Title:
L’Elan

Date of Publication:
Apr. 1915 – Dec. 1916

Place(s) of Publication:
Paris, France

Frequency of Publication:
Monthly (at times bimonthly)

Circulation:
1,000+

Publisher:
Société Générale d’Impression

Physical Description:
20 pages

Price:
12 issue subscription: 15 francs in France, 20 francs abroad

Editor(s):
Amédée Ozenfant

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Original Issues:
Vanderbilt University Library, University of Tennessee, National Gallery of Art Library

Reprint Editions:
Available in PDF form from Princeton University’s Blue Mountain Project. In micoform at: University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), University of Kentucky, University of Delaware, and Johns Hopkins University.

In April 1915 French cubist writer and painter Amédée Ozenfant published the first issue of L’Elan, a magazine dedicated to French art in response to the first World War. Dedicated to the “French spirit,” L’Elan was intended as propaganda not so much to support the French war effort as to sustain French art and culture, a way of showing solidarity in the face of unprecedented slaughter. Nonetheless, the magazine’s aesthetic stance was inherently a political one, as much of the magazine’s contents attempted to portray the French as more cultured and aesthetically revolutionary than their German opponents.

Ozenfant paid particular attention to the visual appeal of the magazine, most notably in his experimentation with typography. His use of a mélange of typefaces within a single poem or essay became what he referred to as psychotypique, where the typeface of the work participates in the meaning of the text. He cites André Billy’s definition of psychotypie as his working definition: “art that involves making the typographic characters participate in the expression of the thought and in the painting of states of the soul, no longer as conventional signs but as signs having a meaning in themselves” (L’Elan Apr 1915 2).

During its brief lifespan, L’Elan featured the works of celebrated painters and poets, many of whom were also fighting in the war: Guillaume Apollinaire and André Derain, for instance, are touted not as artists but as “soldier[s] in the trenches.” In addition to cubist experimentation and typographical flair, the magazine often included more realistic drawings of soldiers; “Types de la Grand Guerre,” for instance, was a series of soldiers sketched by French soldiers on the warfront.

Faced with financial difficulty and the recent death of this father, Ozenfant cancelled the magazine in 1916. He later said that the magazine “opened all doors to me,” having put him in contact with so many different influential artists.

l’étranger croit peut être qu’en France l’Art n’appartient qu’à la Paix. Ceux qui se battent, nos amis, nous écrivent combien la guerre les a attachés davantage à leur art : ils aimeraient des pages où le réaliser.

ce journal sera ces pages.

l’étranger ne pourra qu’admirer cette élégante insouciance, cette fidélité à l’Art.

ce journal, français, est aussi le journal de nos alliés et nos amis. 

nos amis russes déjà, lui ont promis leur riche collaboration.

il luttera contre l’Ennemi partout où il le rencontrera, fut-ce en France.

entièrement désintéressé, il se vendra au prix coûtant, son seul but étant la propagande de l’Art français, de l’indépendance française, en somme du véritable esprit français.

lisez-le.

-First issue of L’Elan, April 15, 1915.

the foreigner believes, perhaps, that in France Art belongs only to Peace. Those who are fighting, our friends, write to us how much the war has fastened them more strenuously to their art : they would like some pages where they can realize it.

this newspaper will be those pages.

the foreigner will only be able to admire this insouciance, this loyalty to Art.

this newspaper, though French, is also the newspaper of our allies and our friends.

our Russian friends have already promised their rich collaboration to it.

it will fight against the Enemy everywhere it meets him, even in France.

entirely selfless, it is sold at cost price, its only goal being the propaganda of French Art, of French independence, in short of the true French spirit.

read it.

