Plotting the Geopolitics of Twentieth-Century Modern and Avant-Garde Illustrated Periodicals

Abstract

Illustrated journals are available digitally in unprecedented quantities, and on a global scale. As such, they provide the ideal foundation to examine globalization logics in the history of art and literature through the prism of ‘distant reading and viewing’. When articulated and completed by more traditional close reading of the sources, a computational approach can raise new questions about the international circulation of images in illustrated periodicals. It may help to reinterpret, and even better understand, the variety of flows and imbalances in the international circulation of images, that are often taken too quickly as evidence of centrality or peripherality. This paper presents the perspectives opened by the Visual Contagions project (SNSF, University of Geneva, CH), which analyses images from thousands of illustrated periodicals published worldwide from the 1890s to the 1990s. Images do not magically circulate, nor do styles ‘diffuse’ and provide evidence of ‘influences’, as it is often assumed. The computational approach is used to analyse avant-garde periodicals, and it allowed us to highlight networks of image exchange, affinities between magazines, countries, and cultural or social milieus. Such methodologies emphasize the social logics that promoted the circulation of images and styles, and unveil the authorial or distributive role of some key publications in the avant-garde; but they also reveal and help understand image diffusions that were previously difficult to explain other than by a Zeitgeist, by the notion of centres and peripheries, or by a formalist approach that consolidated the non-questioned domination of European canons.