Ford Madox Ford and the Arts: Introduction

Abstract

There passed from us this June a very gallant combatant for things of the mind and of which have been in our time too little prized. Ezra Pound wrote these words shortly after Ford Madox Ford's death on June 26, 1939. Fifty years after that event the essays in this issue of Contemporary Literature pay tribute Ford and those things of the mind and of letters which he loved and promoted with so much energy. Ford was born into the world of Pre-Raphaelite art as the grandson of Ford Madox Brown, in whose studio young Fordie trained his eye in line and color. The companionship first of Stella Bowen and later of Janice Biala kept him constantly in touch with the plastic arts. He devoted the pages of the English Review to the arts, and ideas, and his editorial column (The Functions of the Arts in the Republic) discussed music and the plastic arts as well as literature. He celebrated the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and he published reproductions of the work of Brancusi, Braque, Man Ray, and Picasso in the Transatlantic Review. Ford learned from his father the rudiments of music and went on study composition, compose for the piano and voice, and champion the new music of Richard Wagner. He ran a musical supplement in four issues of the Transatlantic where he published the music of George Antheil, Erik Satie, and Ezra Pound as well as Antheil's thoughts on Fanelli and Pound's theory of harmony. Although Ford held Holbein be the greatest of painters and Bach be the greatest of composers, he didn't allow his respect for their genius stifle his enthusiasm for lesjeunes. The essays by Joseph A. Kestner and by Sondra J. Stang and Carl Smith address Ford's lifelong absorption with art and music, suggesting, respectively, how