Translated by Peter Bowman (Class of ’16, Davidson College)

Amédée Ozenfant (Apr. 15, 1886 – May 4, 1966)
Managing Director: Apr. 1915 – Dec. 1916

Born into a wealthy family in Saint-Quentin, Ozenfant attended Saint-Elme d’Arcachon and Captier in Saint-Sébastien. After school he returned to Saint-Quentin to pursue drawing and painting. In 1907 he enrolled in Académie de La Palette and in 1908 began exhibiting his works. Ozenfant founded L’Elan in 1915 in an attempt to celebrate French art and, more widely, solidarity against the Germans. Though he terminated L’Elan at the end of 1916, he went on to cofound another magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau, with Le Corbusier (pseudonym of Charles Edouard Jeanneret). The two men used their magazine as an outlet of Purism, an aesthetic movement they developed that emphasized the impersonality and purity of artistic elements. In the 1930s he wrote several articles for the Architectural Review on color as an essential, rather than decorative or secondary, aspect of architectural form. In 1936 he moved to London and established the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts. About two years later he moved to New York. Ozenfant became a United States citizen in 1944 and returned to France in 1953 where he remained until his death in 1966.

Guillaume Apollinaire:
“Guerre”
“Nuit d’avril 1915”
“Fête”

André Derain:
Untitled portrait of a woman (Jan. 1916)
Untitled portrait of a woman (Feb. 1916)

André Favory:
“Hommage à garros”
“Aérostation militaire”

Paul Fort:
“Le grand événement”

André Lhote:
“Pénélopes”
“Deuil”

Lucien Mainssieux:
“La Marseilleaise”
“De la vertu de la France”

Jean Marchand:
“Les pillards”
“La gardienne du foyer”
“Timeo Danaos. . .”

Henri Matisse:
Two untitled drawings (Dec. 1916)

Jean Metzinger:
“L’infirmière”

Amédée Ozenfant:
Covers, essays, sketches, psychotypiques
“La triple attente”
“Moralité pour un petit bourgeoise”
“Virgo Consolatrix”

Zina Ozenfant:
“Fêtes à Perm (Russie) célébrant la prise de Przemysl”
“Cérémonie en Russie pour le succès des armes alliées”
“Scène d’enrôlements à Londres”

Pablo Picasso:
Two untitled drawings (Feb. 1916)
“C. Max Jacob”
Untitled (Dec. 1916)

André Dunoyer de Segonzac:
“Sergeant d’infanterie aux tranchées”
“La nettoyage d’Alcibiade Falempin”
“Au repos”

Ducros, Françoise. Amédée Ozenfant. Éditions Cercle d’Art: Paris, 2002. Print.

Freeman, Judi. “Amédée Ozenfant.” World Heritage Encyclopedia. Web.

Golding, John. Ozenfant. M. Knoedler & Co., Inc.: New York, 1973. Print.

Ozenfant, Amédée, ed. L’Elan. 1915 – 1916. Paris: Société Générale d’Impression. Blue Mountain Project. Web.

Ozenfant, Amédée and Charles Jeanneret. La peinture moderne. Paris: Les éditions G. Crès, 1920. Archive.org. Web.

Shaw, Jill. “Still Life Filled with Space.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies. 35.2 (2009): 68-9. Web.

Vatin, Philippe. “Du pacifisme des artistes pendant la grande guerre.” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains. 150 (1988): 17-43. Web.

Wigley, Mark. “White-out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2].” Assemblage. 22 (1993): 6-49. Web.

“L’Elan” compiled by Peter Bowman (Class of ’16, Davidson College)

Title: 
La Revue du monde noir / Review of the Black World

Date of Publication: 
Nov. 1931 – Apr. 1932

Place of Publication: 
Paris, France

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly, 6 issues

Circulation: 
Unknown

Publisher:
Unknown

Physical Description: 
9.5″ x 6.5″; plain white paper, simple block print;table of contents; manifesto (“Our Aim”) in inaugural issue; editorials; essays; reports; illustrations; poetry; photographs; illustrations; short stories; reviews; announcements (“Our Next Issue”); no advertisements. Format order varies by issue. Color remains consistent throughout run. Each issue contained approximately 60 pages. Published in French and English.

