omitted from history books and collections. So, it is sadly not surprising that many of these women have been forgotten or left out of the story,” noted Wat.

There are many reasons the art world cast a blind eye on the women of the 1913 exhibition. Many of them later left art to marry and raise families. Some left New York for the same reason and fell out of the art world’s notice. Others practiced for years but gained little attention. Some turned to teaching or spent their time supporting the careers of their artist husbands. Still others, and there were several, made art their means of living and had their work acquired by major museums. But how did they end up in the Armory Show in the first place?

There were several reasons for that, too. In 1890 the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed. (Sadly, in 1911, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was formed, but happily that failed.) 1913 saw massive women’s marches around the country, including up New York’s Fifth Avenue. Congressional hearings revealed the mistreatment of women who’d been arrested for protesting, and the National Women’s Party was formed. In 1913, women garment workers were organizing and fighting for better working conditions and fair pay. By that time, the Art Students League in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art were offering professional training to women students. 1913 was a watershed moment for women, as well.

In the art world, a combination of women’s initiative, women supporters, key women organizers and lots of serious, dedicated women artists percolated into something remarkable. Lillie P. Bliss, who went on to co-found the Museum of Modern Art; Katherine S. Dreier, an artist, lecturer and fervent advocate of Modern Art; Mabel Dodge, a philanthropist known for her weekly Greenwich Village salons and Clara Davidge, one of New York’s first female gallerists, all contributed financial support. In fact, 19 of the 24 substantial supporters of the Armory Show were women.

Women collectors were also key to the success of the exhibition. From Gertrude Stein in Paris to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Greenwich Village, they lent works and later bought works that were included, directly supporting the artists.

And then, there were the women artists, themselves. Thirty were initially invited. Twenty more applied and were accepted. Most were thrilled to be included in what Walt Kuhn, a co-organizer, referred to as America’s “Salon de Refusés.” However, one prominent female artist, it’s been suggested, was not amused. Mary Cassatt’s work was meant to be a bridge between the acceptable and the audacious. She, herself, never approved of Modernist tendencies, and may not have even known that she was included. But other artists notable in their time, like Marguerite Zorach, participated as well.

A painting of a reclining nude woman on a dark chaise lounge, with a large red flower in the foreground and an abstract interior behind her. — The painting Marguerite Thompson Zorach exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show is lost to history, but her 1922 *Nude Reclining* is now part of the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Courtesy NMWA

Ethel Myers, who was known for humorous caricatures of Manhattanites, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, a sculptor who’d broken into the professional ranks years before, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Edith Dimock, the wife of William Glackens, one of the founders of the Ashcan School, all exhibited alongside their husbands, as did Zorach.

Gwen John, a Welsh artist living in Paris, was a model and muse to Auguste Rodin and traveled in the same circles as Matisse and Picasso. She exhibited a painting now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Florence Howell Barkley left a hardscrabble life in Kentucky and made her way to the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, before securing work as an illustrator for The New York World newspaper. Her best-known work, the highly abstracted and atmospheric Landscape over the City, was included.

That most of these women never achieved fame as artists isn’t unfair. In fact, most of the American men who exhibited didn’t either. It’s hard to stand out against a backdrop of works by artists like Monet, Goya, Munch and Delacroix. The Armory Show’s list of exhibiting artists is truly jaw-dropping.

World War I broke out just a year later, in 1914, and another seismic shift took place. It was followed by the Great Depression, and then World War II. Humanity had other things on its collective mind. But, rather than a story of injustice, it’s remarkable that not one or two, or a handful, but 50 women in 1913 were accepted by the all-male Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and showed side by side with the most prominent artists of the day in one of the most consequential exhibitions of all time.

A softly painted portrait of a young girl in a lavender dress and brown hat, seated with her hands folded against a muted pink background. — Gwen John, *La Petite Modèle*, ca. 1915-20. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 26 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Ethel Myers’ works from the Armory Show are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Agnes Pelton was given a major show at the Whitney in 2020. Marguerite Zorach was awarded the Logan Medal of the Arts and her work is housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among other collections. Florence Howell Barkley made it from Maysville, Kentucky to the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, and Marie Laurencin’s work can be seen from MoMA and the Barnes Foundation to the Tate Gallery in London, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. They are there for future generations to discover.

Many of the women of the Armory Show have been featured in and had their work acquired by Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts. Susan Fisher Sterling, the NMWA’s outgoing Alice West Director, told Observer, “NMWA is a unique institution, founded on the principles of achieving gender equity in the arts by championing women artists, such as those who were featured in the 1913 Armory show. We are proud to have works by several of these artists in our collection. Some, like Mary Cassatt, have become household names, while others, like Marie Laurencin and Marguerite Zorach, were written out of the historical narrative and are relatively unknown today. Others, like Gwen John, are enjoying a much-deserved rediscovery. We are excited to host a major retrospective of her work at NMWA in Fall 2027 as part of our 40th anniversary programming. The museum’s dual mission of advocacy and exhibition is a huge part of what has made it such a joy and a privilege for me to be part of NMWA.”

Change is constant, both in the arts, and beyond. As more women become directors of museums, acquiring editors and collectors, and as market interest in women artists grows, new research begins. The canon evolves. The women of the Armory Show may or may not ever become household names, but how many artists do?

“This can change if we all take part in addressing inequity—with our patronage, with questions we ask, with the shows we go to visit,” noted Wat. “To quote an article by Amy Whitaker and Roman Kräussl in a 2025 Art Basel UBS market report, ‘Works are famous until they are not. And works are obscure until they are not. For every William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whose works were popular in his day and are now relegated to museum basements, there is a Howardena Pindell, whose work over decades has just begun to receive due recognition, including by markets.’”