Art Magazines Research Articles

Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain by Anne Helmreich

Reviewed by: Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain by Anne Helmreich Margaret J. Godbey (bio) Anne Helmreich, Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. x + 255, 70 illus., $89.00 cloth. Anne Helmreich's important new book posits that "art was profoundly shaped by radical changes in science and its discourses over the course of the long-nineteenth century" (2). Case studies of select photographers and painters recognized for pursuing new directions in representation reveal how scientific discovery changed the direction of British landscape art. A substantive introduction adeptly provides scholars and general readers alike with the necessary background and cultural context surrounding the often fierce debates that took place in the British art world. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Helmreich rethinks the evolution of British modernism by considering how "artists sought to reinvigorate their practice through lessons derived from science" (5). This approach challenges received histories of art and upends hierarchies of value that place science over art, or painting over photography. Since artist treatises, photographic studies, and scientific discoveries were often first published in the periodical press, Helmreich's extensive research integrates a wide range of sources. This impressive study draws on artists' speeches published in the Times and treatises from familiar periodicals devoted to British painting, including the Germ, Art Journal, and Contemporary Review. She also incorporates articles by painters such as John Brett in Nature and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as articles by photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot in the Literary Gazette and Athenaeum. Her research pays particular attention to the ways Victorian periodicals circulated discoveries in science and [End Page 430] photography, as well as their widespread attention to new developments in the world of art. One of the real pleasures of this work is the opportunity to follow Helmreich's connections between such varied publications as the Journal of the Camera Club, Magazine of Art, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and to trace how she situates each journal within the disciplines. Furthermore, an abundance of color reproductions and numerous examples of early photography are most welcome and exciting. Helmreich has produced a vibrant study that is of great interest to the entire nineteenth-century studies community. Chapter one, "Truth to Nature and the 'Innocent Eye,'" puts William Henry Fox Talbot's early work in photography in conversation with the artwork of Pre-Raphaelite mentor Ford Madox Brown to demonstrate how photographers and artists "aimed to define pictorial representation for the modern age" (23). Helmreich's overview of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood does not center on familiar protagonists or narratives. Instead, she brilliantly explores the intersections between photography, art, and science, specifically geology, to argue that the "relationship between painting and photography . . . was configured not by influence but by shared interests and intersecting discourses shaped by the rise of scientific knowledge" (38). Thus, the Pre-Raphaelite attention to realistic representations of nature and its emphasis on specific detail, as demonstrated in landscapes by John Brett, William Dyce, and William Holman Hunt, emerged not, as has been argued, because of the camera but as a reflection of larger cultural forces that valued close visual observation and inductive philosophy. Therefore, photography and painting, like science, participated in the process of "knowledge formation" (38). Close readings of paintings and photographs reveal artists' attention to perception and their desire to follow John Ruskin's advice to render with precision every aspect of nature. Ruskin, Helmreich writes, was "encourag[ing] the young artists he supported to participate in the increasingly visible and culturally significant practice of scientific observation" (45). Ultimately, painters and photographers determined that an unrelenting emphasis on truth to nature was confining and that images captured via mechanical and chemical processes or by paint and the human hand must be mediated by the unscientific and susceptible human eye. As a result, Helmreich concludes, photographers realized they could not escape the confines of the "picturesque" (70), and painters such as William Holman Hunt determined that realistic representation was not the sole purpose of art; rather, a realistic...

