Collected Writings
Since its humble beginnings almost 200 years ago, the art magazine has reflected, in wildly divergent forms, social, technological and cultural developments
In 1976 the art periodical experienced something of a bumper year. The ‘art press’ was fêted in an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Studio International published a special survey issue on ‘art magazines’, its cover emblazoned with a bright red, faux spray-painted question mark. Thirty years later the state of the art press may be no less in question: the art periodical has received little popular or scholarly focus; magazines are still influenced by new technology, academic whim and the fluctuating fortunes of the market; and the realm of the ‘art press’ remains a wildly varied and shambolic place.
The history of the art magazine as we know it is as inextricably linked to the history of printing as it is parallel to the evolution of criticism and the emergence of art movements. Beginning in the 19th century artists, publishers and printers – encouraged by profits from the production and sale of books and inexpensive prints to the cultivated classes – began exploring ways of broadening their reach. As early as the 18th century printers – loath to keep their presses idle and skilled manpower at a standstill – had begun printing illustrated serials and periodicals alongside books and newspapers. Papers began publishing inserts that featured prints of popular illustrations, some of which evolved into quality stand-alone supplements (Das Kunstblatt, founded in 1816, is an early example) that eventually contained commentary. But printing technology had not yet adequately resolved the issue of combining image and type, and many early art magazines carried either only illustrations or none at all. Even while techniques for engraving and integrating type advanced, reproduction quality could be so poor as to be worthless.
With vast improvements in halftone engraving towards the turn of the century art periodicals began to spread across Europe, and what we think of today as the modern art magazine, in all its variety, began to come into its own in the Victorian era. In Britain, at least, the change in economic and social conditions, the foundation of public museums and progressive education bills meant more people were reading than ever before. Shedding the cloak of the academy and moving through the scrim of journalism was crucial in bringing art into the mainstream – and criticism into its own. Magazines moved away from being the vanity projects of printers and publishers set on profiting from the middle class and into the hands of artists and enterprising editors, spawning countless titles. While the arguments about mechanical reproduction and value of art would begin soon enough, mass reproduction – in magazines, books and prints – marked the beginning of the visual dissemination of the popular arts and the democracy of taste, establishing the delicate relationship between artists, critics and the public that still exists today and preparing the ground for the virtual flood of art journals unleashed in the 20th century.
With the possible exception of the late 1960s and early ’70s (and for different reasons), the first 40 years of the 20th century was the most vital era for the art press. A distillation of everything that preceded it in terms of criticism, technology and design standards, art magazines flourished in Europe and abroad. Unique products of their time, they were as sensitive and responsive to the wars in Europe as they were to immigration (enforced and voluntary), the newly flush art market and, in the US, the collapse of the stock market. Sweeping artistic movements, and even minor ones, were dependent on ‘house organs’ to extend their lifespan; their journals functioned primarily as means for different ‘branches’ of a movement to communicate and exchange ideas. In addition, they ensured a movement’s broad dissemination across Europe and, importantly, to America. Movement-specific magazines abounded: there were countless journals devoted to Dada, Futurism and Surrealism, Vorticism and Concrete Art, and the fledgeling modes of Kinetic sculpture and Minimalism had their own organs. Needless to say, many were short-lived affairs. Under no obligation to give equal coverage to the art world at large, they often attempted to be as pure an expression of an artistic philosophy as possible, although owing to design and manufacturing limitations some would be considered fairly conventional today (oddly, Surrealist journals, in particular, were notably restrained). While, to quote a former editor of Studio International, no movement magazine was ever ‘a magazine first and an art magazine only second’, many examples probably suffered from the narrow focus. But others were just as likely to be a political organ or literary review as a conduit for disseminating the philosophical and theoretical foundations of a particular group.
A few of the countless Futurist magazines of the 1910s and 1920s, including Noi, Stile Futurista and Lacerba, were thinly veiled political screeds for the Fascist party, while still managing to fulfil some sort of artistic mission: freeing poetry from the binds of literature and creating beautifully designed publications and innovative type. The Italian Fascist government didn’t miss a beat and took over the perfectly respectable (state-sponsored) Bolletino d’Arte and transformed it into Le Arti – fervently nationalistic pages defending a ‘Fascist art history’. Not surprisingly, similar publications emerged from Austria and Germany during the 1930s. And View, the American Surrealist magazine, was probably better known for its literary legacy (indeed it was subtitled ‘Through the Eyes of Poets’) than for being the magazine that bolstered Marcel Duchamp’s reputation in the US or for commissioning artists from Wilfredo Lam to Isamu Noguchi to design their covers. George Bataille’s Documents of the 1930s (the spiritual and decidedly less glossy heir to Minotaure) brought together artists, writers and ethnologists to explore its founder’s greater sociological cause. As with Futurism, text was all-important to Dada, Merz and the Situationists, and their magazines seemed to proliferate at an alarming rate: Merz, Z, La Révolutione Surréaliste, 391 and L’Enciclopedia, a rare example of Italian Dada.
