Between 19 October 2024 and 16 February 2025, in the context of its permanent exhibition, the Zentrum Paul Klee is focusing thematically on the journals of the avant-garde. With some 150 exhibits, attention is devoted to the journal as an artistic field of experimentation.
In the early 20th century, journals became an important medium in art – from Futurism via Dadaism to Surrealism and beyond. The focus exhibition Journals of the Avant-Garde displays 15 different journals, worth both seeing and reading, while at the same time exploring the contents and design of magazines as a field of artistic experimentation.
The phenomenon of the artistic ‘avant-garde’ evolved in Europe in the 1910s. Between 1910 and 1933 numerous currents came into being, many of which published their own journals to put out their vision of art and society and draw attention to themselves. Today, journals with titles such as MERZ, Cabaret Voltaire, Sturm, Kentiku Sekai and Habitat are among the most significant documents of global modernism.
Their often extremely innovative design is particularly fascinating: many avant-garde journals used design and typography as an opportunity to make radical ideas and concepts visually accessible. They picked up expressive typefaces, colours and forms and worked with exciting combinations of text and image to signal dynamism and the break with tradition. This makes them forerunners of modern visual communication and advertising design, which works with the same principles. Another innovation was that many avant- garde journals were published multilingually, or contained content in different languages. This multilingualism reflects the lived reality of many representatives of modern art, who lived in exile during the period of the world wars, for example, or who were migrants. Avant-garde-minded artists often had global networks, and forged and nurtured alliances across national borders.
For the artists involved, publishing their own journals or contributing to them had numerous advantages. The most important of these lay in making their own theories and works visible, and allowing them to circulate in the art world. Most avant-garde journals were read primarily by other cultural creators or collectors, and barely by the ‘wide’ public. So it can hardly come as a surprise that many important titles are closely connected with central protagonists of modern art, such as the Berlin gallery-owner Herwarth Walden, the artist Tommaso Filippo Marinetti or Le Corbusier.
One interesting detail that can be found in many avant-garde journals is the advertising pages for other avant-garde journals. Their programmes could sometimes be very different, but there is often a common denominator – the demand for a radical new beginning, the rejection of the cultural and institutional establishment, the desire for self-assertion and a delight in experiment.