Price: 
5 francs / 30 cents per issue

Editor(s): 
Paulette Nardal
Leo Sajous

Associate Editor(s):
Andree Nardal
Jane Nardal
Clara Shephard
Louis-Jean Finot (Collaborators)

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (Oak Street facility); New York Public Library; Carleton University Library; Bibliotheque Nationale de France; Yale University Library (Beinecke)

Reprint Editions:
Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969; Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992, with a preface by Louis Thomas Achille.

La Revue du monde noir was founded in 1931 by Paulette Nardal of Martinique and Leo Sajous of Haiti as a literary manifestation of the Nardal sisters’ salon in Clamart, France. It was at the Clamart salon that the concept of a collaborative monthly, bilingual, multiracial magazine was conceived. Under cooperative editorial management, the inaugural issue of La Revue du monde noir was published in November of 1931. La Revue was the first magazine of its kind, as at the time there was “no competing bilingual, panblack literary or cultural magazine in France or imported from the United States” (Sharpley-Whiting 55).  La Revue’s statement of purpose—“Our Aim”—in the first issue established its intention to encourage creative dialogue among and across the African diaspora: to “create among the Negroes of the entire world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual, and moral tie, which will permit them to better know each other to love one another, to defend more effectively their collective interests and to glorify their race” (Editorial Management 2). La Revue provided a vehicle primarily for sociological, literary, and cultural dialogue rather than political commentary; in this sense, the magazine was quite literally a review, not a journal or newspaper.  The magazine was partly funded by the Ministry of Colonies, making overtly political subject matter off limits (56). La Revue published editorials, articles, poetry, short stories, book reviews, and letters to the editor on subjects related to the African diaspora in Cuba, the United States, Liberia, Ethiopia, France, and others.

Throughout the magazine’s run and despite it’s self-proclaimed apolitical nature, the French government—forever on the lookout for Communist or Garveyist sentiments among black Francophones—closely followed La Revue’s content and its editors’ activities. As Louis Achilles relates in the magazine reprint’s preface, administrators from the Ministry of Colonies withdrew monetary support, and, vexed by funding issues, the magazine ceased publication after six issues (Achilles, preface xi).

On the third page of the inaugural issue of La Revue du monde noir (November 1931), the magazine management defines the magazine’s goals in a preface entitled “Our Aim” :

“To give to the intelligentia of the black race and their partisans an official organ in which to publish their artistic, literary and scientific works.

To study and to popularize, by means of the press, books, lectures, courses, all which concerns NEGRO CIVILIZATION and the natural riches of Africa, thrice sacred to the black race.

The triple aim which LA REVUE DU MONDE NOIR will pursue, will be: to create among Negroes of the entire world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual, and moral tie, which will permit them to better know each other to love one another, to defend more effectively their collective interests and to glorify their race.

By this means, the Negro race will contribute, along with thinking minds of other races and with all those who have received the light of truth, beauty and goodness, to the material, the moral and the intellectual improvement of humanity.

The motto is and will continue to be:

For PEACE, WORK and JUSTICE

By LIBERTY, EQUALITY and FRATERNITY

Thus, the two hundred million individuals which constitute the Negro race, even though scattered among the various nations, will form over and above the latter a great Brotherhood, the forerunner of universal Democracy.” (3)

La Revue du monde noir was the product of a collaborative editorial effort born of the Nardal sisters’ salon in the Parisian suburb Clamart, France. While Paulette Nardal was the chief founder and editor, editorial collaboration included: Paulette, Jane, and Andree Nardal, Martiniquan sisters who moved to Paris to attend university and hosts of the Clamart salon; Leo Sajous, a Haitian scholar specializing in Liberian issues; Clara Shephard, an African American educator and editor of the magazine’s English translation; and Louis-Jean Finot, who was described in a French police report as “a dangerous Negrophile married to a black violinist” (Sharpley-Whiting 55).

