ABSTRACT
In the early months of 1913, the American public was fairly unanimous in its response to the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at New York’s Armory of the 69th Regiment. Edith Wharton surely would have been aware of the controversy encircling the Armory Show and modern art in general, and moving between Paris and New York as she did, its influence would have been hard to ignore. Wharton’s novel of 1913 – set in the first decade of the twentieth century – is, like the Armory Show, international in scope, and it poignantly documents America’s jarring and at times painful passage into the new century. Wharton’s description of this romantic encounter – Ralph Marvell receives a blinding picture which his veins and brain are ill-equipped to process – perhaps unintentionally suggests the criticisms levelled at experimental, modernist visual art.
