In 1924, American literary scholar and author Paul Jordan-Smith adopted a new identity: Pavel Jerdanowitch, an avant-garde Russian artist whose visceral paintings would beguile modern art critics. Parading as Jerdanowitch for the next three years, Jordan-Smith gained traction at the helm of his one-man art movement, which he called Disumbrationism. But Jordan-Smith wasn’t a brooding artist from Moscow, and Disumbrationism was less of an aesthetic than it was a practical joke intended to shame the art world.

Jordan-Smith was a Los Angeles-based academic whose expertise lay in the 17th-century texts and teachings of Oxford University scholar Robert Burton. That Burton, who most notably penned The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), wrote extensively about the intricacies of the human psyche lends context to Jordan-Smith’s transformation into a fictitious visionary. Jordan-Smith had a point to prove about what he saw as the bogus psychology of modern art and criticism, both of which he believed had devolved into nonsense.

Jordan-Smith’s aversion to modernism developed during the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art , more commonly known as the Armory Show. The landmark showcase debuted at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City before traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago , where Jordan-Smith fatefully attended. “Up until that time I had striven to march with my generation in accepting modern trends,” he later recalled in his 1960 autobiography, The Road I Came. “Day after day I went to see and to hear contradictory explanations of what was called modern art, and finally I became disgusted, for most of the young critics were saying in effect, ‘…Great masters in the past were misunderstood and so we must accept and try to see, whether they please us or not. Pleasure is not the point.’”

Pablo Picasso Marcel Duchamp Robert Henri Edward Hopper Indeed, the works he viewed at the Art Institute were twisted, tormented abstractions by leading European artists likeand, whose radical oeuvres distorted and, for many traditionalists, even perverted what was once considered a dignified means of expression. Vanguard painters likeandsimilarly depicted the underbelly of American life as a lonely struggle rife with discontentment. The Armory Show reflected the zeitgeist of an era plagued by the anxiety of a rapidly modernizing world on the brink of World War I, but Jordan-Smith perceived “nothing but confusion and ugliness, bare of either reality or romance.”