Emily Hage

Between 1930 and 1970, Fortune magazine stood out as an important art venue. Taking advantage of the Time Inc. archive, only recently made available, my book presents the first in-depth exploration of Fortune from the perspective of artists. It also reveals the significance of the magazine venue in the production and reception of artists’ works. The book pays special attention to the women and minorities – Margaret Bourke-White, Miné Okubo, and Romare Bearden, among others – who contributed to this business periodical targeting powerful white businessmen. Highlighting artists’ use of Fortune as a critical platform, the book shows how they effected a widespread intervention distinct from what they could have achieved in the rarefied realms of galleries and museums or small-circulation serials. Fortune’s pages also afford a novel, complex view of 20th-century American culture and history as it unfolded. When we see artworks in this context, as original readers did, we gain a more complete and nuanced understanding of them. The Art of Fortune Magazine challenges canonical art historical parameters by putting “fine” artists into dialogue with those employed as illustrators and art editors.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dada-magazines-9781501342660/

Dada magazines made Dada what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This first volume entirely devoted to Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals: Dada, New York Dada, Dada Jok, and dozens more that began crossing enemy lines during World War I. The book includes magazines form well-known Dada cities like New York and Paris as well as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s. Anchored in close material analysis within a historical and theoretical framework, Dada Magazines models a novel, multifaceted methodology for assessing many kinds of periodicals. The book traces how the Dadaists—Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Dragan Aleksic, Hannah Höch, and many others—funded, compiled, printed, distributed, and exchanged these publications. At the same time, it recognizes the journals as active agents that engendered the Dada network, and its thematic, chronological structure captures the constant exchanges that took place in this network. With in-depth scrutiny of these magazines—and 1970s “Dadazines” inspired by them—, Dada Magazines is a vital source in the histories of art and design, periodical studies, and modernist studies..

ABSTRACT:This essay recommends a revised framework for approaching periodicals by putting the Bay Area Dadaists' 1970s "Dadazines" into dialogue with San Francisco punk zines, and by linking these periodicals with each group's performances. For these artists and for punks, zines offered a shared, cheap, quick means of expression and communication. Their zines also show that periodicals have the potential to be dynamic sites, like performances, that foster cross-fertilization and interaction and productively hold in tension materiality and ephemerality, mediation and liveness. Indeed, we can understand them as performances in their own right.

... It highlights writers such as Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, and American artists, including Clara Tice, Louis Eilshemius, and Agnes Ernst Meyer, who are typically overlooked in accounts focusing on Dada paintings and sculptures. ...

By putting Hugo Ball’s anthology Cabaret Voltaire (1916) into dialogue with the live performances at the Cabaret Voltaire, this essay offers a refreshed view of this seminal Dada document. It approaches Cabaret Voltaire as a “living magazine” (“lebendige Zeitschrift”), a phrase Ball used to describe the space at Spiegelgasse No. 1 in Zurich. The publication’s cabaret-like characteristics, mobility and constantly changing identity made it markedly animated and dynamic. Tristan Tzara reframed Cabaret Voltaire—conceived initially as an anthology that documented events—as a transportable, active magazine for promoting Dada and his own periodical, Dada. By defying conventional divisions between performance and print media, Cabaret Voltaire facilitated the Dadaists’ notable debunking of privileging the live over the mediated. The importance of the magazine in negotiating this reconception continued half a century later, in the form of the 1970s zine, CabVolt, which again reinvented Ball’s publication.

... It highlights writers such as Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, and American artists, including Clara Tice, Louis Eilshemius, and Agnes Ernst Meyer, who are typically overlooked in accounts focusing on Dada paintings and sculptures. ...

This essay recommends a revised framework for approaching periodicals by putting the Bay Area Dadaists’ 1970s “Dadazines” into
dialogue with San Francisco punk zines, and by linking these periodicals
with each group’s performances. For these artists and for punks, zines offered a shared, cheap, quick means of expression and communication. Their zines also show that periodicals have the potential to be dynamic sites, like performances, that foster cross-fertilization and interaction and productively hold in tension materiality and ephemerality, mediation and liveness. Indeed, we can understand them as performances in their own right.

