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Chosen by:
Mr Max Delany,
Director, Monash University Museum of Art
Die Pleite. (Berlin : Malik-Verlag, 1919-1924) Editors: Wieland Herzfelde, George Grosz, and John Heartfield. Chief illustrator: George Grosz. (Published irregularly) No. 7, July 1923.
Minotaure. (Paris : Editions Albert Skira, 1933-1939) E. Teriade (Directeur Artistique). editors: André Breton and Pierre Mabille.
A Comment. (Melbourne : Bradley Printers for Cecily Crozier, 1940-1947)
Artistic and literary journals and pamphlets in the period between the first and second world wars were a primary means by which avant-garde and modernist ideas were disseminated and debated. Manifestos, pamphlets and periodicals provided critical forms and forums for the development of movements such as dada, expressionism, surrealism and abstract art, and are key to appreciating the protagonists and complexity of aesthetic and political positions, international connections, as well as the experimental design and texture of the times.
European and North America journals such as 391, The Blindman, Cabaret Voltaire, Circle, Dada, Documents, Littérature, Die Pleite, The Truncheon, Révolution Surréaliste and Minotaur were central to the development not only of dada, surrealist and constructivist tendencies, but also to new political philosophies disdainful of the culture and institutions responsible for WWI, and oppositional to the rise of Fascism in Europe thereafter.2 Similar motivations were apparent in Australian journals such as Angry Penguins and the less-well-known but no-less-significant A Comment, published by the enigmatic poet Cecily Crozier.
The following three journals were produced in Berlin, Paris and Melbourne respectively and provide tactile evidence of the cultural communities of each city, as well as the wider development of modernism internationally.
Die Pleite
Die Pleite (Bankruptcy) was a small pamphlet edited by Georg Grosz and John Heartfield. Radical and revolutionary in tone, Die Pleite produced indelible images and texts critical of the political/industrial excesses of the Weimar Republic – familiar through Grosz’s satirical illustrations of depraved generals, bloated business men, corrupt politicians, wounded soldiers, and a culture of prostitution and perversion. Grosz and Heartfield were twice tried for publishing obscenities and defaming the military. Heartfield’s illustration on page 4 of issue no.7 is a classic example of constructivist photomontage, which became highly influential to political and avant-garde aesthetics through the twentieth century, to be eventually incorporated into the late-capitalist imagery of the advertising industry. Heartfield’s two-colour lithograph on the inside back cover – a swastika dripping with blood superimposed upon a German soldier with devils horns – is a characteristically crude yet direct subversion of Nazi symbolism, exemplifying Heartfield’s critique of mass-media propaganda.
Minotaur
Minotaur was published by Albert Skira and edited by Pierre Mabille, a polymath surgeon, writer, and student of alchemy and voodoo, and André Breton, writer, poet, author of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and editor of La Révolution Surréaliste (1924-1933). Minotaur was a cross-disciplinary treasure trove, with extravagant production values and illustrations, and strikingly provocative colour covers, the first by Picasso whose work was the subject of essays and photographs by Breton and Brassai. Seeking to cover ‘the most audacious intellectual activity of the day’, with a focus upon ‘the plastic arts, poetry, music, architecture, ethnology, mythology, spectacle, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis’, contributors to the first edition also included Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali, Andre Masson, Jacques Lacan and Kurt Veil. Working ‘from the conscious to the unconscious, which, by critical means, returns the unconscious to the conscious’,3 Minotaur introduced a new generation of theorists and surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer and Alberto Giacometti, whilst also establishing historical genealogies through the consideration of artists, writers and poets such as Blake, Poe, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Redon, Lautréamont and Jarry, among others.
A Comment
A Comment, published and edited in Melbourne during the Second World War, by Cecily Crozier, is less well known than the contemporaneous Angry Penguins journal, although it contained many contributors in common, and was more adventurous in its experimental graphic style. Published at least quarterly, each number was humbly produced on brown paper, with vibrant colour lithographs on the cover and internally. Covering art, poetry, photography and social comment, A Comment was polemical and internationally engaged, with contributions by the American, Pulitzer prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro, a one-time lover of Crozier during his war years as an American soldier stationed in Australia. With a strongly avant-garde and surrealist bent, Adelaide-based writer Max Harris was a frequent contributor, as was Adrian Lawlor, Alistair Kershaw, and artist James Gleeson, who wrote on ‘The necessity of surrealism’, contributed graphic poems, and praised the journal for its consideration of the ‘word as an organic thing’. Irvine Green published poetry, linocuts and essays on photography, which reflected the magazine’s modernist orientation. Notable for collage inserts and experimental typography, with one correspondent grumbling that ‘lower-case letters throughout seem like an affectation to me’, Comment sought to express the feelings and sensuality of a new generation of artists and thinkers, and, in Max Harris’ words, to ‘be at one with the surrealists and revolutionaries in defeating a moral system and a moral society which expresses the victory of death [and] the corruption of desire…’.4
2 For an introduction to European and American dada and surrealist journals, see Irene E. Hoffman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, 2001, available at http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/hoffman.php.
3 Albert Skira and E. Teriade, (publishers’ foreword), Minotaur, no.6, Winter 1935. [My translation].
4 Max Harris, ‘A sermon for madmen’, A Comment, no.4, March 1941.
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