''transition'' was an experimental
literary journal that featured
surrealist
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
,
expressionist, and
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by
Maria McDonald and her husband
Eugene Jolas and published in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
, France. They were later assisted by editors
Elliot Paul (April 1927 – March 1928),
Robert Sage (October 1927 – Fall 1928), and
James Johnson Sweeney
James Johnson Sweeney (1900–1986) was an American curator and writer about modern art. Sweeney graduated from Georgetown University in 1922. From 1935 to 1946, he was curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was the second director of the Solo ...
(June 1936 – May 1938). After the Second World War, the publishing license of ''transition'' was transferred from the Jolases and McDonald to
Georges Duthuit who capitalized the title to ''Transition'' (1948–1950) and changed its focus.
Origins
The literary journal was intended as an outlet for experimental writing and featured
modernist
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
,
surrealist
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
and other linguistically innovative writing and also contributions by
visual artists
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and texti ...
,
critics, and
political activists. It ran until spring 1938. A total of 27 issues were produced. It was distributed primarily through
Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore run by
Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach (14 March 1887 – 5 October 1962), born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and World W ...
.
[
While the journal originally almost exclusively featured poetic experimentalists, it later accepted contributions from sculptors, civil rights activists, carvers, critics, and cartoonists.] Editors who joined the journal later on were Stuart Gilbert, Caresse Crosby and Harry Crosby. Maeve Sage acted as secretary for the magazine during a portion of its Paris-based run.
Purpose
Published quarterly, ''transition'' also featured Surrealist
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
, Expressionist, and Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
art. In an introduction to the first issue, Eugene Jolas wrote:
Manifesto
The journal gained notoriety in 1929 when Jolas issued a manifesto about writing. He personally asked writers to sign "The Revolution of the Word Proclamation" which appeared in issue 16/17 of ''transition''. It began:
The Proclamation was signed by Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett
Whit Burnett (August 14, 1899 – April 22, 1973) was an American writer and educator who founded and edited the literary magazine ''Story (magazine), Story''. In the 1940s, ''Story'' was an important magazine in that it published the first or earl ...
, Hart Crane, Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart Gilbert, A. Lincoln Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas, Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra, Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, and Laurence Vail.
Featured writers
''Transition stories'', a 1929 selection by E. Jolas and R. Sage from the first thirteen numbers, featured: Gottfried Benn, Kay Boyle ("Polar Bears and Others"), Robert M. Coates ("Conversations No. 7"), Emily Holmes Coleman ("The Wren's Nest"), Robert Desnos, William Closson Emory ("Love in the West"), Léon-Paul Fargue, Konstantin Fedin, Murray Goodwin, ("A Day in the Life of a Robot"), Leigh Hoffman ("Catastrophe"), Eugene Jolas ("Walk through Cosmopolis"), Matthew Josephson ("Lionel and Camilla"), James Joyce ("A Muster from Work in Progress"), Franz Kafka (" The Sentence"), Vladimir Lidin, Ralph Manheim ("Lustgarten and Christkind"), Peter Negoe ("Kaleidoscope"), Elliot Paul ("States of Sea"), Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Sage ("Spectral Moorings"), Kurt Schwitters ("Revolution"), Philippe Soupault, Gertrude Stein ("As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story").
Some other artists, authors and works published in ''transition'' included Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
("Assumption", "For Future Reference"), Kay Boyle ("Dedicated to Guy Urquhart"), H. D. ("Gift", "Psyche", "Dream", "No", "Socratic"), Max Ernst
Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...
("Jeune Filles en des Belles Poses", "The Virgin Corrects the Child Jesus before Three Witnesses"), Stuart Gilbert ("The Aeolus Episode in Ulysses", "Function of Words", "Joyce Thesaurus Minusculus"), Juan Gris ("Still Life"), Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
("Three Stories", "Hills like White Elephants"), Franz Kafka ('' The Metamorphosis''), Alfred Kreymborg (from: ''Manhattan Anthology''), Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...
("Petite Fille Lisant"), Muriel Rukeyser ("Lover as Fox"), Gertrude Stein ("An Elucidation", "The Life and Death of Juan Gris", "Tender Buttons", "Made a Mile Away"), William Carlos Williams ("The Dead Baby", "The Somnambulists", "A Note on the Recent Work of James Joyce", "Winter", "Improvisations", "A Voyage to Paraguay").[
Also ]Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...
, Bob Brown, Kathleen Cannell, Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, ''Blue Juniata'' (1929), and his memoir, ''Exile's Return'' ( ...
, Hart Crane, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie Jr. (on music), Eugene Jolas (also as "Theo Rutra"), Marius Lyle, Robert McAlmon, Archibald McLeish Allen Tate; Bryher, Morley Callaghan, Rhys Davies, Robert Graves
Captain Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were b ...
, Sidney Hunt, Robie Macauley, Laura Riding, Ronald Symond, Dylan Thomas.
Christian Zervos' article ''Picasso à Dinard'' was featured in the Spring 1928 issue. No. 26, 1937, with a Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...
cover, featured Hans Arp
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (; ; 16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.
Early life
Arp was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Ar ...
, Man Ray
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American naturalized French visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, ...
, Fernand Léger, László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...
, Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...
, Alexander Calder
Alexander "Sandy" Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobile (sculpture), mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, hi ...
and others.
