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Modern art arrived in America with the famous 'Armoury' exhibition, held in New York in February and March of 1913. Based on the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions held by Roger Fry in London, the Armoury show was more comprehensive in its coverage, which included works by Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp as well as showing a more detailed collection of Georges Braque's and Pablo Picasso's Cubist works. Its subsequent tour of two other cities in America provided an opportunity for over 300,000 people to see the works and ensured that European, particularly Parisian, art was made known to a receptive new audience. The Armourg show transformed the art market and marked the arrival of modernism in America,

One of the visitors to the exhibition who was greatly influenced by its content was Man Ray, a New Yorker who had already been introduced to European art of the avant-garde by his visits to Alfred Steiglitz's influential gallery, 291. Steiglitz was an inspirational photographer who influenced Man Ray in his aspirations to become a photographer. Aviary is based on o photographic studio session in which we see a mannequin in place of the usual fashion model, Man Ray already anticipates the use of mannequins in Surrealism,