For the purpose of this index entry, extensive biographical description will be limited to the primary founder, publisher, and editor of La Revue, Paulette Nardal.

Paulette Nardal (1896 – 1985)
Editor: 1931 – 1932 

Born in Martinique in 1896, Paulette Nardal was the youngest of seven sisters.  Along with her sisters Jane and Andrée, she moved to Paris for university. In Paris she obtained a “licence ès lettres anglaises”—or, English major—from the Sorbonne (Sharpley-Whiting 48). Along with her sisters she hosted an ethnically diverse and gender-inclusive salon in Clamart, the birthplace of La Revue du monde noir.  She wrote for Aimé Césaire’s paper, L’Etudiant Noir, and later co-founded the newspaper La Dépêche Africaine, along with La Revue du monde noir (49). Her work in each of these publications, which varied in genre and subject matter, reflected an interest in exploring black literature and culture on a global scale.  She wrote essays, journalistic pieces, and short stories on subjects ranging from Caribbean women, black art, and colonialism. Despite La Dépêche Africaine being shut down by the French government, Nardal was commissioned by the French government to write a guidebook on Martinique (49). A devout Catholic and feminist, Nardal never married.

In her role as editor of La Revue Nardal became a cultural intermediary between Harlem Renaissance writers and Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean, three of whom would go on to found the  Négritude movement: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas (Ikonne 66).

Her contributions to the  Négritude movement, too, are often overlooked; while Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire are often touted as the founders of Negritude, Nardal contends that the men “took up the ideas tossed out by us and expressed them with more flash and brio…we were but women, real pioneers—let’s say we blazed the trail for them” (Hymans 36). Following Nardal’s death in 1985, Aimé Césaire paid honored Paulette Nardal as an initiator of the Négritude movement; he named a square in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, in her honor (36).

Louis-Thomas Achille
“The Negroes and Art”
“Nos Enquetes”

Lionel Attuly
“Duet”
“On the World Crisis Considered as a Topic of Interview”
“The Patient”

Jaques Augarde
“Poem”

Jean L. Barau
“Stenio Vincent, Statesman”

P. Baye-Salzmann
“Negro Art, Its Inspiration and Contribution to Occident”
“Islamism or Christianity?”

M. Bazargan
“An Answer to “Remarks on Islamism””
L. Th. Beaudza
“Rise and Decline of a Doctrine”
“Open Letter to Admiral Castex”

H.M. Bernelot-Moens
“Can Humanity be Humanized?”

Carl Broud
“Creole Cadences”

Aaron Douglas
“Foundry”

Gisele Dubouille
“New Records of Negro Music”

Felix Eboue
“Elephants and Hippopotamuses”
“The Banda, their Musique and Language”

Raymond Ecart
“A Book of International Merit”

Joseph Folliet
“New Books: Le Droit de colinasation”

Louis-Jean Finot
“Race Equality”

Leo Frobenius
“Spiritualism in Central Africa”

Mme. Grall
“The Tom-Tom Language of the Africans”

Gilbert Gratiant
“High Sea”

E. Gregoire-Michele
“Is the mentality of Negroes inferior to that of white men?”

Georges Gregory
“Debate on the Race Question”

Roberte Horth
“A Thing of No Importance”
“Le Taciturne”

Langston Hughes
“I, Too”

Maitre Jean-Louis
“The Creole Race”

G. Joseph-Henri
“Black Magic”

Flavia Leopold
“The Vagabond”

Etienne Lero
“Poems”
“Evelyn”
“Book Reviews: Jungle Ways”

Cugo Lewis
“Molocoye Tappin (Terrapin)”

Margaret Rose Martin
“The Negro in Cuba”

John Matheus
“Fog”

Claude Mckay
“Poem”
“Spring in New Hampshire”

Rene Menil
“Magic Island”
“Othello” (“Un poeme inedit de”)
“Views of Negro Folklore”

Andree Nardal
“Notes on the Biguine Creole (Folk Dance)”

Paulette Nardal
“A Negro Woman Speaks at Cambridge and Geneva”
“Awakening of Race Consciousness”

Colonel Nemours
“History of the Family Descendants of Toussaint-Louverture”

C. Renaud-Molinet
“Remarks on Islamism”

G.D. Perier“Racial Poetry”

Senateur Price-Mars

“The Problem of Work in Haiti”

Magd. Raney
“Night Vigil”

Rolland Rene-Boisneuf
“Colonial Economics: The Banana Question”

Leo Sajous
“The New Crusade”
“American Negroes and Liberia”
“Liberia and the World Politics”

Pierre B. Salzman
“An Opinion on Negro Art”

Clara W. Shephard
“Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute”
“The Utility of Foreign Languages for American Negroes”

Emile Sicard
“A Meeting at the Colonial Exhibition”
“Mutual Ignorance”

Philipe Thoby-Marcelin
“Poem”
“Poem of Another Season”
“Stanza”
“Destiny”

Walter White
“The Fire in the Flint”
Ydahe (pseudonym for Jane Nardal) 
“Night Falls on Karukera Island”

Doctors A. Marie and Zaborowski
“Cannibalism and Lack of Vitamins”

Guetatcheou Zaougha
“The Renaissance of Ethiopia”

Philipe de Zara
“The Awakening of the Black World”

Guy Zuccarelli
“Docteur Price-Mars, a portrait”
“A Lecture on the Voodoo Religion”
“A Stage in Haiti’s Evolution”

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.

Hymans, J.L.  Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1971.

Ikonne, Chidi. Links and Bridges: A Comparative Study of the Writings of the New Negro and Negritude Movements. Nigeria: University Press, Nigeria, 2005.

Jack, Belinda E. Negritude and Literary Criticism : The History and Theory of ” Negro-African ” Literature in French. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996

“La Revue du monde noir.” Liberation Journals Index.  Brown University

Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy D. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

Sourieau, Marie-Agnes. “La Revue du Monde Noir.”Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997. Print.

“La Revue du monde noir” compiled by Taylor Hamrick (Class of ‘13, Davidson College)

Title:
The Klaxon

Date of Publication:
1923/1924

Place(s) of Publication:
Dublin, Ireland

Frequency of Publication:
Once

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher:
Unknown

Physical Description:
27 pages. A frontispiece of “Negro Sculpture in Wood.” A “well-printed, nicely designed little magazine, with a decorative Vorticist-like cover, professional looking yet decidedly avant-garde” (O’Malley 4).

Price:
One shilling

Editor(s):
L.K. Emery (pseudonym of A.J. Leventhal)

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Original Issues:
Unknown

Reprint Editions:
Unknown

Described by Tim Armstrong as the “Irish Blast,” The Klaxon took off in Dublin, Ireland, with an ambitious purpose (1). Self-described as “an Irish International Quarterly, published in Dublin, concerned with the activities of all Nations in matters of Art, Music, and Literature,” The Klaxon lasted only one issue before collapsing. William T. O’Malley points out that, although the solitary issue is dated Winter 1923/1924, it was reviewed in the Irish Statesman on Jan. 17, 1924, and was likely published in the first week of 1924. The Klaxon was the first little magazine to be published in the Irish Free State.

The magazine was edited by Lawrence K. Emery, a pseudonym for esteemed Dublin intellectual A.J. Leventhal (O’Brien). It featured poetry (prose and verse), a manifesto of sorts (titled “Confessional” in a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of Ireland’s religious heritage), a translation of Brian Merriman’s 19^th century Gaelic poem “The Midnight Court,” and two critical defenses of modernist artistry in Ireland at the time.