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

Attic, and: Drawing with My Mother, and: In the Queue

Attic, and: Drawing with My Mother, and: In the Queue Connemara Wadsworth (bio) Attic It is a museum of disuse, we findkeys, open trunks untouched for years. Top hats for my brother. For me,brittle dresses with hand-sewn seams velvet ribbon, lace, rows of tiny turnedbutton holes for silk knots. The dress I try on, show Grandma,is too long. Whose was it? It is a house of dust and clutter—our father's siblings, all but one still at home. Grandma complainsabout our mother's cooking, and says she should wear a nightgown.She makes my brother and me eat our peas. I throw them up on the table.Sometimes I rummage in her button box, wood ones taken from bvds. Like beadsshe threaded white ones from shirts frayed [End Page 116] left in the ragbag. I sort the lifetime of them.If we ask, she recites "Paul Revere's Ride." Sometimes she closes her bathroom doorbangs and bangs an enamel cup on the sink. Her cotton stockingstwist and wrinkle at her thin ankles. If only she had as many stories asbuttons. We are too young to search for what else might be in her.Our mother tells us Grandma doesn't have all her marbles.We don't know the weight her words carry, we understand onlyour mother's trapped urgency, that a fury, unnamed,lurks within the house. Drawing with My Mother Outside, the arched windows,the rise of a bridge and the canal. I add color but noneis close enough. "It's easy," she saysand draws for me a still life [End Page 117] on the back of a paper bag,oranges ripening by the minute. She says, "Form. Weight. Depth.Negative space." I see more perfectlywhat she hasn't even noticed. In the Queue My mother, so tall to lose in a crowd,lies blanketed on a gurney indistinguishable from other blue-gowned patients waitingfor the OR. Only when the doctor told her she was weakening and without surgeryshe wouldn't have enough breath to climb Venetian bridges again, she no longer pressesto try homeopathy, herbs, acupuncture. An IV pumps medications into a veinin her bruised, papery skin. Still she talks of her next trip, her latest painting, news.It is inevitable that she will rise from this place to go her own way.On her skeletal wrist a band with her name, date of birth, next of kin—snapped therelike those for tracking wild birds. [End Page 118] Connemara Wadsworth Connemara Wadsworth's chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50's, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have most recently appeared in Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Valparaiso, the Kentucky Review, and the Mayo Review. "The Women" was nominated for publication in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses by Bloodroot Magazine. Wasdsworth and her husband live in Newton, MA. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press

Amateur Art Discourse in the Era of Stagnation (With Reference to Art Magazines)

This article considers the transformation of the amateur art discourse of the stagnation period. The research is based on critical reviews and problem articles published during the period in special art magazines. The concept of artistic and political discourse is used as a basic concept in the article. The author reveals the structure of the discourse of amateur art, which combined the stagnation period and the component of the official ideological construct, formed during the 1930s, and a more modernised language of professional art and scholarly studies. The author reveals that in the mid-1960s, specialised magazines actualised the issue of amateur creativity, using a new definition of amateur art; there emerged criticism of self-taught professionals imitating fine arts. Together with that, critical articles and reviews of foreign exhibitions demonstrated the change in the pattern of amateur art and the legitimisation by the authorities of the new artistic languages of such artists. In the late 1960s, art critics made the first attempts to comprehend the origins of naive art, the authors contemplated primitivism and its connections with urban folklore. By the mid-1970s, art criticism and research finally legitimised naive art and separated it from amateur art.

Desertor de un ejército forastero: Seoane y el movimiento para un arte abstracto en Argentina

This article analyzes how the Argentinean art magazine Ver y Estimar received the art exhibitions spanning from 1948 to 1955, in Buenos Aires, by the Argentinean-Galician artist Luis Seoane. During those years, the magazine, led by art critic Jorge Romero Brest, advocated for the imposition of geometric abstraction as the hegemonic trend to be followed in order for Argentinean art to engage with the international development of modernity. This essay shows the fictional quality of those accounts meant to institute hegemonic models for the consumption of cultural productions. These are processes leading to the configuration of a canon, composed by choices and omissions. And the main purpose of this canon is to legitimize a given discourse—rather than creating knowledge about an art object in relation to the conditions of its production. This article shows how, in analyzing Seoane's paintings, the first omission is related to his belief in an idea of a popular art as one meant to be effective beyond museums' walls. Critics of the time also disregarded Seoane's conception of his own work as a process based on an idealization of art's potential for building a transatlantic dialogue with both Galician history and culture. At the same time, Seoane's shapes are a result of his effort to establish a dialogue on art techniques, interacting with the different voices present in the metropolitan art scene of postwar Buenos Aires.

