The Modern Gallery and American Commodity Culture

Though little remarked since its occurrence, an event that took place on 7 October 1915 in New York city bears considerable significance for our understanding of the rapport between the historical avant-garde and modern commodity culture. On that day the Modern Gallery, located at 500 Fifth Avenue, opened its doors for its first exhibition. Created by Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, Agnes Ernst Meyer, and other young members of Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 entourage, the Modern Gallery was conceived of as the commercial “expression” of the famous “spirit of 291.” That firmly avant-garde figures such as de Zayas and Picabia would feel Stieglitz’s pioneering modern art venue required an openly commercial off-shoot may seem strange, since current consensus tells us that such artists ought to have sardonically opposed the commodification of the art object, or at least been highly ambivalent on the subject. ¹ But of course the strangeness of this development is precisely why it is worth recounting and analyzing. The story of how the commercial Modern Gallery emerged out of the declining anti-commercialism of Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue offers key insights into the surprisingly optimistic nature of the avant-garde’s engagement with the modern fact of commodification and the powerful attraction exerted by machine-age American commodity culture on the aesthetic and institutional imaginations of both European and American avant-garde artists of the time. The fact of this attraction to commodity culture puts into question the widely held belief that the historical avant-garde sought to change “life” through “art”: in New York, avant-garde artists sought artistic direction from the machine-age life around them, so that “art” was shaped by “life”—both in aesthetics and its institutional arenas; for figures such as de Zayas and Picabia, the primary motivation behind the artistic and institutional work of the New York avant-garde was the desire to be absolutely contemporary with, rather than in opposition to, modern society as emblematized by New York’s commodity culture.

The Modern Gallery opened within the context of Alfred Stieglitz’s decline as pioneering avant-garde impresario and institution builder and the contemporaneous expansion of the market for modernist art in New York. Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work and his 291 gallery came to an end in the summer of 1917 after a steady decline in activity that began just after the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show. Though scholars have offered numerous reasons for this decline, the primary one is the failure of Stieglitz’s long-standing anti-commercial strategy for coping with post-Armory Show modernist art market expansion. That strategy was now replaced by another advanced by the de Zayas-Picabia group, one much better adapted to the post-Armory Show atmosphere because of its optimistic belief that art’s commodification could afford the avant-garde the opportunity to “pay its own way” as a contemporary expression of the energies animating modern American society.

Camera Work, originally a quarterly, appeared sporadically after the Armory show until, from the summer of 1914 to its final number in June 1917, only three slim issues appeared. When it ceased publication it had only thirty-eight subscribers. ² During this same period, Stieglitz became far less active in his pursuit of significant new artists for exhibition at 291. Showings centered primarily on works by artists already familiar to the 291 public, such as John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Abraham Walkowitz; significant ground-breaking exhibitions at 291 were organized not by Stieglitz but by the younger de Zayas. (De Zayas was a Mexican-American caricaturist and collector who established contacts between 291 and members of the Parisian avant-garde, particularly those associated with Guillaume Apollinaire’s review Les Soirées de Paris; his expositions at 291 included the “African Savage Art” show of 1914 and the U.S. debut of Italian Futurist Gino Severini in 1917.) Even the two notable debuts that Stieglitz himself arranged—the 1916 debut of his protégé, the photographer Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keefe...