View: The Modern Magazine

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).

View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The astonishing list of contributors included Jorge Luis Borges, Alexander Calder, Albert Camus, Marc Chagall, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Lawrence Durrell, Max Ernst, Jean Genet, Paul Klee, Henry Miller, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Georgia O’Keefe, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Edouard Roditi, Yves Tanguy, and Pavel Tchelitchew.

The editor was Charles Henri Ford, one of those mercurial polymaths who seemed to know everybody of significance in the world of arts and letters which explains how he could summon such an extraordinary roster of contributors. (It also helped that the upheavals of the Second World War had filled New York with a host of European artists.) Ford made a splash initially in 1933 when he co-wrote a novel with film critic Parker Tyler, The Young and Evil, a book regarded, somewhat debatably, as the first gay novel. This received guarded praise from Gertrude Stein (Ford’s writing was influenced by Stein and Joyce) who later said it was “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation”, and the book was sufficiently frank about the lives of its Greenwich Village characters to be banned in the US until the 1960s. Ford’s lover, Pavel Tchelitchew, provided a number of homoerotic illustrations although these were also suppressed until 1988.

The tragedy of magazines is that they flourish for a period then are soon forgotten, no matter how much impact they may have made in the general culture. View was no exception, and like most arts titles was published in limited runs which means that individual copies now command high prices. At a time when other forms of media are being continually resurrected, magazines fall by the wayside; museums and libraries collect them but they remain out of view of the world at large. The web has been slowly alleviating this problem: editions of Oz are now available for online browsing and there’s a complete copy of the “Americana Fantastica” issue of View here. You can also see issues of Aspen magazine over at the wonderful Ubuweb. Fingers crossed that somebody eventually gives us the rest of View.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1943 (SERIES II, NO.4)
Cover by Joseph Cornell.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.3)
Cover by André Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.4)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY / SUMMER 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.2)
Cover by Georgia O’Keeffe.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.3)
Cover by Fernand Leger.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, No.4)
Cover by Esteban Frances.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1945 (SERIES V, NO.1)
Cover by Marcel Duchamp.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY 1945 (SERIES V, NO.2)
Cover by Wilfredo Lam.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.3)
Cover by Morris Hirshfield.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.4)
Cover by Leon Kelly.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.5)
Cover by André Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 1)
Cover: Brancussi’s studio.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 2)
Cover by René Magritte.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH / SPRING 1947 (SERIES VI, NO.3)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

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