Press & Success

To celebrate the Armory Show’s success, the Press Committee of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) hosted a beefsteak dinner for “friends and enemies of the press”at the New York restaurant Healy’s on March 8. Accompanied by singing and dancing, especially that of AAPS member D. Putnam Brinley, winner of the high-kicking contest, lawyer, patron, and modern art collector John Quinn announced to a group of artists and representatives from almost every metropolitan daily paper that nearly 50,000 people had attended the Armory Show since its opening 19 days ago and that over 100 works had been sold. Entertaining the attendees, Brinley also danced the Turkey Trot, Tango, and Can Can with the considerably shorter modernist sculptor Jo Davidson. The New York Times reported that the show’s “success in attendance and sales demonstrates that the American people as an art-loving people are second only to France.”

Image: International Exhibition of Modern Art dinner menu signed by guests, Association of American Painters and Sculptors (New York, N.Y.) March 8, 1913. Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, 1859‐1978, bulk 1900‐1949, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.