The Armory Art Show, which opened in 1913, was the first large modern art exhibition. It was during a time of modernism and change and the pieces of art selected to be included somehow portrayed this. They were controversial and many claimed that they weren’t even art. As I walked through the exhibit I appreciated most of the beautiful pieces of art. However, none of them struck a chord until I reached one piece that I kept returning to because it was so complex and compelling that I couldn’t get enough.

When I saw Young Girl by Jacques Villon (aka Gaston Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp’s elder brother) despite being unsure of what it was, I immediately fell in love. The vibrant colors which stood out amongst Picabia’s Dancing at the Spring and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, definitely caught my eye, but I had to take a moment to discern the “young girl” in the painting who is meant to be Villon’s twenty-three-year-old sister, Yvonne sitting in an armchair. Paintings like these were called “puzzle pictures,” paintings that seemed unintelligible and were deemed deceptive because one could not look at it and immediately know what it was. However, that’s partly what I think makes it so special. I love how every time I looked at this painting (which was many, because I kept coming back to stare at it) I found something new. There was order amongst the chaos and a method to the madness. Villon used geometry in this abstract, Cubist artwork; the mathematical proportion called the Golden Section, volumetric pyramids and triangles and numerous other shapes. It’s not something that “anyone could do,” like many claim about other pieces of modern art. What’s meant to be the eyes, eyebrows, lips, jawbone, and cheeks is subject to opinion; there is more than one possibility for each, but somehow it fits in more than one way. 

The piece may be conveying that the numerous changes at the time can each be seen in a different light. While one person may see one thing, someone else can see something totally different. But there’s no right or wrong, it’s a matter of perspective and opinion.