Freak Art Scrapbook

In 1913, the year that the Armory Show hit Chicago, an anonymous Chicago artist gathered every newspaper clipping from the infamous Art Institute exhibition into an extraordinary handmade document. Freak Art Scrapbook presents this folk ledger documenting the key presentation of early twentieth-century American and European modernist art, a collection of witty and vitriolic snippets from the popular press, much of it dripping with satire as an entire city took to lampooning modern art. Lovingly reproduced in all its bilious, acidic yellow, sporting pre-jazz cartoons that snicker at Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, the scrapbook is a complex, multilayered artifact, not only a register of the Midwestern response to modernism, but also a fascinating glimpse of the central arguments about populism and the vanguard of art.