Minotaure

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Minotaure

description Art and literature magazine
Area of ​​Expertise surrealism
language French
publishing company Albert Skira Publishing House ( France )
First edition June 1933
Frequency of publication irregular
Sold edition 800+ copies
Editor-in-chief André Breton and Pierre Mabille
editor Albert Skira and Tériade

Minotaure ( French Minotaure ' Minotauros ') was a surrealist artist magazine . It was founded in February 1933 by publishers Albert Skira and Tériade in Paris . The editors-in-chief were André Breton , who made the magazine a forum for the “surrealist revolution”, and Pierre Mabille . The epoch of the Minotaure , 1933 to 1939, is seen as the high phase of Surrealism.

Presentation and content

The magazine was expensive and luxurious and showed original works by well-known artists such as Salvador Dalí , Max Ernst , Joan Miró , Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (the latter were close to Surrealism at the time) or Yves Tanguy as well as articles by Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara and at the same time offered a forum for hitherto less well-known contemporaries such as Hans Bellmer , Victor Brauner , Paul Delvaux , Alberto Giacometti , Roberto Matta and Abraham Rattner .

The title was inspired by the painter and graphic artist André Masson , who was one of the first artists of the 20th century to deal with the motif and myth of the Minotaur . Together with Georges Bataille , he proposed Skira the Minotaur as a leitmotif for the title.

Most of the time, the artists made their own contributions and artistic considerations and contributed to the graphic design of the magazine. Under the motto “Archeology of Modernity”, Minotaure reflected on architecture , the fine arts , film , literature and science and looked at earlier epochs and styles from an archaeological , ethnological , mythological and psychoanalytical perspective . In addition, the magazine published travel reports and interdisciplinary articles in which the visual artists alternated as poets and the writers as painters, graphic artists and typographers. Avant-garde photographic works by Brassaï or Man Ray complemented this new form of media design. At the turn of the year 1933/34 Man Ray published a color photograph on the cover, two years before the Kodachrome film came on the market. Man Ray had only recently developed the process himself. Minotaure thus carried on the surrealist idea of ​​the "combined arts".

The magazine, which was sold for 25 francs , was financed by donations from patrons , such as the English multimillionaire, art collector and poet Edward James , who in return sporadically contributed his own poetic works.

history

Minotaure
Front pages , 1933-1939
Albert Skira publishing house, Paris

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

In 1933, the publisher Albert Skira had the idea for a new and revolutionary magazine that was supposed to report on modern art and architecture in a progressive manner and turned to André Breton in February of that year. With Skira's stipulation, “Breton should not use the magazine for his social and political views”, topics that were of interest to Breton - in the narrower sense archeology, philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis and film - should be covered by the magazine. The first two issues appeared in June 1933 with cover designs by Picasso and Gaston Louis Roux, with the certainty of 800 subscribers .

Minotaure soon saw itself as a direct successor to the La Révolution surréaliste previously published by Breton and the surrealist journal Documents by Georges Bataille. From 1935 the Surrealists worked continuously and in the same year published a bulletin ( Bulletin international du surréalisme ), which accompanied the "International Surrealist Exhibitions" in Prague , Brussels and in 1936 in London . From issue no. 10, the Surrealists exercised full influence over the magazine. Breton, who, along with Bataille, was a member of the anti-fascist group Contre-Attaque , soon used the magazine as a political forum against Skira's previous orders against the backdrop of the Spanish civil war and in 1938 directed himself against Dalí and Paul Éluard, which resulted in the exclusion of the two artists from the group of surrealists contributed.

With the outbreak of the Second World War , Albert Skira had to discontinue the costly magazine. The last edition appeared in February 1939 exactly six years after it was founded.

meaning

Minotaure was designed from the title page to the frontispiece to the back in a sophisticated combination of high-quality photographs, graphics and texts in such a way that the recipient allowed his own free associations. Due to the reluctance of its producers, the publication broke with the traditional technique of directing the reader. Minotaure thus laid the foundation for the modern media aesthetics of later Zeitgeist magazines.

Other similarly important publications of the surrealist movement were the forerunners of Minotaure : Littérature (1919–1924) by Louis Aragon , André Breton and Philippe Soupault , La Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929) by Breton, Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret , Documents (1929– 1930) by Georges Bataille and Acéphale (1936–1939) by Bataille, Pierre Klossowski and André Masson and later View (1940–1947) and VVV (1942–1944) in the USA .

The magazine can be found in many important art collections of modern fine art such as the Center Pompidou Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Mary Reynolds Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago .

literature

  • Isabel Maurer Queipo, Nanette Rißler-Pipka, Volker Roloff (eds.): The cruel games of the Minotaure . transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-345-3

Web links

Individual references and sources

  1. ↑ Nicole Heinicke: star special PHOTOGRAPHY No. 35 “Man Ray”. stern, March 9, 2004, archived from the original on June 26, 2009 ; Retrieved September 28, 2012 .
  2. ↑ a b Volker Roloff: The cruel games of the Minotaure. (PDF; 175 kB) transcript Verlag, 2005, archived from the original on June 1, 2015 ; Retrieved April 6, 2008 .
  3. ↑ Minotaure. Handleser.org, archived from the original on November 9, 2013 ; accessed on January 13, 2013 (German).
  4. ^ Irene E. Hofmann: Paris: The Heart of Surrealism. In: Documents of Dada and Surrealism - Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago, archived from the original on April 5, 2008 ; Retrieved April 6, 2008 .
  5. ↑ Surrealism - From Minotaure to VVV. g26.ch art glossary, 2005, archived from the original on November 14, 2002 ; Retrieved September 28, 2012 .