her tremendous energy and her rare sagacity and taste, she set about, quite spontaneously, arranging for an exhibition, the first great exhibition of the post-impressionist and cubist painters in New York. This show has now become almost a legend but it was the reality of that winter. It was the first, and possibly the last, exhibition of paintings held in New York which everybody attended. Everybody went and everybody talked about it. Street-car conductors asked for your opinion of the Nude Descending the Staircase, as they asked you for your nickel. Elevator boys grinned about Matisse's Le Madras Rouge, Picabia's La Danse à la Source, and Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany, as they lifted you to the twenty-third floor. Ladies, you met at dinner, found Archipenko's sculpture very amusing, but was it art? Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery had nourished similar ideas for years, spouted like a geyser for three weeks and then, after a proper interval, like Old Faithful, began again. Actresses began to prefer Odilon Redon to Raphael Kirchner. To sum up, the show was a bang-up, whale of a success, quite overshadowing the coeval appearance of the Irish Players, chaperoned by Lady Gregory. It was cartooned, it was caricatured, it was Dr. Frank Craned. Scenes in the current revues at the theatres were devoted to it; it was even mentioned in' a burlesque at the Columbia. John Wanamaker advertised cubist gowns and ladies began to wear green, blue, and violet wigs, and to
Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/135
