VVV
By Pippa LaMacchia '26
Access the scans of this periodical via Princeton University Library.
VVV: a New York surrealist periodical
VVV was published in New York City between 1942 and 1944. This journal came into existence during World War II, when many European artists migrated to the United States in order to escape the violence of the war. Edited by David Hare alongside well-known surrealists André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, VVV is described as a “hub of a revitalized surrealism” because of its inclusion of international voices as well as these foundational members of the surrealist group (Hare 2016, 186). With this overlap, VVV positioned itself as a far-reaching and global journal. While originating in New York, the displacement of European surrealists and their involvement with the publication, makes the journal an outlet for their work now in conversation with young and upcoming American artists. In this sense, VVV grounds itself as a place for communication and the dissemination of artistic ideas and endeavors, and becomes a “forum of interaction” (Hopkins 2016, 208). Coming nearly two decades after the publication of André Breton’s founding Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du surréalisme), VVV preserves surrealism’s legacy while pushing it towards new directions and a wider international audience, particularly in the busy hub of New York City. While surrealist magazines were originally self-referential as a venue to define the movement, later periodicals like VVV extend surrealism’s boundaries and its potential. Each new magazine represents a new facet of surrealism and furthers its reach as a dynamic and constantly shifting global movement.
Each issue of VVV published “poetry and plastic arts” (sculpture, photography, painting, etc.), and prose, but the magazine also included articles exploring anthropology, sociology, and psychology (Hare 1942, 1). Its diversity of material broadened the range of its conversational potential, inviting intellectuals and thinkers into discussions centering around surrealism. But the magazine also presents this material in a vibrant and radical manner, revolutionizing the visual and expressive potential of magazines. VVV harnesses surrealism’s revolutionary power to continuously shape the American avant-garde by folding in new forms of thought and artistic experimentation.
VVV’s poetic manifesto is printed very simply onto the first page of each issue, further defining the role of this magazine in the lineage of other surrealist publications. The word “Victory” permeates the piece as the magazine defines itself with the goal of “Victory over the forces of regression and of death unloosed at present on the earth…” alongside victory “over that which tends to perpetuate the enslavement of man by man” (Hare 1942, 1). The magazine emphasizes the surrealist values of liberation and its steady anti-fascism in the middle of a traumatic wartime period — it defines itself as a call-to-action, a call to seek “Victory” over the violent fascist powers terrorizing the world. The magazine explicitly places itself in opposition to “death” and “enslavement” and it calls upon the “emancipation of the spirit of which the first indispensable condition is the liberation of man” (Hare 1942, 1). With this call for liberation and freedom, VVV immediately positions itself as a war-time magazine. In addition to the personal liberation, or “emancipation of spirit” through artistic expression which the journal evidently seeks to embody, VVV’s presentation (striking coloring and dynamic three-dimensional foldouts, for example) transforms this magazine into a physical representation of global and social revolution during World War II.
“Victory over the forces of regression and of death unloosed at present on the earth, but also V beyond this first Victory, for this world can no more, and ought no more, be the same, V over that which tends to perpetuate the enslavement of man by man”
VVV’s vibrant covers are the first representations of the journal’s implicit messaging. Illustrated by well-known surrealists like Max Ernst (the first issue), Marcel Duchamp (the second and third double issue), and Matta (the fourth and final issue), VVV confidently grounds itself as a part of the surrealist legacy. Ernst’s design of the first issue’s cover retains its impact — a deep green backdrop to the remarkable, albeit simple, VVV logo. Across the page are flowing shapes, sometimes animals, sometimes mathematical sketches, sometimes both. Ernst represents an overlap of nature and logic through these animalistic and mathematical signs, which embodies several surrealist principles. An important part of the “emancipation of spirit” comes from core surrealist ideas — for instance, discovering a connection with and an expression of the unconscious often related to imaginative powers. By bringing together the logical human with the instinctual animalistic human, Ernst concisely represents the surrealist project. Mankind strays away from its subconscious when logical thought becomes more powerful than the child-like or animalistic side, therefore Ernst represents the necessity of balance between these two facets of the human.
The magazine’s two other covers accomplish a similar goal by provoking conversation through their striking representations of a variety of human figures. Marcel Duchamp’s cover of the second issue depicts a man on a horse who appears to straddle both the horse and the planet Earth itself, perhaps a commentary on the violent destruction of the world. In the combined third and fourth final issues Roberto Matta shockingly illustrates the mouth and teeth of a monster that is simultaneously a vulva. This combination of the feminine and the monstrous speaks to an understanding of a woman’s sexuality as violent or threatening. The distressing images on the covers shock the readers out of their stupor, sometimes perhaps with subliminal political messages — the power of female sexuality on Matta’s cover, for instance, might be an attack to fascist hypermasculinity.
The magazine ricochets between English and French — contributing to its relatively cross-cultural focus. On one page, for instance, is a poem written in French by Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and merely a few pages later is a short story in English by Leonora Carrington. Vibrant and unexpected illustrations, like Ernst’s drawing First memorable conversation with the Chimera, fill the pages between texts and several pages even contain foldouts, among other playful elements. The dynamism of this magazine (in language, in appearance, in audience) cements VVV in surrealism’s lineage as a specifically global and international project. Its page-by-page movement, as the journal shifts between mediums and languages, paired with the journal’s physical movement as an art object that is meant to be sent around the world, offer a material representation can conversations within a wider diversity of people, particularly in the cultural center that is New York City.
Bibliography
Hare, David, ed. "VVV." VVV, no. 1 (1942): 1.
Hopkins, David, ed. A Companion to Dada and Surrealism. Newark: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. ProQuest Ebook Central, 2016. Accessed March 2024. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/princeton/detail.action?docID=4418731.
Storm, Kristen, ed. The Routledge Companion to Surrealism. Routledge, New York. 2022. Accessed March 2024. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003139652.