Magazines, Modernity and War (review)

This book stems from a conference correlated with an exhibit at the Reina Sofía Art Center in Madrid. Hence, curatorial interests and editorial economy are both responsible for the book's scope, which despite an enticingly broad title is largely limited to journals that covered or sprouted from the Spanish Civil War. This limitation, while understandable in the institutional context, is unfortunate when one reflects that the shock of modernity through armed conflict was socially more dramatic and theoretically more productive during the First World War than in the localized and far less industrialized conflict that raged in the Iberian Peninsula two decades later—in effect, the last in the West to benefit from the romantic imagery of a people in arms. Despite this focus, the collection includes two essays that expand the view of modernity beyond the Spanish war. Also striking—and likewise associated with the curatorial event—is the neglect of the literary aspect of modern magazines and the heavy reliance on illustration, a privileging of image over text that clearly relates to the spectatorial conditions of the museum. Even so, sequestering a book about modern magazines from the profuse literary reactions to the Spanish Civil War and the other wars of the century is too emphatic a gesture to pass unnoticed.

In her brilliant introduction, Jordana Mendelson advocates the importance of "Periodical Studies," bemoaning the relative inattention such publications have suffered at the hands of scholars. She acknowledges a recent interest in "little magazines" as manifestations of "elite culture," a proposition that, although not entirely accurate in its temporal evaluation, may be statistically correct. While specific examples of academic interest in periodical ventures can be found, they represent exceptions to a wider disinterest in cultural studies; hence it remains true that analysis of literary and cultural magazines has not been at the center of research. This is perhaps not surprising given the traditional focus on individual authors and works, whereas, as Mendelson aptly points out, "To study magazines means not just to examine individual contributions but to think about the magazine as a whole" (10). Furthermore, magazines exist in multiple arenas, all of which contribute to the overall effect. Her interest, nevertheless, lies primarily in the, in her view, more neglected role of the modernist magazine as "a visual artifact"; the book turns, therefore, less around the role of the modern magazine as a vehicle for ideas than around the role of artists in fashioning the magazine's appearance (11). Programmatically then, the book's rationale is to "reintroduce us to a category of ephemera that was thriving and ubiquitous" and is now coming to be seen as "a key to understanding the cross-media and inherently interdisciplinary modernity of early twentieth-century print culture" (11). One theoretical aspect missing from this collection is any analysis of the economic and social presuppositions that regulated the appearance of the illustrated magazine, its relation to the daily press, and to the feuilleton from which the cultural magazine derives. What sociological strata did these publications cater to? How did the interwar magazines come about and maintain themselves in a period of economic slump? What is their relation to the increased circulation of newspapers and to the ever-growing share of space given over to publicity in the newspaper's layout? How did this commercial necessity transition to the avant-garde design that changed traditional discursive vehicles into "visual artifacts"? These and other questions are left aside for the political contexts that greeted the modernist graphic aesthetics that the book is primarily concerned with.

Miguel Sarró offers a compact overview of the illustrative work in the Spanish anarchist press for the duration of the Spanish Civil War, informing about the various unions and organizations of illustrators during this period of feverish collectivization. Javier Pérez Segura writes about two magazines, 14ª División and Voz de Madrid, a Spanish language publication appearing in Paris to further the cause of the Spanish republic. Unlike 14ª División...