View Magazine's Marcel Duchamp Special Issue, 1945: Introduction

The young American poet Charles Henri Ford started View magazine in his New York apartment in 1940. Ford's stay in Paris in the 1930's had introduced him to Surrealist poets and artists, including André Breton, the leader of that movement, who had encouraged the young poet. When Ford returned to the United States, he founded View as an avant-garde literary magazine with Surrealist interests. View magazine ran from September 1940 through March 1947, appearing quarterly and monthly as financial circumstances permitted. Ford initially intended View to be a journal of contemporary events compiled of writings by his literary friends in Europe. The magazine soon evolved beyond this news-oriented format to include color covers, additional advertisements, numerous illustrations, and more ambitious designs by Ford's assistant editor, Parker Tyler.

View magazine offers the scholar of World War II-era American modernism a wealth of potential avenues for study. At its most successful, View was reminiscent of the French Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Ford modeled View after Minotaure's lavish production and wide-ranging interests in "arts plastiques - poèsie - musique - architecture - ethnographie et mythologie spectacles - études et observations psychanalytiques." Historian Susan Nessen has compared the two periodicals and noted that, like View, "Minotaure was not a forum for the moral politics of Surrealism."[1] Between 1942 and 1944, Breton published his own Surrealist magazine in New York, VVV, in part as a response to the eclecticism of View. Under Breton's dogmatic leadership, VVV certainly was a forum for the moral and political disputes within Surrealism in the 1940's. It ran for only three issues.

Under Ford's direction View was a success, as the business-minded young poet had intended from the start. He wrote to his mother in 1945, "[View's] prestige grows by leaps and bounds. View is now the world's leading journal of avant-garde art & literature. And I'd like to hold the position won . . . ."[2] His statement was not an exaggeration. By 1945 View had published writing by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, and the Surrealists Breton, Nicolas Calas, and Benjamin Peret. It had also produced special issues on artists Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Marcel Duchamp, with original covers by the artists. Several of the special issues were the first monographs published in English about these artists. View reproduced works by other contemporary artists as well. The magazine also ran columns on contemporary jazz and theatre.[3]

Several of the special issues on individual artists, each of which includes original essays by prominent writers and artists, stand today as the first significant monographs in English on the artists. Scholars often see View's most valuable contribution as its role in the introduction of Surrealist art to an American audience during the years 1940-1947. Although several recent studies examine the magazine generally within the context of Surrealism in America, few focus closely on the individual issues themselves.[4] The single exception to this tendency is Susan Nessen's dissertation, Surrealism In Exile: The Early New York Years, 1940-1942, which looks at the Ernst and Tanguy issues as seminal documents of the period that launched Surrealism in America and has provided a model for my own approach. Nessen notes the unique position View occupied as an art magazine sympathetic to Surrealism, but not an official forum for its ideas.[5] She writes in her introduction, "View published the mainstream of Surrealist thinking through May of 1942, and this fact has been overlooked . . . . If we are to understand the evolution of the movement throughout these years of exile, we must start at the beginning."[6] The present study falls at a somewhat later moment. The Marcel Duchamp issue in March of 1945 appeared at a moment when Ford's magazine was enjoying some relative success, and Breton's own attempt at a Surrealist journal, VVV, had faltered. The year 1945 also saw the end of Ford's serious commitment to the visual arts in his magazine.

The Duchamp issue represents another point of artistic contact. The issue is a near collaboration between Breton, his friend Duchamp, and the Austrian-born architect and designer Frederick Kiesler, who contributed to the issue a complex fold-out entitled "Les Larves d'Imagie d'Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp." Kiesler is a fascinating and little-studied figure in European and American modernism between the wars. Scholars have only begun to unravel his radical architectural designs, theater work, and art display ideas. His career was as long as Duchamp's, and his work was idiosyncratic, complex, and often strange. However, perhaps no other figure in post-World War I modern art had such extensive contact with artistic movements in Europe and America, absorbing the best parts of them into his own aesthetic. By the time he knew Duchamp and Breton in the mid-1940's, Kiesler had evolved a system of ideas as intricate as Duchamp's own and Surrealism itself. As an object of study, the Duchamp View issue combines the ideas of these three men in a single multifaceted production designed to explain Duchamp to an American audience for the first time.

The first chapter of this study discusses Breton's essay "Lighthouse of the Bride," the central essay in the Duchamp issue. This influential essay establishes a context into which the other View articles fit, and is the likely source for many of the opinions expressed in them. The second chapter will look more closely at the working relationship of Ford and Breton, and surveys the eleven articles in the Duchamp View that accompany "Lighthouse of the Bride." The third and fourth chapters examine Kiesler's "Les Larves d'Imagie d'Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp" Triptych. Kiesler's contribution to the Duchamp View offers a look at the way in which Duchamp and Kiesler's ideas may have intersected with Surrealism in 1945.

[1] Susan Weil Nessen, Surrealism in Exile: The Early New York Years, 1940-1942 (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1986), p. 219.

[2] Ford to his mother, 9 May 1945, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, hereafter HRC.

[3] For a survey of View's contents, see Charles Henri Ford, View: Parade of the Avant-garde, 1940-1947, compiled by Catrina Neiman and Paul Nathan, with an introduction by Neiman (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991).

[4] See, for example, Dickran Tashjian's A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson,1995), which includes a chapter on Charles Henri Ford and View. Marticia Sawin's Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,1995) is an treatment of the appearance of Surrealism in New York in the late 1930's and its evolution over the following decade, with a few brief mentions of View.

View Magazine's Marcel Duchamp Special Issue, 1945: Introduction.