Reading Ray: Avant-Garde and Transnationalism in Interwar Britain

Abstract

The British modernist little magazine Ray: Art Miscellany (1926–1927) pioneered the combination of text and image in the vein of the Continental avant-gardes. Amid the surge of interest in periodicals within modernist studies, Ray has managed to escape broader attention. Its editor, Sidney Hunt, was an enigmatic figure and the magazine itself also eludes categorization, as it did not conform to the standards of English modernism, which were in the process of crystallising at the time of its publication and then dominated the scholarly consensus on artistic innovation during the interwar period. Focusing on the specificities of the magazine form and on Ray's explicitly interartistic and transnational ethos, this article locates Ray within the spectrum of British ‘modernisms’, while interpreting its manifest effort to introduce various European avant-garde movements to a British audience as part of a strategy to establish an alternative modernist project grounded in the ideals of the moribund Arts and Crafts tradition.