Photography in Eugene Jolas'stransitionMagazine

Abstract

Abstract The important role of the little magazine in the development and transmission of modernism has long been acknowledged. Magazines such as transition, edited from Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, served the additional role of seeking consciously to bridge the cultural gap between Europe and North America. Defying the limitations imposed by their form, little magazines exhorted the value of many different artistic disciplines, furthering the modem ideal of commensurate development across the arts. So when transition editor Eugene Jolas wrote of the pre-eminence of ‘poetry’ in his magazine, he claimed that he meant ‘poetry’ in the sense of its ‘generic semantics as indicating the primal impulse to create’.1 Although transition was unabashedly committed to the advancement of experimental writing between the world wars, and ‘poetry’ in a more specific sense was emphasized in the later numbers of the review, visual art always played a significant role in the history of the magazine. In its publication run of 27 numbers over more than ten years, transition proved to be remarkably interdisciplinary, printing fiction and poetry, critical articles, dream transcriptions, Dadaist incantations, musical scores, architectural blueprints, and reproductions of paintings, sketches and sculptures. But transition also printed works from a number of important photographers of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Francis Bruguière, Lászlá Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. In spite of the relative prominence afforded photography in transition, however, one cannot dismiss the less-thancomplimentary comments made specifically about it in the magazine. In fact, it can be argued that the criticism of this branch of the visual arts in transition served only to reaffirm the esteem Jolas placed upon his own approach to poetry, an aesthetic programme that appears to have challenged the relative equality of different arts.