The breakthrough of Modernism

The big city, the skyscraper and jazz gave the United States a modernity of its own – and the Armory Show of 1913 brought in the European avant-garde.

Around 1900 a group of painters in New York turned their gaze to everyday life in the big city: backyards, washing lines, boxing matches and crowded streets. They were later known as the Ashcan School and wanted to depict life as it was. Meanwhile, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz showed modern European art in his small gallery 291 on Fifth Avenue.

The great turning point came with the Armory Show in New York in 1913. The exhibition showed some 1,300 works, among them Matisse, Picasso and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which provoked both laughter and anger. For the first time the public could see Cubism and Fauvism at close quarters, and many American artists changed direction.

In the interwar years several paths ran side by side. Georgia O'Keeffe painted enlarged flowers and desert landscapes, Edward Hopper lonely people in cities, and the Harlem Renaissance gave African American artists and writers a new voice. During the Depression the government employed thousands of artists through the Federal Art Project to produce murals and posters.

• The Armory Show, 1913
• Hopper's lonely cities
• Carl Milles and Cranbrook