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Among those who best formulated these concerns were the American social critic Benjamin de Casseres (1873-1945) and the Mexican author and caricature artist Marius De Zayas (1880-1961).  The two had known one another from their days in Mexico City, where de Casseres had gone in 1906 to found the newspaper El Diario Illustrado, to which de Zayas contributed caricatures satirizing some of Mexico City’s most prominent citizens…Stieglitz, who had always been fascinated by the art of caricature, learned of de Zaya’s work through the photographer and critic John Nilsen Laurvik.  On his first visit to the artist’s studio, Stieglitz was so impressed by what he saw that he immediately proposed an exhibition, and on January 4, 1909, a show of twenty-five caricatures by Marius de Zayas opened at 291.  Other than for a favorable review written by de Casseres – published, appropriately, in Camera Work – and scattered notices in the press, the exhibition passed largely unnoticed.

Throughout the years of his association with Stieglitz and the artists who showed at 291, de Zayas’s thoughts and theories about the new art appeared regularly in Camera Work.  It was in this magazine that he outlined his new approach to the art of caricature, and it was here that his ideas about African art and the evolution of form – both subjects of subsequent books – were first presented to the public.  But the article that has drawn the most attention is one that begins with the outspoken proclamation: “Art is daead.”  Although the negative connotation of these words is often cited as one of the earliest published manifestations of a Dada sensibility, the sentence was in fact meant to serve as a positive statement about the birth of a new art.  “We know that death is not absolute but relative,” he wrote, “and that every end is but the beginning of a new and fresh manifestation.”

Within a matter of months, this new manifestation in the arts would make its first grand-scale public appearance in the New York at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors and held at the Sixty-ninth Infantry Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue at Tweny-fifth Street in Manhattan.

Whereas exhibitions at 291 may have prepared some artists and critics for what they saw at the Armory Show, most of the American public was baffled, some even repulsed, by certain examples of the more extreme manifestations of modern European art.  They were especially confused by the Cubist room, which they called a “chamber of horrors,” and with few exceptions, they regarded Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase the greatest horror of all.