What a year was 1913! In an exhibition in a New York Armory, American viewers confronted Cubism and abstraction for the first time. In Vienna, the audience at a concert of atonal music by Schoenberg and others broke out into a near-riot. And in Paris, Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring burst on stage with inflammatory results.
Culture Shock 1913 tells the stories behind these and other groundbreaking events that year, and goes back to consider what led to this mad, Modernist moment. "I think in a lot of ways it was just the beginning of a century just of absolute chaos and nightmare, and as so often, the artists heard it and reflected it first," notes the critic Tim Page. WNYC’s Sara Fishko speaks with thinkers, authors, musicians, art curators, and historians about this unsettling era of sweeping change — and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age.
This Studio 360 episode is an abridged version of a one-hour documentary Sara Fishko produced for WNYC. The original program, videos, and related podcasts can be found here.
Host/Executive Producer: Sara Fishko
Associate Producer: Laura Mayer
Editor: Karen Frillmann
Mix Engineer: Wayne Shulmister, additional mixing by Edward Haber
(Originally aired: December 28, 2012)
Slideshow: Art that rocked the world in 1913
Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was featured in the landmark Armory Show.
(Photograph taken by spDuchamp)
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931)
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany, version I, 1913 (after a marble of 1912)
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)
Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, 1913-14
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp)
Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913)
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp)
Natalia Goncharova, Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest, 1913 (dated on reverse 1911)
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)
Roger de La Fresnaye, The Conquest of the Air, 1913
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Mikhail Larionov, Rayonist Composition: Domination of Red, 1912-13 (dated on painting 1911)
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)
Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-13 (dated on reverse 1912)
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Kazimir Malevich, Samovar, 1913
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Henri Matisse, The Back (II), 1911 (?) - early March or April 1913
(© 2012 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
Piet Mondrian, Composition in Brown and Gray, 1913
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)
Francis Picabia, I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie, 1914, possibly begun 1913
(© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)
Morgan Russell, Creavit Deus Hominem (Synchromy Number 3: Color Counterpoint), 1913
(Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)