by Alexander Sanger
One hundred years ago, a February day in 1913, two strangers, both fortyish, one in a formal black suit, wearing a black homburg, with carefully manicured nails, the other in a rumpled tweed suit, carrying in his oil-paint-stained hands a wide-brimmed brown fedora, stand alone in Gallery G of the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue (“The Armory Show”). Gallery G was the English, Irish and German room. A large painting, “The Garden of Love,” that has briefly brought the two men together, is by a Russian living in Munich, Vassily Kandinsky. It is mostly abstract, though some figures are vaguely discernible; it is the only abstract painting in the room — a colorful oil, with a blending of hues like a watercolor — vibrant and seething with energy. Gallery I, two galleries over, which contained, among other revolutionary abstract works, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the Staircase,” was so crowded with gawkers that a visitor could barely see, much less absorb the revolutionary experience of the artworks. The two men had Gallery G and its one abstract painting, and ten realist ones, to themselves. The two men are my grandfathers. The better-dressed one, Edwin Campbell, a doctor turned businessman, lingers enthralled before the Kandinsky, while the other, William Sanger, an architect and sometime painter, though appreciative of Kandinsky’s painterly technique, moves on to the adjoining work, a non-abstract watercolor, “The Political Meeting,” by the Irish Jack Butler Yeats.
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Alexander Sanger 