Museum Open

Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn is the first exhibition to relate the American, French and Haitian revolutions as a single, global narrative. Spanning decades of enormous political and cultural changes, from the triumph of British imperial power in 1763 to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, Revolution! traces how an ideal of popular sovereignty, introduced through the American fight for independence, soon sparked more radical calls for a recognition of universal human rights, and set off attacks on both sides of the Atlantic against hereditary privilege and slavery. It also recounts the famed careers of such revolutionaries as Thomas Paine, Jean-Baptiste Belley and Dominique Toussaint L’Overture.

This exhibition will revisit the famous 1913 New York Armory Show on its 100th anniversary. The original exhibition, organized by a small group of American artists and presented at the Lexington Avenue Armory, introduced the American public to European avant-garde painting and sculpture. The public sensation and the polemical critical responses to the show represented a watershed in the history of American art. The exhibition included works by such well-known European modernists as Paul Cezanne, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin, as well as leaders of American art such as Robert Henri, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Childe Hassam, along with the early work by such budding modernists as Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis.