VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE
December 1943 [Series iii, No. 4]
Charles Henri Ford [Editor]
Charles Henri Ford [Editor]: VIEW [Series iii, No. 4]. New York: View, Inc., December 1943. Slim quarto. Stapled thick wrappers. 44 pp. Illustrated articles and period advertisements. Spine edge lightly worn with faint stress lines. Cover faintly creased. Textblock edges very lightly yellowed. Cover design [The Flower of Sight] by Pavel Tchelitchew. A very good or better copy.
8.75 x 12 magazine with 44 pages reported and reflected "through the eyes of poets." Contents include:
Cover: The Flower of Sight by Pavel Tchelitchew
New Drawings by Leon Kelly
Apes, Warriors and Prophets by Nicolas Calas
Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel
Socrates and the Master Poet by Charles Glenn Wallis
Dead Eye Dick Rides again by Clay Perry
Melted Pillars of Wisdom
Ganymede drawing: Michelangelo
You cannot stop death (poem) by Joe Massey
Childrens page Daniel Henry Hays
New York Letter by Kenneth Macpherson
Full-page ad for Direction designed by Paul Rand
And more.
It was not until Charles Henri Ford's View came along that America had its own avant-garde literary and art magazine.
—Paul Bowles
Surrealist poet and Mississippi native Charles Henri Ford (1910-2002) created View in 1940 while living in New York City. Ford's original idea was to establish a new sort of journalism where the truth of world events was reported and reflected "through the eyes of poets." Originally in a tabloid newspaper style, the first issue of View featured Ford's interview with the reclusive poet Wallace Stevens at his home in Connecticut. Out in the garden, Stevens complained about the "pose and theatricality" surrounding Mrs. Roosevelt on a recent flight they shared, chatted about Dylan Thomas, and told Ford to make him "look romantic" in the photograph for the article.
After World War II began in earnest, European writers and artists began arriving in New York. View grew along with the emerging art scene and evolved into a slick, large-format Avant-garde magazine with dazzling covers by major figures of the modern art movement. Leger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Masson, Magritte, Noguchi and Ford's partner, Pavel Tchelitchew, all contributed cover designs.
View captured and cataloged a surrealist sensibility but was not limited by the strict confines and manifestos of the famously cliquish group. Ford participated in the salons and artistic collaborations that blossomed in 1930s Paris, where he first met Breton, American ex-patriots like Djuna Barnes and Paul Bowles, and others who would become friends and, later, contributors to View. When his European cohorts began fleeing their war-torn countries, they moved to New York City and naturally built a dynamic artistic community. Galleries like Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century and Julian Levy's showcased the European refugees' works. Ford took full advantage. He partnered with the galleries and presented View numbers as catalogs for their shows. Gallery owners would foot the bill, and Ford would have a sparkling new issue.
Ford was an experienced editor and publisher when he started View. He first published Blues: a Magazine of New Rhythms in 1929 from his home in Columbus, MS. Blues was first to publish writers Erskine Caldwell and Parker Tyler. Connections Ford made while producing the eight issues of Blues served him well when he started View. Ford co-authored with Parker Tyler what some consider the first gay novel, The Young and Evil (Obelisk Press, 1933). Tyler became part of Ford's View editorial team and contributed the typography, lay-out and design that helped define the fresh aesthetic of the magazine. View peaked at a circulation of 3000, according to Ford, and ultimately encompassed an eclectic array of literary and artistic production. Ford published the last issue in March of 1947. Tchelitchew contributed the cover art.
Little magazines like View presented new and "untested" writers before many of the established publications would give them a chance. Faulkner and Hemingway were first published in The Double Dealer, for instance. The avant-garde nature of the little magazine records for history pre-institutionalized intellectual movements. Their position on the cultural landscape makes these publications significant for those seeking to understand and preserve our social and intellectual history. [The University of Southern Mississippi]
Allow us to quote extensively from Steven Heller's Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century: View: Through the Eyes of Poet's New York's first Surrealist journal appeared in September 1940 as a six-page tabloid. Edited by poet Charles Henri Ford, the former American editor for the London Bulletin, the British surrealist revue published by the London Gallery between 1938 and 1940, View's mission for its seven year duration (36 numbers in 32 issues) was to fill the void of European avant garde periodicals that ceased with the war. Ford positioned his publication between the "little magazine" transition (the vanguard journal edited in Paris by Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul between 1927 and 1938) and Minotaure. After View's 1941 "Surrealist issue" edited by Nicolas Calas it became the most important American surrealist publication, featuring text and visual contributions from all the principles in the circle.
By 1943 View shifted from the tabloid to a more standard magazine format printed on slick paper with full color covers and the occasional gatefold. This increased the financial burden of production that the maximum 3000 paid circulation did not cover, so to maintain a regular quarterly publishing schedule Ford accepted relatively expensive advertisements for fashions and perfumes, among those already for books, periodicals, and other cultural events. Associate editor, Parker Tyler was in charge of View's typography and graphic design and produced a highly sophisticated graphic persona on a par with Minotaure and yet unique to View. The covers created by Surrealist standard bearers, Andre Masson, Man Ray, Kurt Seligmann, and Marcel Duchamp, as well as other modern artists, Alexander Calder, Fernand Leger, and Georgia O'Keeffe, were the most adventuresome of any American magazine. Moreover, these were not paintings arbitrarily placed on the covers but images designed especially for this venue. Occasionally, the common View masthead (set in a Bodoni typeface) was designed by the cover artist: Isamu Noguchi's 1946 cover is a superb example of this transformation: Here the letters of View are sculptural elements reading diagonally down the page and bracketing the sculpture is the centerpiece of the cover.
View covered the Dada experience and introduced the key surrealists to New York. Andre Breton's first American interview was published here. An entire issue (1942) was devoted to Max Ernst with article on him by Breton; and a spectacular issue (1945) featured Duchamp, complete with layouts designed by the artist -- this being the first monograph ever published of his work. An essay by Peter Lindamood describes the technical machinations involved in, and thereby demystifies, the creation of Duchamp's View cover, a montage of a smoking wine bottle. He explained how this master of "art-plumbing expediency" rigged up a smoke pipe under the bottle and then manipulated the various halftone layers to achieve the desired effect. In this and other articles View gave Surrealist art a human context that was curiously absent in the pseudo-scientific and hyper analytic writing found in the earlier European journals.
Coverage of the European vanguard was only a part of the editorial menu. Ford felt a duty to bridge the transatlantic gap by bringing Americans into the Surrealist fold and in 1943 View was the first to publish Joseph Cornell's earliest "found art" compositions ("The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice"). It gave outlet to the emerging American vanguard writers and artist-writers, including Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Alexander Calder, and others. But Ford also published the naive and self-taught Surrealists, notably the African-American artist Paul Childs. Morris Hirshfield, whose beguilingly detailed and folk paintings were discovered by Sidney Janis in the thirties, was also part of the View community. Hirshfield's 1945 cover intricately rendered cover of a cleverly veiled nude was surrealism at its most slyly innocent.
View celebrated the artist as visionary and Surrealism as a wellspring of artistic eccentricity. In its role as avant garde seer the magazine overstepped the bounds of propriety, and therefore in 1944 was banned by the U.S. Postal Service presumably for publishing nudes by Picasso and Michelangelo. However, despite its confrontational stance and the debates about Marxism, Communism, and Trotskyism that were carried on in European Surrealist circles, View did not advocate ideological political activity, but rather supported the right of individual artistic freedom - and eclecticism. "View 's editors thought it delusional to believe that art could ever serve any cause other than its own," wrote Catrina Neiman in View: Parade of the Avant-Garde (Thunder Mouth Press, New York, 1991), who further notes while certain poets of the day urged opposition to the inevitable world war, "View printed no editorials denouncing the war." Though it did maintain a pacifist stance that supported conscientious objection.
View was a significant outlet for Surrealism it was also uncommitted to the movement as a "party," and thus became an instrument for popularizing the avant garde. Surrealism as a style was, no pun intended, ready-made as an advertising trope. "Ford did not disdain commercial avenues of support," states Catrina Neiman, ". . . on the contrary, he knew not only how to navigate capitalism but hoe to appreciate (appropriate) its imagery, namely through the lens of camp, a 'view' that converged with surrealism then and with Pop Art twenty years later." Despite the paid advertising, however, View ceased publishing in 1949.