FORM No. 4
(April 15, 1967)
Philip Steadman, Mike Weaver & Stephen Bann [Editors]
Philip Steadman, Mike Weaver & Stephen Bann [Editors]: FORM No. 4 (April 15, 1967). Cambridge: Philip Steadman, 1967. Original edition. Slim square quarto. Stapled wrappers. 32 pp. 32 black and white illustrations. Functional graphic design throughout by Philip Steadman. Wrappers lightly soiled and curled at fore edge. A couple of random spots throughout, but a nearly very good copy.
9.75 x 9.75 stapled Art journal with 32 pages of illustrated essays. Short lived British avant-garde periodical published in ten issues from Summer 1966 to Autumn 1968. “I think we had the idea that Form would be a mixture of contemporary art and the avant-garde of the pre-war period. We were trying to bring those two together in some way. In particular, we wanted to set Kinetic Art in the context of the avant-garde of the 1930s,” according to Editor and Designer Philip Steadman.
- Black Mountain College: The Founding of the College, Lewis Shelley (with 2 illustrations).
- The Hochschule at Ulm, Josef Albers (with 1 illustration).
- Albers' 'Graphic Tectonics,’ Irving Finkelstein (with 8 illustrations).
- Brighton Festival Exhibition of Concrete Poetry Exhibition notes and map (with 3 illustrations).
- The Early Days of Concrete Poetry, Eugen Gomringer
- What is Kinetism?, Lev Nusberg (with 11 illustrations).
- Symmetry, Nature and the Plane, Charles Biedermann
- A Non-Aristotelian Creative Reality, Charles Biedermann (with 4 illustrations).
- The Coherences, Anselm Hollo (poem).
- Great Little Magazines: No. 4. Mecano, excerpts by Kurt Schwitters, I.K. Bonset and Raoul Hausmann (with 3 illustrations).
Editor and Designer Philip Steadman is the author of several books on geometry in architecture and computer-aided design. In the 1960s he co-edited and published Form, an international magazine of the arts, and co-authored a book on kinetic art. He helped to produce four computer-animated films on the work of Leonardo da Vinci for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989. He has also contributed to other exhibitions, films and books on perspective geometry and the history of art.
Allow us to quote at length from Adrian Shaughnessy’s essay “Looking at Form, a quarterly magazine of the arts (1966–1969),” published in Unit: Design/Research 02 – Space and structure [2010]:
Steadman was untrained as a graphic designer. He acquired a love of printing and typography while at school, and apart from a spell working on the shortlived magazine Image, and a stint on the Sunday Times Colour Magazine in its early glory days, he has not worked as a graphic designer. But his training in architecture and his strong interest in the visual arts – especially art with a geometric focus, not to mention Concrete Poetry and Kinetic Art – has equipped him with a sense of space and structure that allowed him to design page layouts and front covers for Form that exuded poise and confidence.
His lack of formal training is revealed in the occasional typographic infelicities that can be found in Form. As a publication, it cannot be compared to the finest specimens of Modernist editorial design from Europe – Neue Grafik, for example – but it had a discipline and purity that makes it wholly unexpected in the contemporaneous UK publication scene. To illustrate just how untypical Form’s design and layout was, Steadman struggled to find a printer who held Helvetica – hard to imagine considering that typeface’s subsequent ubiquity. In fact, the Cambridge based Steadman had to ‘send to London’ to get the magazine’s headlines set in Helvetica. Further evidence of Form’s unusualness can be seen in the use of good quality art paper – a somewhat lavish gesture for the time – and in the use of the ‘wasteful’ square format.
But it’s the content of Form that really distinguishes it from other journals of the period. Steadman and his two co-editors were writing about subject matter –most notably the rise of French postmodern thinking – that simply wasn’t being dealt with anywhere else in Britain. Form’s co-editor Stephen Bann said: “We thought of Form as a kind of neomodernist publication, I suppose, devoted to the early avant-garde as well as to the classic American avant-garde deriving from Black Mountain College, etc. I was especially keen on work by contemporary literary figures – people like Thomas Bernhard, Robert Pinget, and Ian Hamilton Finlay – who have now achieved a great reputation. I also included possibly the first English translation of an essay by by Roland Barthes in issue number one.”
Browsing through the ten issues of Form is like a switchback ride through the 20th century avantgarde. The dazzling array of names forms a dramatis personae of radicalism: Theo Van Doesburg, Roland Barthes, Gertrude Stein, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The subject matter ranges from Kinetic Art to Structuralism; from Marcel Duchamp to American photography by way of Neoplasticism and Russian Unofficial Art. A regular feature titled Great Little Magazines allowed Form’s editors to write about many of the ‘little’ magazines that had inspired them: Secession, G, Mecano, De Stijl and Kulcher. This is subject matter that you’d struggle to find in one place today. Yet in the 1960s there was a small but dedicated audience eager to support a magazine that surveyed this terrain – a fact corroborated by the discovery made by Steadman when he closed the magazine after 10 issues: ‘I wrote to all the subscribers at the end and said I’m afraid we’ve run out of money and we’re going to have to close. Lots and lots wrote back and said “Oh we’d have paid much more for it.”’