Avant-garde Magazine Research Articles

Selling modernism

Selling Modernism Mark Morrisson Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. 374. $18.95 (paper). Who Paid for Modernism? Joyce Piell Wexler. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Pp. 157. $24.00. Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Robert Jensen. 1994; Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. 367. $18.95 (paper). In 1917 the editors of The Little Review, the quintessential American avant-garde magazine whose motto was to “make no compromise with the public taste,” consulted a prominent advertising agent, James Howard Kehler, about plans to market the magazine. In December 1913 the poet Richard Aldington, even while espousing a vehement rhetoric of contempt for the masses, suggested hiring sandwich-board-men to march around London advertising and selling copies of The Egoist, the British organ of Imagism and aesthetic revolt for which he served as assistant editor. 1 What are we to make of strange moments like these in the history of modernism, when modernists’ public anti-mass-market rhetoric seemed to be undercut by flirtations with consumer culture? The years 1996 and 1997 saw the publication of a number of books about the marketing of modernist art and literature, as scholars address precisely these issues. [End Page 155] About a decade ago, Andreas Huyssen’s much-cited study After the Great Divide (1986) gave a convenient name to the modernist antithesis between high art and mass culture. But at the same time, Huyssen complicated the Adorno/Horkheimer vision of this split, not only to suggest the necessary relationship between “High Modernism” and mass culture, but also to demarcate a corner of modernism that had a positive relationship to mass culture—what he calls avant-gardism. In the years following Huyssen’s book, new works on the cultural history of advertising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on advertising’s role in modernism, as well as new studies of the professionalization of literature and the history of publishing and readership, have given scholars fresh perspectives from which to approach the Great Divide. 2 This trend, and recent work in cultural studies, feminism, and the study of material culture, have informed this last year’s works and brought them to an exciting level of sophistication and historical richness. The range of topics considered in Dettmar and Watt’s collection alone attests to the fact that questions about the marketing of modernism are no longer seen as irrelevant at best or belittling at worst to modernist literature. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt assembled their impressive collection of essays, Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, precisely not to belittle, as one prominent critic had interpreted such a project, but rather to explore Anglo-American modernists’ search for readers and markets. Some of these essays concern traditional questions about modernists’ concerns over money and the ideology of the professional writer—for example Daniel Morris’s “A Taste of Fortune: In the Money and Williams’ New Directions Phase,” and Joyce Wexler’s “Selling Sex as Art,” which examines the profits possible for censored books by D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. And some, like Leonard Diepeveen’s “‘I Can Have More Than Enough Power to Satisfy Me’: T. S. Eliot’s Construction of His Audience,” and Timothy Materer’s “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” explore modernists’ self-positioning before audiences. Materer’s essay is especially interesting in that it explores Pound’s construction of Imagism as itself an advertising strategy, and interprets the similarities between Imagism and new advertising techniques in the commodity realm. Pound wished to avoid what he called, quoting Joyce, the “poster novelty” of the commercial realm (27), but Materer argues that the same emphasis upon the direct treatment of the “thing” appeared in both elite literary culture and in popular consumer-culture images. In addition to essays that explore how modernists themselves interpreted and fashioned their place within a consumer culture, Michael Murphy’s “‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia’: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks” explores the other side of this issue. Murphy looks at the “slicks”—glossy...

Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines and Literary History.

For many years young writers experimenting with forms and aesthetics in the early decades of this century, small journals known collectively as magazines were the key to recognition. Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and scores of other iconoclastic writers now considered central to modernism received little encouragement from the established publishers. It was the avant-garde magazines, many of them headed by women, that fostered new talent and found a readership for it. Jayne Marek examines the work of seven women editors-Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Marianne Moore-whose varied activities, often behind the scenes and in collaboration with other women, contributed substantially to the development of modernist literature. Through such publications as Poetry , The Little Review , The Dial , and Close Up , these women had a profound influence that has been largely overlooked by literary historians. Marek devotes a chapter as well to the interactions of these editors with Ezra Pound, who depended upon but also derided their literary tastes and accomplishments. Pound's opinions have had lasting influence in shaping critical responses to women editors of the early twentieth century. In the current reevaluation of modernism, this important book, long overdue, offers an indispensable introduction to the formative influence of women editors, both individually and in their collaborative efforts. Jayne Marek is associate professor of English at Franklin College.

