katherine dreier

In 1912, in New York she became treasurer of the German Home for Recreation of Women and Children and helped to found the Little Italy Neighborhood Association in Brooklyn. She was invited to exhibit her own work and her collection in the influential 1913 Armory Show. Contemporary criticism of her work reduced Dreier's status to a "decorator" locating her within the amateur field, producing in a less sophisticated medium - despite the decorative arts being an essential source of inspiration for many avant-garde painters and sculptors.

The invisibility of Dreier and many other women who participated in the Armory Show - and in avant-garde circles in general - begins with criticism that dismissed women who made art works connected to the schools of Modernism as imitative, rather than capable of assimilating theories by canonical artists. The Armory Show was dependent on a number of women artists who participated in the growth of modern art in New York in the years around the 1913 exhibition, yet the critical reception of this, such as Frank Crowninshield's 'Armory Show' in Vogue, 1940, Mayer Shapiro's and Milton Brown's writing have conditioned perceptions of the period to see affluent women as mere collectors because they were the wives and daughters of the "magnates." But aspects of patronage had began to shift from the industrial capitalists - guided merely by a desire to amass more wealth - to a new class of 'cultural aesthetes' who were:

"...the readers and followers of Neitzsche, Bergson, Whitman, Veblen, and often Blavatsky. They represented a professed desire to keep the art market autonomous from the markets for other goods where "it is not for the maker to set the goal for art, but for the buyer."

In 1914 Dreier formed the Cooperative Mural Workshops, a combination art school and workshop modeled in part after the Arts and Crafts movement and the Omega Workshops of Roger Fry. The organisation, which operated until 1917, also included the dancer Isadora Duncan. In her painting Dreier began working toward non-representational portraiture, and in 1916 she was invited to help found the Society of Independent Artists (SIA) which brought her into an influential circle of European and American avant-garde artists, most notably working with Marcel Duchamp as friend, partner and patron.

The SIA (which continued until 1944 and also had a Mexican chapter) were a group of American and European artists who aimed to support regular exhibitions of contemporary art. It is thought it was based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants, founded in 1884 (which had rejected Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase') and which acted as a kind of institutionalized Salon des Refusés. The other founders with Dreier included Marcel Duchamp, William J. Glackens, Albert Gleizes, John Marin, Walter Pach, Man Ray, John Sloan and Joseph Stella. The managing director was Walter Arensberg. Much the same group had been responsible for the Armory Show in 1913, which they quickly aimed to surpass.

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