By Annie Xiong '25

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Founded in 1940, the New York-based View magazine was created by Charles Henri Ford, a surrealist poet from Mississippi. After an extended stay in Europe, Ford moved to New York City in 1939 when American citizens were advised to return upon the Nazi invasion of Poland (Gilbert 2020, 8). View was not Ford’s first experience with publishing: he was the former American editor of London Bulletin, a British surrealist art magazine that ran from 1938 to 1940, and the poetry journal Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (Heller 2013). An accomplished artist in his own right, Ford also ventured into poetry (he published his first poetry collection, The Garden of Disorder in 1938) and the visual arts - he created, for instance, the visually striking collages Poem Posters (1964-65). Initially planning to name the magazineThe Poetry Papers but ultimately settling on View, Ford wanted the magazine to be a form of “new journalism,” “a form of international reporting by poets and visual artists that would provide visionary critical insight on the forthcoming political catastrophe in Europe” (Gilbert 2020, 1).

Ford argued that artists and poets had a unique and more meaningful way of understanding current events around the world. The slogan “through the eyes of poets” is also noticeably printed in every issue of the magazine. Charles Henri Ford published and edited the magazine with American poet and film critic Parker Tyler (Gilbert 2020, 8). Although Ford had always been receptive to surrealist ideas, it was Nicolas Calas who solidified the magazine’s alignment with the movement in the November 1941 “surrealist issue” that he edited. The issue also featured André Breton’s first American interview, which covered topics such as the position of surrealism in a time of war (Gilbert 2020, 10). View, when originally conceived by Ford, was thought to be a hybrid of Transition (a Parisian anglophone vanguard journal) and surrealist magazine Minotaure (Heller 2013). Throughout its monthly/quarterly publication from September 1940 to March 1947, View ended up experimenting with different formats. First printed as a newspaper, View had taken on a tabloid format by 1943, printing on glossy paper and donning the beautifully designed covers that it is now known for (Heller 2013).

New York City was the perfect place to create an avant-garde magazine: fleeing their home countries, many surrealist artists, such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Kurt Seligmann, immigrated to the city, creating a vibrant artistic scene. Americans had been introduced to the movement already in the 1930s: The Museum of Modern Art put on a surrealist show in 1936, while gallerists Julien Levy were also a crucial figures in disseminating surrealist art in New York, with exhibitions of Ernst, Tanguy, and René Magritte (Tashjian 1995, 178).

Given Ford’s personal experience and the background of View’s contributing writers, it is no surprise that the magazine was extremely interested in the war. In fact, the birth of surrealism in Europe was deeply entangled with the first World War. Many future surrealists were enlisted. André Breton and Louis Aragon, two main figureheads of the movement, served as medics treating wounded soldiers and observing first-hand the effects of battle on the human psyche. André Masson and Max Ernst’s works were thought to be reflective of the emotional and physical traumas they suffered while fighting. During the 1920s, the surrealists denounced the war in various polemic texts, while at the same time, many of the fundamental insights of surrealism were spurred by the violence of the war. Likewise, in the early 1940s, the new reality emerging with WWII had a big impact on surrealism and informed the content and the scope of View. In addition to an eclectic selection of poems, essays, opinion pieces, and artworks from European and American contributors, the magazine made it its mission to “maintain vital lines of communication between European and American intellectual communities divided by the upheaval of the war” (Gilbert 2020, 9). Created as a form of new journalism, View sought to convey wartime topics “through the eyes of poets.”

Since it did not shy away from portrayals of horror, calamity, and destruction, View was extremely radical, given the contemporary censorship of the American press. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United State’s official entry into the war, President Roosevelt established the Censorship Branch in the Military Intelligence Division, an agency dedicated to the monitoring of images and written text surrounding the war. Worried that Americans were shown overly optimistic and idealized images but also hoping to shield the country from harrowing pictures of death and battle, the American media heavily filtered information coming from the frontlines (Gilbert 2020, 2). While popular press like Captain America comic strip portrayed romanticized versions of masculine fighting, View insisted on the confusion, destruction, and the wrought political tensions that besieged the world during the time of war.

These ideas were expressed through essays as well as images. A close reading of a few examples from issues of View is telling. The cover of the January 1942 issue of View features “The Destruction of the World,” an essay written by Pierre Mabille, anthropologist and editorial director of Minotaure. The essay was translated from the French by Charles Henri Ford and excerpted from Mabille’s book Le Miroir du Merveilleux (Mirror of the Marvelous) (Mabille 1942). The essay starts by describing Mabille’s sadistic enjoyment of catastrophe and destruction in his youth, a propensity that he felt was shared by many others given the atrocity of the World Wars:

Pavel Tchelitchew, La Cascade Sèche, View, January 1942, cover.

He later compares the violence of war to cyclical geological upheavals. Mabille writes, “The unconscious associates these geologic transformations with the fabulous events connected with the origin of societies” (Mabille 1942). Frequently using terms such as “fabulous” to describe cataclysmic events, Mabille expresses his alignment with surrealism (and in turn the magazine’s alignment with surrealism) by evoking the movement’s tenet of the marvelous, even when talking about generational trauma. As André Breton writes in the Manifeste du surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924), “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” The marvelous, an aesthetic category centered on ideas of convulsive beauty, goes against classical ideas of harmony and order (Beyond given Knowledge, 2018, 206). Without aestheticizing or idolizing the atrocity of the war, Mabille sees in these cataclysmic events the birth of something new. Accompanying Mabille’s essay is a drawing by Pavel Tchelitchew titled La Cascade Sèche, meaning “the dry waterfall,” which depicts a rugged and rocky landscape that resembles the geologic upheavals that Mabille describes. Upon a closer look, human figures and faces can be found in the drawing, blending seamlessly and almost morphing into the structure. The landscape—resembling rubble—could refer to the aftermath of battle or bombardment, or the ruined state of the world in general. Furthermore, the choice to render human figures almost indistinguishable from their background may be a reference to the military practice of camouflage, the goal of which is to almost become one with one’s surroundings, but it can also suggest the engulfment of the individual into larger geopolitical forces. Although “The Destruction of the World” and La Cascade Sèche are only two examples of works published in View, they are nevertheless reflective of the magazine’s unique focus on the war, but through a surrealist lens. In the following years, View would continue to express a strong interest in educating their American audience on contemporary affairs across the Atlantic while also publishing an eclectic selection of modernist writings and artworks.

Beyond given Knowledge : Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-Gardes. European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies ; Volume 5. Boston, Massachusetts: De Gruyter, 2018.

Gilbert, Gregory. 2020. "View Magazine and the Mass Visual Culture of World War II" Arts 9, no. 2: 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020041

Heller, Steven. “All Eyes on View.” PRINT Magazine, January 1, 2013. https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/all-eyes-on-view/.

Mabille, Pierre. “The Destruction of the World.” View, January 1942. Princeton Special Collections.

Pawlik, Joanna. 2018. "Re‐membering Surrealism in Charles Henri Ford's Poem Posters (1964–65)." Art History 41 (1): 154-191.

P. & M. Jaworowicz Collection. View: Through the Eyes of Poets All Covers. 2024.

Tashjian, Dickran, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

University of Southern Mississippi. “View Magazine (1940-1947).” Accessed March 17, 2024. https://manager.lib.usm.edu/spcol/exhibitions/itemofthemonth/iomjunejuly08.