A Genealogy of Rasquache and Camp: Luis Alfaro and the Royal Chicano Air Force

A Genealogy of Rasquache and Camp:Luis Alfaro and the Royal Chicano Air Force Ella Maria Diaz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The photograph appears in Carlos Almaraz’s essay “The Artist As a Revolutionary,” Chismearte 1, no. 1 (1976), 53. Image courtesy of the Cornell University Library. In the fall of 1976, a photograph appeared in Chismearte, a Chicano/a art magazine published for several years through the Concilio de Arte Popular. The magazine, like the council, was a forum for a regionally diverse community of artists that emerged during the 1960s and made art in service to the Chicano Movement.1 The photograph is featured in Carlos Almaraz’s essay “The Artist as a Revolutionary,” in which he [End Page 105] recalls his artistic production on behalf of the United Farm Workers union (UFW). Framed within Almaraz’s meditations on the rise of a creative class that mixed a New Left political platform with the culturally nationalist tenets of the Chicano Movement, the picture shows Air Force personnel, in military attire, organized in three rows. They stand in front of a plane with the acronym “RcAf” superimposed on its front. One can tell that the letters have been added to the picture and that mustaches have been drawn on the men. The acronym stands for the Royal Chicano Air Force, a Chicano/a art collective founded in Sacramento, California, between 1969 and 1972. Initially named the Rebel Chicano Art Front, the group changed the name when audiences confused the abbreviation with that of the Royal Canadian Air Force.2 If Chismearte readers found the photograph suspicious, then the handwritten caption assuring them of its authenticity was no less dubious. Addressed to “Carlos,” it informs viewers that the picture depicts “RCAF members while on a secreat [sic] mission.”3 The photograph’s humor lies in the sincerity of its artifice. It simultaneously calls attention to the fact that it is not really a photograph of the RCAF while nonetheless insisting on the existence—however fantastic—of a Chicano Air Force. The rudimentary flourishes added to the picture exemplify Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s description of “rasquache” in Chicano/a art as “making do with what is at hand” in the fashioning of one’s self, one’s home, and other spaces for presentation.4 From the spliced letters and hand-drawn mustaches to its misspelled caption, the photograph’s construction enhances the illusion of historical sincerity, if not the certainty, of a Chicano Air Force. Emerging as a “visceral response to lived reality,” rasquache reflects a resilience and resourcefulness in crafting presentations of selfhood unencumbered by hegemonic notions of taste and propriety.5 But whereas the ingenuity of rasquache may derive from necessity, it reflects a “sort of good taste of bad taste,” Ybarra-Frausto writes, adding that rasquache favors “the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe.”6 Ybarra-Frausto’s description of rasquache resonates with notions of camp in European and Anglo-American cultures as well as in queer performance traditions: as a style and manner, camp is likewise funky, improvised, and overstated and often used to produce a non-normative aesthetic sensibility with (or without) political intentions.7 [End Page 106] Ybarra-Frausto, however, notably resists the connection between camp and rasquache in his catalog essay for Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (CARA), the first nationally touring Chicano/a art show held at several universities and institutions in the 1990s.8 Instead, he turns to the playful and elemental impulses (the acts of fulfilling a basic need) performed in popular Mexican and Mexican American theater during the 1930s and 1940s and their continuation in performances by El Teatro Campesino in the 1960s. El Teatro Campesino drew upon the “rapid corporeal movements interlaced with slapstick actions and pratfalls” of the carpa tradition (tent shows) and the “verbal virtuosity” of Mexican film actor Mario Moreno, better known as Cantínflas.9 Seeking a genealogy of rasquache that draws from a “campesino” rather than camp tradition, Ybarra-Frausto avoids the queer association, as well as the European and Anglo-American influences it likewise connotes. Almaraz’s “funny-looking” photograph meets...

