In 1913, The International Exhibition of Modern Art landed at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory and caused such a scene that we are still talking about it a century later. In “The Armory Show at 100,” which opened Friday, The New-York Historical Society assesses the impact on American culture when modern art arrived full-force and roaring, whether we were ready for it or not.

The Armory Show, as it came to be known, displayed American paintings by William Glackens, George Bellows, Robert Henri and others alongside those of European artists such as Odilon Redon, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh. Depending on one’s view, the exhibition was either a symbol of progress or regression, simultaneously derided and celebrated as it traveled to Chicago and Boston.

Mabel Dodge, socialite and champion of the avant-garde, giddily predicted, “there will be a riot and a revolution and things will never be quite the same afterwards.” But Arthur B. Davies, one of its organizers, sought to establish a lineage between the new painters and 19th century masters.

Eugène Delacroix was considered a controversial painter in his day yet came to be understood as an heir to the European tradition. In Davies’ mind, Jacques Villon’s “Young Girl,” 1912, with its prismatic relationships of emerald green, scarlet orange, and slippery, crimson red, was heir to the old masters such as Honoré Daumier and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Puvis’ “Le Verger, Les Enfants au verger, L’Automne,” ca. 1885, is an idyllic scene of innocent youths gathering flowers into baskets under the watchful gaze of an Earth Mother figure in white. Flowers of pale yellow, pink, and blue wink in the tranquil, surrounding green against a background of pale trees.

André Dunoyer de Segonzac’s “Paysage No. 1,” 1912, updates the tradition of European landscape painting in a patchwork of warm ochres, browns, and cool greens. With a limited palette and narrow atmospheric observation, a wooded trail under a rough, gray-blue sky becomes a charming, compact environment of dappled sunlight and shadows tucked in among the lower vegetation.

In contrast to this melancholic solitude is “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” 1912, by Marcel Duchamp in which both anatomy and environment are fractured by the frantic, rhythmic repetition of Cubist lines and planes, as individual components and recognizable features are obliterated and reforged in the speed and movement of the machine age.

A still-life by Paul Cézanne entitled “The Dark Blue Vase II,” ca. 1880, is wonderful. The form of the bluish black vase, cut off by the bottom edge of the picture plane, creates a compelling weight to the composition and is relieved by the softer contours of the flowers rendered with a subtle palette and further brightened in the little pink dashes of the petals.

“Still Life, No. 1,” 1912, by Marsden Hartley is a dense composition of saturated complimentary colors and dark tones in forms that are rough but not inelegant. Fruits and vegetables in a bowl sit on a small black trunk before a heavily patterned tapestry of green and yellow designs against a red background, its reverse side revealing yellow, red, and green geometric shapes against blue-black. In the foreground is a blue glass and a small pitcher with a pattern of tan and brown.

John Sloan depicts a relaxing moment among friends in “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” 1912. Three neighbors enjoy the open space of a Manhattan tenement rooftop as strong light creates cool shadows while illuminating white shirts hanging on a clothesline against a background of nearby buildings. There is a real physicality to Sloan’s painting that sometimes seems hurried, yet subtle movement is depicted here with simplicity as one of the women leans forward slightly at the waist, her left hand poised on her hip in a pose which is both natural and charming.

With the 1913 Armory Show New York eclipsed Boston as the center of American culture and modern art came of age. We turned a corner, and Mabel Dodge was right when she said “things will never be quite the same afterwards.”

The Armory Show at 100, opens Friday, October 11, 2013 at The New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY . 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org

More information about Robert Edward Bullock’s work can be found at bullockonline.com