Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde magazine has been a sporadic visitor to these pages over the past 20 years, the subject of occasional posts as well as my complaints about the difficulties of finding online sources for important magazines and journals. The difficulties are now over where View is concerned…or almost over because this cache is an incomplete run, with the last seven issues absent. That still gives us 30 complete issues to look through, however, so I’ll temper my complaints. The run is further compromised by being taken from a single-volume reprint which has reduced all the colour to black and white, but the covers at least are easy to find elsewhere. The first few issues of View were simple newsprint affairs, but the design soon became more ambitious and properly magazine-like, with coloured paper used for interior pages.
Vol 2, issue 1; April 1942.
View (1940–47) was an important arts magazine for a number of reasons, chief among them the title’s status as the leading American journal devoted to Surrealism. The Surrealist movement in Europe had been destroyed by the advent of war but Surrealism found itself revitalised in the United States when artists and writers fleeing the Nazis made their way to New York. In a very short space of time the movement went from being a European curiosity to a local novelty, with the same delayed impact that occurred when modern art was revealed to a bewildered American public by the Armory Show in 1913. View magazine took advantage of the wave of aesthetic immigration, positioning itself as a showcase and promoter of the new art of “the Marvellous”. The range of the magazine’s contributors is astonishing (per Wikipedia):
…writers like Wallace Stevens, an interview with whom was featured in the first number of View, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Cornell, Edouard Roditi, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, Philip Lamantia, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, André Breton, Raymond Roussel, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet or Jorge Luis Borges and artists like Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Marc Chagall, René Magritte and Jean Dubuffet.
Volume 2, issue 4; January 1943. Cover collage by Joseph Cornell.
To the names above can be added Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. Several of the early issues were devoted to a single theme: Max Ernst was the subject of an entire issue, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew shared an issue, while other numbers explored specific subjects—“Vertigo”, “Americana Fantastica”, “Narcissus”, “Tropical Americana”, “America”, “Italy”, and “Surrealism in Belgium”. The magazine also helped promote Surrealism-adjacent Americans like Joseph Cornell and Morris Hirshfield. Cornell was a virtual unknown in the art world of the early 1940s; Charles Henri Ford helped him a great deal when he gave his collages and constructions an equal platform with the Europeans. “Americana Fantastica” is pretty much a Cornell issue, while elsewhere Cornell creates print works like the one-page “Story Without a Name” in the Max Ernst issue, a homage to Ernst using collaged engravings. Some of this material was reprinted in 1992 in Parade of the Avant-Garde, Ford’s book-length compilation of the magazine’s greatest hits, and a very commendable publication in itself. But magazines, especially ones as rich as this, have to be seen as entire issues, with all their minor pieces, decorative vignettes and advertising pages intact. What we have here is a compromised View but it’s still a sight worth seeing.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Minotaure, 1933–1939
• The nightingale echo
• Max Ernst’s favourites
• Viewing View
• Cornell’s Constellations
• Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box
• Joseph Cornell, 1967
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
• View: The Modern Magazine
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