New Tork is not yet, by any means, a Renaissance Florence, but the history of art in America is largely a history of its life. An has grown here as the city has grown. To say that it has grown by the proverbial leaps and bounds is to make a very mild statement. Progress started late, but when it came there was no stopping it.
—Royal Cortissoz, in “New York as an Art Centre,” in his book American Artists, 1923.

The feeling that if you have grasped an idea you can realize it, instead of beating your head against the bars of prejudice and prestige, is most invigorating. There is a big work to be done here and we should, in a sense, take a very leading position. Money, I think, would come in plenty, but more than that, real power to shape things and real consideration. It’s a quite different spirit to that of England; the artists admire one another too much perhaps, but how much better that is than not enough . . . . There is going to be an immense boom here in art—everything is shaping and arranging itself for it and I am regarded as the person who can give the direction to it in lots of ways. . . . it is the bigness of the job, the elan and real confidence in the future that fascinate me and this climate is exhilarating, no doubt.
—Roger Fry, in a letter from New York in