Henry van de Velde

AbstractIn Quaerendo, 1 (1971), pp. 164-81 and 2 (1972), pp. 55-73 I analysed Henry van de Velde's first steps as typographer, including, in particular, his role in the designing of the avant-garde Flemish magazine Van Nu en Straks (founded 1893) in the earliest years of the Art Nouveau movement. My conclusion was that the typographical design was the work of a collective, possibly with Elskamp and Van Rijsselberghe, and that the ornaments alone were the work of Van de Velde and Van de Velde only. In Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taalen Letterkunde, 1977, No. 1, pp. 109-44, P.J. Lissens describes three proofs and a copy of a prospectus for Van Nu en Straks which he found in the Museum of Flemish Culture in Antwerp. In this prospectus Van de Velde is named as the magazine's art director. According to Lissens this indicates that contrary to what I suggest in Quaerendo, Van de Velde was responsible for the typography. In the magazine itself, however, Van de Velde's name does not appear. Why not? The editor of Van Nu en Straks, August Vermeylen, was short of both time and cash, but still demanded high standards. The first proof of the prospectus, set by the Antwerp printer Buschmann, he rejected, substituting for it a new design by Van de Velde. The latter, however, kept making changes and was always dreaming of a new type-face of his own (which would take years of preparation). The whole thing was beginning to drag on too long for Vermeylen's liking, and in addition it was costing too much. Typographical compromises had to be made for the magazine itself, to which Van de Velde very probably declined to lend his name. Despite the fact that the newly discovered documents shed new light on various details, I hold fast to my original view - including my contention that the Brussels printer Deman and possibly Theo van Rijsselberghe were the first in Belgium to strike out in a new typographic direction.

Anarchism, Action and Malraux

In the autumn of 1920, after a long and shattering conflict, French literati were groping in many directions seeking to reformulate an aesthetic for the new, post-war world. It was at that time that the 18-year-old Andre Malraux published his second literary effort-a prose-poem entitled Prologue-together with a negative review of the new Andre Breton-Philippe Soupault work, Les Champs magnetiques. Both items appeared in the October issue of Florent Fels' little avantgarde magazine, Action. The text of the review is particularly noteworthy. Although Malraux agreed that Breton's book was plus susceptible d'etre imite que les poemes M. Tzara, par exemple, si caracterises que ses disciples sembleraient des plagiaires, he was nevertheless convinced that qui voudra ecrire une oeuvre en fonction l'esthetique des Champs magnetiques n'en fera qu'un pastiche, donc oeuvre sans valeur. For him, de nombreux enfants des Champs magnetiques vont surgir, mais ils ressembleront trop a leur pere to be really aesthetically valid.

Prokofiev's Early Opera ‘Maddalena’

The year 1911 was in many respects a landmark in Prokofiev's early career as a composer. He was then twenty years old and a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, where his studies at the time included classes in conducting with Nikolay Cherepnin, and an intensive piano course with the famous Anna Nikolayevna Yesipova. He was already known in St. Petersburg as an exponent of his own piano music and had frequently appeared in this role at Nuvel's Evenings of Modern Music as well as at student concerts. He had also performed his works in Moscow, and the enthusiastic reviews of his compositions which Myaskovsky and Boris Asafyev contributed to the avant-garde magazine Muzyka had further promoted his reputation in the more musically-conservative capital. In 1911 his music appeared in print for the first time, when Jurgenson published the First Piano Sonata and the Four Piano Pieces of Op. 3. The same year saw the beginnings of the First Piano Concerto, Op. 10, which was to have its successful premiere in Moscow the following summer with the composer as soloist. By 1911 also, Prokofiev had composed the Sinfonietta, Op. 5, and the two short symphonic poems. Dreams, Op. 6, and Autumnal Sketch, Op. 8.