Critical Writings by Alvaro Barrios published in Revista del arte y la arquitectura en América Latina: Contributions to an understanding of the concept of art in light of Álvaro Barrios’ critical works in the context of Colombian art, 1978-1982

During the 60’s and 70’s in Colombia, art criticism was published in written texts and specialized magazines directly related to the Colombian artistic field. Many historians, philosophers, intellectuals, and writers were interested in criticizing how artists and institutions were developing a sense of beauty and taste in art. However, the way art criticism turned into a counterpart of the artistic production defined how artists took part in writing about artworks, exhibitions, and institutions from their point of view and artistic production experience. The following research describes the written work of Alvaro Barrios, a well-known contemporary Colombian artist and art critic who wrote for Revista del Arte y la Arquitectura en América Latina (an art criticism and review specialized Architecture and Art magazine published in Medellin, Colombia) between 1978 and 1982. This research focuses on analyzing three main articles written by Barrios to build up a concept of art according to the context that the author was living in while he was exploring his own artwork creation.

From Pen to Feather: The Transformation of <i>La Plume</i> into a Limited Company

The Parisian literature and art magazine La Plume (1889–1914) has been traditionally considered a ‘petite revue’. This article shows its transformation from a specialized magazine made by writers for writers into a key actor of late-nineteenth-century culture, particularly under the entrepreneurial leadership of Léon Deschamps (1863–99), its first editor. At its beginnings, La Plume made the most of a productive formula that used subscriptions to sustain publication, like other literary reviews of the time. But it also integrated isolated practices into a larger system, able to produce synergetic effects that would prove profitable. As the magazine turned its back to the literary underground, it became a limited company, introduced some of its collaborators into the dailies’ editorship, and promoted art and artists, exhibitions and social events, it addressed a broader, more fashionable bourgeois readership, particularly women. This step marks an interesting turn in periodical history and throws up unforeseen issues, examined on the basis of unpublished documents from the magazine’s archives. The study sheds light on the importance of financial factors in the creation of literature and art periodicals, and links changes in form and content with concrete commercial strategies. La Plume represents an interesting case study of business transformation. Not only did it succeed, it also guaranteed a sustainable and expandable economic model rooted in communication strategies.

Create a home for your students and community through strong leadership

Bruce Willis Ferguson's path to higher education leadership was a nontraditional one. The president of the Otis College of Art and Design moved into his role in 2015 after years as the vice chairman of Louise Blouin Media, an art magazine and book publishing company based out of New York.

Art Periodicals and Contemporary Art Worlds (Part I): A Historical Exploration

This essay explores the role of art periodicals in art worlds past and present. It examines the histories of Artforum and October within the context of the North American art world of the 1960s and 1970, and contextualizes these publications within a larger field of publishing practices, including self-published Salon pamphlets, little magazines, and artists' periodicals. It explores how the distribution form of the periodical affects the politics of art criticism, and considers how art magazines have served as sites of critical publicity, mediating publics and counterpublics within the art world. It also reflects on the role of magazines and newer online media in the contemporary, globalized art world.

Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today (Conference Report and Q&A)

This introduction and selection of Questions and Answers are from a conference organized in 2014 at the American University of Beirut Art Galleries titled Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today. The conference summoned editors of art periodicals from different countries in order to discuss the role of art magazines, journals, platforms, and newspapers. While the introduction provides a general report on the conference, discussing the principles according to which the panels were organized or describing and comparing the missions of some periodicals, the selection of questions from the audience and answers from editors that follow aim to convey different editorial strategies, political disputes, funding models, and relations to readership that one can encounter today in the field of art periodicals.

