Minotaure, Albert Skira's Art Review (1933-1939)
- Fri 30/11/07 - Sun 30/03/08
- Cabinet des estampes | Promenade du Pin 5
- Curated by :
- Véronique Yersin
At the Musée Rath in 1987-1988, Charles Goerg mounted a brilliant exhibition centred around the magazine Minotaure. Today, in parallel with the Musée d’art et histoire’s show Giacometti-Balthus-Skira! Les années Labyrinthe, 1944-1946, The Cabinet des estampes revisits the earlier journal through an exhibition of engravings by the Surrealists and their contemporaries. Albert Skira (1904-1973) opened his mythic publishing house in 1928 in Lausanne, then quickly transferred it to Geneva, where, from 1931 on, he produced a series of superb books, including Ovid’s Metamorphosis illustrated by Picasso and The Poetry of Mallarmé illustrated by Matisse in 1932,and in 1934, Les chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont with illustrations by Dali. To encourage a wide distribution of his books, Skira launched a journal in Paris with the aid of Teriade, containing contributions by such artists and writers as Picasso, Breton, Bataille, and Masson. Filled with colour and black and white reproductions of a technical excellence unusual for the time, Minotaure first appeared in June 1933, and continued through thirteen issues, ceasing publication at the onset of World War II. The publishers set themselves the difficult task of bearing witness to the different movements in contemporary art, through text and image, demonstrating the interaction between the visual arts, literature, and science. Thus Minotaure documented the vast panorama of the 1930s, and served as a forum for encounters and discussions. As surrealism was the dominant movement in the arts at this time, it was natural that this be reflected in the review – from 1937 André Breton was Minotaure’s editor-in-chief. Although Skira’s intentions were not to publish a surrealist review, the introduction of Minotaure coincided with the last issue of Surréalisme au service de la revolution, while Documents, with its collaborators Bataille, Leiris , and Masson, had stopped publishing three years previously. Each number of Minotaure included contributions from artists, writers, philosophers, critics, psychoanalysts, and ethnologists, and was meant to be read as a collective work, many-voiced. Confronted with a multitude of possible paths to follow, the Cabinet des estampes has chosen to explore the world of surrealist prints – through the works of Kurt Seligmann, Giorgio De Chirico, (whose work is fundamental to the surrealist aesthetic) , collages and frottages of Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer’s photographs, as well as rayographs of Man Ray.-, and also including works by artists contemporary with the surrealists and admired by them, such as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. The exhibition will attempt to evaluate the impact of the surrealist movement on the aesthetics of Minotaure, since here all is a matter of meeting and exchange, as testified by the multiple answers to the (surrealist) survey which appeared in the journal’s double issue (numbers 3 -4): “What was the most important encounter of your life?”
Véronique Yersin
