The Revolution Has Been Digitized

Modernismtransformed culture with bold new ideas and experiments in literature, visual art, and music. But when movements like Dada and Futurism hit the scene in the early decades of the 20th century, publishers didn’t want anything to do with them. Instead, tiny literary magazines such as The Little Review and The Dial brought the poetry of H.D., T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound to readers for the first time. They functioned a lot like zines in the 1990s or blogs today to bring the avant-garde to the people.

The aesthetic of each magazine reflected its artistic aspirations and, in some cases, its politics.Journals like 291 combined avant-garde art, photography, and literature with stylish design and typography. The Mask harkened back to early English magazines like The Spectator. Others, like Blast, were so radical that they look like the covers of punk albums.

See some of the cover art below.

The modernist “little magazines” used to be a bit hard to track down online — many were digitized, but they were often buried on library and museum websites. Now Monoskop, an arts and humanities wiki, has published an online catalog of modernist and avant-garde magazines, providing context for each title and links to the digitized versions. It’s basically ZineWiki for modernism and Dada. Design and typography geeks will find lots of great stuff browsing these at random, but Monoskop has pulled out some gems like these covers of Bauhaus and Mcano to get you started.

Seeing all of these titles in one place, one of the things that stands out is how familiar the cultural landscape of 100 years ago looks now. Loads of upstart outlets were clamoring for attention, all of them opposed to mainstream behemoths but each aimed at a tiny niche of readers. And, also like today, the overwhelming majority of those start-ups failed. Most of the little magazines didn’t last long; many didn’t make it past their first issue. Anyone can toss off a manifesto, but running a publication and keeping it coming out on time takes more than revolutionary fervor.

Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts was published between 1921 and 1924.

Mcano, a Dutch Dada journal, ran from 1922 to 1924.

Bauhaus was the journal of the famous German arts school.

Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray edited the first — and only — issue of New York Dada