Transforming Representations of Marine Pollution. For a New Understanding of the Artistic Qualities and Social Values of Ghost Nets

In the last few years, an increasing number of texts published in environmental journals and in art magazines have addressed the “ghostnet” issue and referenced how artists in Northern Australia use discarded or abandoned nets to create art and craft items. By analysing the artistic life of the ghost nets, from the creative process to trade networks, this article provides a new perspective on marine pollution and highlights Australian Indigenous peoples' agency toward this environmental and global issue. It presents ghostnet art as a transgenerational and transcultural practice that reflects the articulation of Indigenous and Western knowledges, two systems of thought and action that are united to solve ecological, economic and cultural issues.

New guide to Mexico: Teaching about Mexican art in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract Social, economic and political reforms following the Revolution of 1910 in Mexico made the first part of the twentieth century a period when Europeans, North Americans and other people paid particular attention to Mexican Art. Coverage of Mexico in The School Arts Magazine from the 1930s and 1940s centred on folk craft and rural and Indigenous populations. This stemmed in part from the postrevolutionary concept of Mexicanidad, the movement to develop a national identity based on the Indigenous roots of the country rather than its colonial past, but is also argued to have derived from the idea of Mexico in the US imagination in which the country is associated with quaintness, backwardness and the exotic and romantic.

Art journals in Morocco: new ways of seeing and saying

ABSTRACTIn the last half century, Moroccan artists, historians, critics and creative writers have undertaken the task of decolonising the history and criticism of their art. From the nineteenth century through independence in 1956, the story of Moroccan art was written largely from a colonialist perspective. In the 1960s and 1970s, this story was rewritten in broadly focused cultural journals such as Souffles, Intégral and Lamalif. In the subsequent decades, lesser known journals continued to reflect on the place of art and artists in Moroccan society. After the millennium, a specialised art press emerged. Current art magazines such as diptyk, launched in 2009, devote visual and verbal space to artists and critics. While a variety of media outlets, including newspaper journalism and television programming, have kept visual arts in the public eye, this essay focuses on the impact of cultural journals and magazines on the development of distinctly Moroccan ways of seeing and saying in the twenty-first century.

Maureen McCue. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art 1793–1840

Maureen McCue. <i>British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art 1793–1840</i>

The Institute for Southern Contemporary Art (ISCA)

AbstractJoão Enxuto and Erica Love are artists and writers living in New York City. Their writing has appeared in Art in America, Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine, Wired, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. They have given talks and exhibited work at the Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of Art, the New Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Walker Art Center, Yossi Milo Gallery, Carriage Trade, Louisiana Museum in Denmark, ArtCenter/South Florida, and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City.

Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism by Elena Jackson Albarrán

