Kate Walbert on Lillie P. Bliss

The Armory Show, masterminded by [American artist Arthur B.] Davies and a collective known as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, sought to challenge the old ways of the National Academy, the league that had always defined what was and was not considered of artistic value. (The AAPS’s plan to bring the European avant-garde to New York audiences was so radical that they chose an uprooted pine tree, inspired by the Massachusetts flag flown during the American Revolutionary War, as their symbol.) Astonishingly, of the 24 funding patrons of the show, 19 were women, their gifts accounting for more than half of the exhibition’s total cost of $10,050. This may have been a behind-the-scenes opportunity to claim a “part of modernity for themselves.”

Lillie P. Bliss, c. 1924

Lillie P. Bliss was chief among them. She underwrote around 25 percent of the overall cost, although because she did so anonymously, funneling her contributions through Davies, the exact amount of her investment isn’t known. Perhaps hiding behind Davies was a calculated move, and Bliss intuitively understood that anything that suggested ownership and “claim” in the Armory endeavor would stink of ego. (She was decidedly less inclined to the showmanship of some of the other collectors, such as John Quinn, the Ohio-born son of Irish immigrants who championed the exhibition and, in an opening night speech, suggested that “it would change the course of American history itself.”) Or Bliss may have consciously stepped back so as not to be an interrupting presence between “the perceiver and the work of art.”

No matter. On February 12, 1913, the exhibition opened in the 69th Regiment Armory at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue, and from the moment its massive doors were unlocked, nothing was the same for Bliss, just a year shy of her 50th birthday. She visited the exhibition daily, milling about with the crowds that jammed into the cavernous space to view the more than 1,600 works of modern art on display. These included works already in Bliss’s collection, such as an oil by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a painting and a pastel by Edgar Degas. Bliss also bought two pictures by Odilon Redon, including Silence (c. 1911), an oil on paper of an androgynous head modeled after the artist’s wife, her fingers held to her lips as if to say shhh. Singled out years later by a critic as one of the more extraordinary works in the Bliss collection and an example of her “well-nigh matchless tact of selection,” the writer described Silence as suggestive of “the environing silence into which we pass, in which, in truth, we live in spite of the clamor endlessly assailing our senses.”

Odilon Redon. Silence. c. 1911. Oil on prepared paper

Most important, however, was Bliss’s purchase of two color lithographs of Paul Cézanne’s Bathers. Bliss was influenced by Davies in her admiration for the artist, as were several other important New York collectors. Davies seemed to have sway; he was often the first buyer of new work by French artists exhibited in New York galleries. In 1911 the influential photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz had shown the first American exhibition of Cézanne’s watercolors at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known as 291, his tiny gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue; Davies bought the only work sold at the show.

Bliss’s two new lithographs joined The Road (c. 1871), a landscape painting she had in all likelihood purchased from Davies the previous year, in 1912, after he scooped it up while in Paris scouting pictures for the Armory Show. At the exhibition, it was listed as an anonymous loan, with no sale price. (Once Bliss found her way to Cézanne, she stayed: her bequest to MoMA included 26 works by the artist, including the paintings The Bather, from circa 1885, and Still Life with Apples, from 1895–98, which she purchased in 1922 for the exorbitant price of $21,000, equivalent to nearly $400,000 today.)

Paul Cézanne. Still Life with Apples. 1895–98. Oil on canvas

The new collector charged ahead at the Armory Show, undaunted by the New York Times editorial board’s declaration that modern art could “disrupt, degrade, if not destroy not only art but literature and society as well.” Belmont wrote of her friend, “Criticism, even ridicule...had no effect upon her whatever.” She continued,

“She smiled confidently at those who had nothing in common with her beliefs and went her serene, cheerful way. Just as a rock at the ocean’s edge meets the pounding of the teasing surf, after each attack the rock emerges unchanged—it is the wave which breaks and leaves the rock gleaming in the sunlight as bright as before.”

Did Bliss’s papers describe the show’s circus-like atmosphere? How the curious visitors gawked at Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), from 1912, and mocked the recitations of the “word portraits”—the only literature for sale—of writer Gertrude Stein? (Pablo Picasso had offered a characteristically droll reply to the criticism that Stein, friend and champion of so many of the French modernists, did not at all resemble his famous pre-Cubist portrait of her, one that took him months to complete. “She will,” he said.) Did Bliss address the thrill of the scene, her impressions of the enormous, block-long Armory building, constructed for military purposes and transformed in 1913 into a temple to the avant-garde?

One longs to hear Bliss’s own words above the noisy racket of critics and committees of concerned citizens, but we are met, once again, with that familiar silence that echoes throughout so many of the rooms in the galleries of women’s history.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art today.

The exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern is on view at MoMA November 17, 2024–March 29, 2025.