Arts and Letters edit
Frank Rutter, art critic of The Sunday Times, along with artists, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, had planned the launch of a journal, Arts and Letters, for Spring 1914, but this was delayed by the outbreak of war.[2][1] It began publication in July 1917 as an illustrated quarterly,[3] co-edited by Rutter and Herbert Read,[4] whose aesthetic and critical ideas dominated.[1][5] It was a modernist magazine of visual and literary art, which fused the artistic and the political.[6]
The contents page of the first issue carried a policy of renumeration for contributors, based on "co-operative lines" that after the cost of production and 5% on capital, half of the profits would go to editorial and publishing staff and the other half would be split equally between contributors.[3] Underneath an 1894 woodcut by Lucien Pissarro, page one carried an editorial explaining the delayed publication due to the outbreak of war and justifying the use of scarce materials, compared to other periodicals "which give vulgar and illiterate expression to the most vile and debasing sentiments."[7] It was also stated that some of the contributors were serving at the front and that educated men in the army were keen to see such a publication: "Engaged, as their duty bids, on harrowing work of destruction, they exhort their elders at home never to lose sight of the supreme importance of creative art."[7]
Sickert's "Thérèse Lassore" was printed in 1918, after which the journal ceased publication for a year. It resumed again with Osbert Sitwell as Rutter's co-editor—and T. S. Eliot's theories predominating editorially—but folded in 1920.[5]
Notes and references edit
- ^ a b c Sickert, Richard Walter; Robins, Anna Gruetzner. Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, p. xxxi, Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0199261695, ISBN 9780199261697. Retrieved from Google Books.
- ^ Robins gives Gilman's death in 1917 as contributory to the publication delay. However, Gilman died in 1919 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
- ^ a b Arts and Letters, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1917, "Contents".
- ^ Aldington gives Ginner and Gilman as co-editors with Rutter.
- ^ a b Aldington, Richard; H.D. (Doolittle, Hilda); Zilboorg, Caroline. Richard Aldington & H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, p. 157, Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN 0719059720, ISBN 9780719059728.
- ^ Saler, Michael T. The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, p. 52, Oxford University Press US, 1999. ISBN 0195119665, ISBN 9780195119664.
- ^ a b Arts and Letters, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1917, p. 1.