The magazine took as its leading symbol the boisterous and riotous klaxon, and proclaimed that “with all the arrogance of youth, we step forward naked and unashamed as though for us the fig tree never grew” (Klaxon 1). Emery and his collaborators sought to “wake” Ireland up from what they saw as a moral slumber that rendered them irrelevant, and they proposed to do so by asserting their “lustiheaded youth” (“Beauty Energised”). The magazine ultimately failed to continue for financial reasons, and its contributors and editor sought other means of bringing Ireland to an artistic enlightenment. A.J. Leventhal (Emery) continued to publish in fellow Irish magainze Tomorrow and went on to replace Samuel Beckett at Trinity following the completion of his doctoral thesis (O’Brien 20).

The Klaxon’s manifesto was published in two parts, one by the editor, Lawrence K. Emery, titled “Confessional” (1),  and the other by F.R. Higgins, titled “Beauty Energized” (2).

“Confessional” is self-referential, establishes a collective audience, and ventures a tentative index of beliefs, Emery’s “seven articles of faith”:

“We are the offspring of a gin and vermouth in a local public-house. We swore that we were young and could assert our youth with all its follies. We railed against the psycopedantic parlours of our elders and their old maidenly consorts, hoping the while with an excess of Picabia and banter, a whiff of Dadaist Europe to kick Ireland into artistic wakefulness.”

“We Produced our seven articles of faith: announcing primarily our belief in ourselves and a catholic aestheticism that would include the xylophone as well as the spinet. Picasso and Ingress, Shakespeare and Aldous Huxley, Beethoven and the Organ Grinder, Chaplin and Chaliapin were mingled in our incredible credo. We put the psychologist on his knees before the gymnast and punched our fellows into believing in the divine right of artists. We put the four corners of the world round Ireland and clacked our heels together with merriment at the resultant  macédoine de fruits”  (“Confessional” 1).

Emery concludes with a declaration of action: “we fling our speculative bonds on the waters and assert our lustiheaded youth.”

Higgins adds, “We are no more dreamers, but drunkards, standing on the remote spaces of Ireland with our eyes to ends of the earth. Those last years have mellowed our youth: we are tasting life, as athletes desiring the virility of those greeks before the squabbling days of Socrates” (2).

Lawrence K. Emery (A.J. Leventhal) (1896 – 1979)
Editor: 1923

Lawrence K. Emery was the pseudonym of Irish intellectual, A.J. Leventhal, who was the sole editor of the short-lived Klaxon. Leventhal, born in Dublin in 1896, was educated at Wesley College before being invited to London for his work in the first Zionist Commission. Following his return to Dublin, Leventhal became involved in the propagation of modernism Ireland, contributing to the Dublin Magazine, and ultimately starting The Klaxon with the intent of publishing his review of Joyce’s Ulysses. After the dissolution of the magazine, Leventhal completed a doctoral thesis and occupied the lectureship position of French Literature at Trinity College only recently vacated by Samuel Beckett. He continued to contribute to Irish newspapers and magazines as well as publish pieces of criticism on the works of Beckett and Joyce among others (O’Brien).

L .K.E.
“Confessional”

F.R.H.
“Beauty Energised”

Percy Ussher
“The Midnight Court (from the Irish)”

H. Stuart
“North”

John W. Blaine
“Cheese”

Sechilienne
“The Will of God”

Lawrence K. Emery
“The Ulysses of Mr. James Joyce”

F. R. Higgins
“Cleopatra”

 G. Coulter 
“An Inghean Dubh”

Thomas McGreevy
Criticism

Armstrong, Tim. “Muting the Klaxon: Poetry, History, and Irish Modernism.” Modernism and Ireland: Poetry of the 1930s. ed. Patricia Coughlan. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. pp. 43-74.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

O’Brien, Eoin. “The Writings of A.J. Leaventhal: A Bibliography.” Dublin: The Con Leventhal Scholarship Committee.

O’Malley, William T. “Modernism’s Irish Klaxon.” Technical Services Department Faculty Publications. (2003).  Paper 19. Web. 9 Jun 2016.

“The Klaxon” compiled by Riley Ambrose (Class of ’13 Davidson College)