Reviewed by: Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism by Elena Jackson Albarrán Stephen E. Lewis Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism. By Elena Jackson Albarrán. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xvi + 393 pp. Cloth $75, paper $35. [End Page 338] In recent years, historians of Mexico have offered detailed accounts of how the country’s Ministry of Public Education (SEP) implemented an ambitious state- and nation-building program in the immediate postrevolutionary period (1920–1940). They have described an uneven process involving a great deal of negotiation; parents often resented and resisted an official curriculum that could challenge gender roles, threaten social hierarchies, and attack religious beliefs. But until now, historians have not addressed how children themselves experienced Mexico’s cultural revolution. Elena Jackson Albarrán attempts to do just that in this ambitious and well-written book. Some of the primary documents that she uses—children’s letters and drawings, photographs, and documents generated at child-centered conferences—are uniquely rich. These sources offer a view into the minds of Mexican children who “were at the forefront of a country reinventing itself as a nation of literate, productive, modern citizens” (269). Mexico was not the only country to take special interest in its young people at this time. Adults the world over turned to children to redeem societies that had been shattered by the Great War. In Latin America, Mexico emerged as the vanguard for its child-centered initiatives. Jackson Albarrán describes a child-centered society that “offered new opportunities for the child to serve as an active member of society in his or her own right, and not simply as a future citizen” (6). Following the 1934 reform to Article 3 of the Constitution, which introduced a brief but intense experiment in socialist education, the niño proletario—the proletarian child—took center stage as a political actor. Perhaps the book’s most fascinating chapter looks at the children’s art magazine Pulgarcito, published from 1925 to 1932. Jackson Albarrán argues that this magazine, with its almost entirely child-produced content, promoted an aesthetic shift in the art world. Schoolchildren taught to draw using Adolfo Best Maugard’s indigenous motif-based curriculum submitted their drawings for publication. In the afternoons, the magazine’s editors also invited children to produce art in their studio, and the best child artists became celebrities. The magazine also organized trips to allow children to draw volcanoes and other iconic scenes using Best Maugard’s method. Pulgarcito contributors won international acclaim for their art. Yet the nation-building function of Pulgarcito had its limitations; the magazine’s editors and art educators distinguished between urban children, who consumed and produced the art, and rural, often indigenous children, who were not considered citizens of modern Mexico and were discouraged from submitting drawings of factories, airplanes, and other images of modernity. [End Page 339] SEP radio programming for children was marked by the same disjunction: modern urban children were more likely to have radios, receive the SEP’s signal, and relate to the content of the programs. The 1933 program Troka el Poderoso—The Powerful Truck—starred a man-made supermachine that seemed to embody all things mechanical and modern. The Troka character was attuned to his urban listening audience; he referred to his rural audience as his amigos invisibles. Jackson Albarrán suggests a gendered dimension to SEP radio programming—modernity was depicted as masculine, while rural, traditional lifeways were feminized. Other chapters in this impressive book discuss children’s participation in a dizzying array of committees at SEP schools. Participation on student councils and anti-alcohol committees encouraged children to be civic actors while their parents were being channeled into the official institutions of the emerging corporatist state. The 1935 Conference of the Proletarian Child was held just months after the Mexican congress endorsed socialist education. Adults organized the conference, but children elected the delegates—boys and girls—democratically. The child delegates then gave impassioned speeches decrying social inequality. The Children’s Anti-Alcohol Assemblies in 1936 and 1940 were also remarkably democratic and child centered. The young delegates were chosen from among the...

William Jerdan and "The Literary Gazette"

William Jerdan, Scottish by birth and education, arrived in London in 1806, at age twenty-four, determined to make writing his career. Like Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens (Hessell), Jerdan began as a parliamentary reporter and supplemented his income writing for Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, which he bought in July, 1812. It collapsed in 1814, after Napoleon, main target, was defeated. However, Jerdan was already writing for Sun, and, in May, 1813, was appointed editor, with a salary and one-tenth share. Under pen name Viator, he contributed thirty-one articles written in Paris over six months after Napoleon was exiled. After a bitter dispute among other shareholders in 1817, Jerdan sold his share, dissolved partnership, and, on July 12, 1817, became editor and one-third owner of Henry Colburn's Literary Gazette, first weekly review magazine of arts, launched previous January and in its 24th number. At one shilling, three columns per page, it proposed to form at end of year, a clear and instructive picture of moral and literary improvement of times, and a complete, and authentic Chronological Literary Record for general reference. In December, 1819, Longmans purchased journal and took on management of sales and accounts, which Jerdan had found irksome and for which he was ill-suited. He announced new arrangement in issue of December 18, 1819. The Literary Gazette was ideally placed to participate in a new literary culture comprised of popular poets such as Byron, novelists such as Scott, and, along with other reviews, help create new reading public Among first to use lithography, it could be printed faster, more efficiently, and more economically than competing journals. According to Samuel Carter Hall in Book of Memories, Literary Gazette exercised immense power ... between 1820 and 1840. A laudatory review there was almost certain to sell an edition of book, and an author's fame was established when he had obtained praise of journal ... for a quarter of a century there was but one who was accepted as an 'authority'. The Gazette stood alone as arbiter of fate, literary and artistic. (285) Although, initially, Jerdan wrote most of reviews himself, he confessed that the dignity and stilts of authorship never suited me. If I tried to write grand or fine I was sure to fail. (11:174) Gerald Pyle calculated that, during time Jerdan edited, Literary Gazette contained, exclusive of advertisements, roughly 25,000 words per issue, a million and a quarter a year, totalling 42 million words--the vast majority written by Jerdan himself' (8). To help support his family of five children, Jerdan also wrote leaders for North Staffordshire Potteries Gazette., essays for Chelmsford Chronicle, edited two books for John Murray (for 125 [pounds sterling]), negotiated a copyright (for 100 [pounds sterling]), and contributed an article to Quarterly Review. Reviewing involved conflicting interests. Colburn, for example, wanted to use Gazette to promote books he published and other publishers courted Jordan to time his reviews to their advantage. Jerdan, however, in charge of selection, reviewers, and timing of reviews, wanted to publish objective reviews. Sometimes he was wrong: he overlooked Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, but featuring Washington Irving's Sketch Book, included excessively long extracts that would interfere with sales. The long extract was a common practice among literary reviews with advantages for both editors who needed to fill space and promote their own sales and for reviewers who were paid by word or sheet. Pyle calculated that quantity of extracted text from work reviewed rose from about 43% in 1818, to over 80% in 1847, when Gazette was in rapid decline. (68) Letitia Landon, as L.E.L., at age eighteen, published her first poem in Literary Gazette in 1820. …

