The exhibition Davies co-organised ran from 17 February to 15 March 1913 and drew nearly 90,000 visitors to the Armory in New York, the largest audience any contemporary art exhibition had attracted in the United States, before travelling on to Chicago where attendance climbed even higher^[3]. Its impact came from the scale of the European work on show, including Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse, most of which American audiences had never seen in any quantity, alongside Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which became the exhibition's single most mocked and most discussed picture^[3]. Reaction was hostile: the New York Times called the exhibition pathological and likened the modernist artists to anarchists, while other papers demanded it be closed as a threat to public morality^[1]. Despite the ridicule, the show is generally treated as the moment that split American art history into a before and after, giving American painters and the public their first sustained exposure to European modernism^[4].

Davies and Kuhn assembled the European half of the show on a short, deliberate buying trip. After seeing the catalogue for a major exhibition in Cologne, the Sonderbund, Davies wrote to Kuhn urging him to see it before it closed; Kuhn crossed the Atlantic within days, and the two men met in Paris by November 1912, working with the critic Walter Pach to gather loans from dealers and collectors across France, Germany and Holland^[5]. Davies was elected president of the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors that staged the show, in part because his standing as a respected but non-radical painter made him an acceptable figurehead, even though colleagues later discovered he was considerably less conventional in his tastes than they had assumed^[2]. He personally lent works from his own collection to the exhibition, including a Cezanne watercolour and a marble torso by Brancusi, both lent anonymously so as not to draw attention to his role as both organiser and collector^[2].

Davies' own work sat at a distance from the radical European painting he championed. His single trip to Europe, made around fifteen years before the Armory Show, was not oriented toward the new movements gathering strength there, and his paintings kept a romantic, unrevolutionary character throughout his career, owing more to the muted, allegorical landscapes of Puvis de Chavannes than to Cubism or Fauvism^[2]. He nonetheless had an unusually adventurous eye as a viewer and collector: he gained access to the Havemeyer collection, one of the most important private holdings of French painting in America at the time, and was among the few American painters of his generation to study its contents directly^[2]. That combination, a conservative hand paired with a genuinely open eye for what other artists were doing, made him an effective bridge between the American art world and the European developments it had largely missed.