Integral to – and arguably the most vital by-product of – these titles was design. Along with the replacement of hand-set type by machine composition and advancements in offset lithography, conditions in the early part of the century meant that the intersection of political activity, cultural activity, scholarship and increasingly urgent international communication allowed tremendous strides to be made in the development of type and layout, and with them new ways to present content that challenged tradition and, in some cases, competed with the art being presented. In Dada magazines text appeared sideways, in different type sizes and, while not unusual or particularly radical to readers today, nothing from the past was safe from re-interpretation. Futurist magazines filtered their design through the new machine-age aesthetic, and new typefaces were developed by the leading journal designers, notably Enrico Prampolini of Noi and, most significantly, Herbert Bayer of the Bauhaus, whose Universal typeface was used throughout the school’s publications. The Dutch magazine i10 covered the synthesis of art, architecture and design and boasted sparse interiors by László Moholy-Nagy and cover designs based on an architectural grid. Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist Blast was so complex that it was impossible to find a printer equipped to handle it. At the Bauhaus communication design was an element of every student’s education, and the journals (including Bauhaus and Offset Buch- und Werbekunst) and the Bauhausbücher series speak of a commitment to innovation and the importance of mass communication of ideals.
Art magazines have, of course, always been dependent on advertising revenue. In the period of independent movement magazines advertising was often limited to paid ads from competing publications, for lack of contacts in the industry or at galleries. Publishers have been oft-criticized rather unfairly for being open to the influence of advertisers – usually galleries – but advertising revenue contributes to the literary and design quality of a magazine while keeping subscription rates affordable. In the 1976 Studio International magazine survey – most certainly, and at times entertainingly, a product of its time – out of 68 magazines contacted (a handful of them state-, gallery- or art association-sponsored) around a dozen explicitly stated that they didn’t take advertising – almost 18 per cent – an unthinkable proportion today.
Censorship and advertising have intersected publicly on more than one occasion, but perhaps most famously in 1974 at Artforum, with the infamous Lynda Benglis episode. When the editors decided not to illustrate an essay on Benglis (by Robert Pincus-Witten) with the controversial image of the artist naked and sporting a dildo, she decided instead to take out an advert featuring the photograph, which was accepted by the magazine’s advertising staff. The ensuing schism among the editorial staff resulted in a heated exchange, in which Rosalind Krauss was prominent, about the ad’s inclusion and the mockery it made of women’s liberation. Krauss and her supporters (who included Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff and Annette Michelson, with whom she subsequently left the magazine to set up the anti-Artforum journal October) called its inclusion a stab at ‘self-promotion … in the most debased sense of the term’ and accused others at the magazine of ‘complicity’ with the market-place. The extant editors were cowed into a printed apology. Robert Rosenblum, quite funnily, called for the exposure of the ‘Sons and Daughters of the Founding Fathers of the Artforum Committee of Public Decency and Ladies’ Etiquette’.
In the late 1970s photographer Jacqueline Livingston (a Cornell University art professor at the time) exhibited a number of nude photographs of her family, including a photograph of her husband’s erect penis and of her son, according to the artist, ‘in a moment of natural, child-like self-exploration’. She was summarily slapped on the wrists by Cornell (where she later lost her job) and investigated by New York State’s social services department for child abuse; needless to say, they were without a case and charges were dropped. In an effort to save the photos from further denigration Livingston self-published and sold a poster-size edition of some of the images. She attempted to advertise the edition in Art News and Art in America, who refused to take it because it showed male genitalia (for what it’s worth, Ms and Playgirl also refused to run the ad).
The older, more august magazines were not themselves free from the hand of the censor. The December 1943 issue of View was banned by the US post office because it featured Leon Kelley nudes and reproduced Pablo Picasso’s Le Minotaure. Racy stuff, indeed. But the event was indicative of a larger cultural pall at the time. In March 1946 Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia (who at only 16 had been published in the influential San Francisco journal Circle and was a contributing editor to View) asked for his name to be removed from the masthead, claiming View represented the ‘perverted sensibility of our time’ and that the openly gay editor of the magazine, Charles Henri Ford, was responsible ‘ for the basic corruption of this generation’. Well, perhaps such censoriousness was not universal. One of the more ambitious magazines ever to emerge from the 1960s’ renaissance, Aspen, lasted ten issues – remarkable given its unorthodox advertising guidelines and its atypical format, the postage costs for which would sound its death-knell.
Studio International’s survey, which covered only magazines in print at the time, revealed a spirit in independent arts publishing that seems to have resurfaced only in the last six to ten years. Reading it, one gets a sense that the editors, while necessarily hopeful – they were, after all in charge of a highly influential, successful journal that could boast about its longevity – also despaired at the state of criticism, the real or perceived self-censorship among the larger titles, and the challenge presented to magazines by the rise of arts coverage on television and radio. Today, as arts readership, gallery attendance and general interest in art soar, those very mainstream media outlets – the sources of most people’s information – have drastically cut or diluted their arts coverage in favour of page-turning, subscription-selling ‘entertainment’ reporting. Art magazines are perhaps more essential than ever, in order to keep criticism critical – of itself as much as of what it covers – and to keep art publications the vital, changing forms they need to be.
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