Introduction

This special issue of Visual Resources brings together studies of some of the principal journals and themes related to the history of the international art press in the twentieth century. Journals have played a crucial role in the art world and in the study of art history: often the site of new scholarship or interpretation, they also illuminate the role of the art critic and art criticism and the relationship of these to artistic practice. Moreover, periodicals often reveal the complexities of the wider art world, including the art market and art funding; they can also be examined as works of art in their own right. This special issue explores these and other themes, demonstrating the rich diversity embedded in this nascent field of scholarly research and underscoring the significance of journals within the sphere of art publishing. The collection focuses on the twentieth century, which witnessed the emergence of the modern specialist art magazine. It concludes before the digital revolution in publishing in the early twenty-first century, which has already prompted dramatic changes in the periodicals landscape. Through case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States, this special issue aims to present a significant contribution to a growing body of research and literature within the discipline of art history.

Translation Austria / Translating Austria: Introduction

This issue of Austrian Studies assembles eight articles which investigate the pro cesses, outcomes and determinants of the transmission of Austrian culture into non-German linguistic environments. They look at the issues arising when a German text is rendered in a foreign linguistic system, the factors which determine its re-creation and its reception in the target culture; they high light the frictions that arise when the act of transposition meets with the cultural, political and medial conditions on the receiving side of the linguistic binary, but also the ways in which translational cross-cultural ventures are determined by conditions on the source side. The articles, in short, illustrate that understanding the translation process transcends the idea of a binary — German, on one side; a target language (here: english, Greek, brazilian portuguese) on the other — and that it also transcends the confines of merely linguistic transfer. The productive and controversial moment is ‘in transition’, i.e. in the in-between space of contact, overlap, demarcation, where difference and sameness are negotiated, frictions and obstacles surface, decisions are made and factors such as personal predilections, idiosyncrasies and wider historical circumstances exert their influence. The cultural artefacts examined in this issue were produced in German by Austrian authors from the immediate aftermath of the First World War to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Their translation into foreign languages and cultural systems spans a time period from their initial publication up to the present day. There are discussions here not only of texts and authors who have entered the canon of Austrian modern classics (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Joseph Roth, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig, Karl Kraus, Ilse Aichinger), but also of a number of different forms of expression: high and popular culture, journalism, reportage and autobiographical fiction as well as the art magazine, film, drama and novel. The authors’ backgrounds: Hungarian, bohemian, Galician, Jewish — and often a combination thereof — mirror the legacy of cultural plurality and diversity in the Habsburg empire, whereas common features, such as their residence in Vienna (some permanently, some temporarily), their distinctive use of the German language and their pronounced literary or essayistic treatment of often very Austrian issues, suggest a cultural coherence — a distinct Austrianness — as the flip-side of this