By putting Hugo Ball’s anthology Cabaret Voltaire (1916) into dialogue with the live performances at the Cabaret Voltaire, this essay offers a refreshed view of this seminal Dada document. It approaches Cabaret Voltaire as a “living magazine” (“lebendige Zeitschrift”), a phrase Ball used to describe the space at Spiegelgasse No. 1 in Zurich. The publication’s cabaret-like characteristics, mobility and constantly changing identity made it markedly animated and dynamic. Tristan Tzara reframed Cabaret Voltaire—conceived initially as an anthology that documented events—as a transportable, active magazine for promoting Dada and his own periodical, Dada. By defying conventional divisions between performance and print media, Cabaret Voltaire facilitated the Dadaists’ notable debunking of privileging the live over the mediated. The importance of the magazine in negotiating this reconception continued half a century later, in the form of the 1970s zine, CabVolt, which again reinvented Ball’s publication.

... Marinetti's "Dune" and Franceso Cangiullo's "Addioooo," and Kandinsky submitted two poems, "Look and Lightning" ("Blick und Blitz") and "See ... Sharmila Ganguly, 1st English-language ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009); and Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky, "Paris," in ...

Magazines are increasingly emerging as critical sites in developing a new understanding of the dynamic relationship between “fine” art and mass culture. Throughout the 20th century, a wide range of American periodicals commissioned artists to produce work for covers and feature stories, but many of these commissions have been left out of histories of modernism.

This session considers three case studies to convey the rich trajectory of art and magazines: Edward Hopper’s covers for the Wells Fargo Messenger, Mine Okubo’s drawings in Fortune magazine, and Saul Steinberg’s work for such publications as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, and Time. The papers explore the origins of and motivations behind such commissions and analyzes the art as it was originally published in print, showing how advertisements, adjacent articles, and captions shaped the initial reception and understanding of the works.

The sometimes-incongruous juxtapositions of images, texts, and ads reveal a messy modernism in the making. They also offer a novel view of the convergence of financial, social, cultural, and political forces in 20th-century American history without the (often misleading) order afforded by hindsight. This session brings new works by both well-known and understudied artists to light and broadens the parameters of what is considered “modern” art. Spanning over half a century, it demonstrates the complex relationships among artists, corporations, and magazines in the 20th century.

Presenters and Topics:

Chair: Erika Doss – Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame; Rockwell Center Distinguished Fellow

    Edward Hopper and the “Wells Fargo Way”
    Leo G. Mazow -Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
    “Objectivity” in Wartime U.S.A.: Mine Okubo and Fortune Magazine
    Emily Hage – Associate Professor of Art History, Saint Joseph’s University
    Beyond The New Yorker: Saul Steinberg’s Other Magazine Commissions
    Melissa Renn – Collections Manager, HBS Art and Artifacts Collection, Harvard Business School.

Magazines are increasingly emerging as critical sites in developing a new understanding of the dynamic relationship between “fine” art and mass culture. Throughout the 20th century, a wide range of American periodicals commissioned artists to produce work for covers and feature stories, but many of these commissions have been left out of histories of modernism.

This session considers three case studies to convey the rich trajectory of art and magazines: Edward Hopper’s covers for the Wells Fargo Messenger, Mine Okubo’s drawings in Fortune magazine, and Saul Steinberg’s work for such publications as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, and Time. The papers explore the origins of and motivations behind such commissions and analyzes the art as it was originally published in print, showing how advertisements, adjacent articles, and captions shaped the initial reception and understanding of the works.

The sometimes-incongruous juxtapositions of images, texts, and ads reveal a messy modernism in the making. They also offer a novel view of the convergence of financial, social, cultural, and political forces in 20th-century American history without the (often misleading) order afforded by hindsight. This session brings new works by both well-known and understudied artists to light and broadens the parameters of what is considered “modern” art. Spanning over half a century, it demonstrates the complex relationships among artists, corporations, and magazines in the 20th century.
Chair - Erika Doss
Speakers - Emily Hage, Leo Mazow, Melissa Renn