A third to half the space in the early years of ''transition'' was given to translations, some of which done by Maria McDonald Jolas; French writers included: André Breton
André Robert Breton (; ; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'' (''Manifeste du surréalisme'') ...
, André Gide and the Peruvian Victor Llona ; German and Austrian poets and writers included Hugo Ball, Carl Einstein, Yvan Goll, Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an Idiosyncrasy, idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as ...
, René Schickele, August Stramm, Georg Trakl; Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Yiddish, and Native American texts were also translated.[
Perhaps the most famous work to appear in ''transition'' was '']Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It was published in instalments starting in 1924, under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The final title was only revealed when the book was publishe ...
'', by James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...
. Many segments of the unfinished novel were published under the name of ''Work in Progress''.
Featured artists
While ''transition'' was foremost a literary review, it also featured avant-garde visual art, beginning with its inaugural issue (April 1927), which included reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst
Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...
, Lajos Tihanyi, and Pavel Tchelitchew. The periodical's cover initially bore only textual elements; but commencing with the thirteenth issue, Jolas began to feature art on the outside of his publication as well–much of it created specifically for ''transition''. In the order of their appearance, the magazine's covers included art by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...
, Stuart Davis, Man Ray
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American naturalized French visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, ...
, Gretchen Powel, Kurt Schwitters, Eli Lotar, Jean Arp
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (; ; 16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.
Early life
Arp was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Ar ...
, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...
, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...
, and Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstract art, abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in ...
. In his essay "Fontierless Decade", in the magazine's final issue, Jolas reflected that "all the new painters, photographers, and sculptors were reproduced n ''transition'' beginning in 1927, when many of them were unknown outside of a small circle on the continent." While Jolas's program for his magazine was outwardly focused on literature, his comments in his essay "A New Vocabulary" indicate that he considered visual art's inventiveness to be a model for the possibilities of the poetic word. He wrote: "While painting . . . has proceeded to rid itself of the descriptive, done away with classical perspective, has tried more and more to attain a purity of abstract idealism, should the art of the word remain static?"
Much of the visual art in ''transition'' belongs to a small number of avant-garde moments that later became a part of the Modernist canon, especially (but not exclusively) Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
, Surrealism
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
, Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture.
Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...
, and Constructivism. Other artistic selections, like the reproduction of Marie Monnier's embroidery ''Birth'', in ''transition'' no. 4, highlight Jolas's interest in both new and re-invented means of expression as well as marking the milieu in which he and his co-editors worked and socialized. For instance, Jolas knew Marie Monnier's sister, Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, where Marie's work was exhibited in 1927. Moreover, the writer Léon-Paul Fargue, who Jolas admired and included in his magazine, wrote text the catalog to the 1927 exhibition of Marie Monnier's embroidery. Similarly, Jolas obtained a number of the reproductions of Surrealist paintings and objects that appeared in the magazine's first two years–including work by Yves Tanguy, who was little known at the time–by way of his friend Marcel Noll, who was director of the Galerie Surréaliste until it closed in 1928. ''Transition'', in turn, ran advertisements for the gallery in several issues.
Post-war revival
''Transition'' was the short-lived post-war revival of ''transition''. While ''Transition'' was edited by Georges Duthuit and the copyright to use the name "Transition" was bought by Duthuit, the Jolases remained a part of the project. Eugene Jolas was on the editorial board and Maria Jolas was heavily involved. The name "Transition" was usually followed by the last two digits of the year it was published (eg. ''Transition Forty-Eight'').
''Transition'' was less international and had a less diverse selection of media than its predecessor. In the introduction, the project of the journal was set forth as "to assemble for the English-speaking world the best of French art and thought, whatever the style or whatever the application" although its audience was primarily American.
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
had many pieces published in ''Transition,'' along with working as a translator for about 30 pieces from the journal. Most of Beckett's work for the journal was unsigned, so the extent of his contributions are unclear. A compilation of letters between Beckett and Duthuit, '' Three Dialogues'', was originally published in ''Transition Forty-Nine''.
See also
*List of literary magazines
Below is a list of literary magazines and journals: periodicals devoted to book reviews, creative nonfiction, essays, poems, short fiction, and similar literary endeavors.
*Because the majority are from the United States, the country of origin ...
References
{{Reflist
Further reading
* McMillan, Dougald. ''transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927–38''. New York: George Brazillier, 1976.
* Hoffman, Frederick J. ''The Little Magazine: a History and a Bibliography.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.
* ''IN'' transition'': A Paris anthology. Writing and art from ''transition ''magazine 1927–1930''. With an introduction by Noel Riley Fitch. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990.
* Jolas, Eugene. ''Man from Babel.'' Ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
* Mansanti, Céline. ''La revue transition (1927–1938): le modernisme historique en devenir''. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009.
*Nelson, Cary. ''Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945.'' Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
* ''Transition Stories, Twenty-three Stories from transition.'' Ed. Eugene Jolas and Robert Sage. New York: W. V. McKee, 1929.
External links
''transition''
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina. Retrieved October 5, 2005.
''transition'' partial magazine scans (1927–1930 and 1938)
at Gallica
1927 establishments in France
1938 disestablishments in France
Defunct literary magazines published in Europe
Defunct magazines published in France
Magazines established in 1927
Magazines disestablished in 1938
Magazines published in Paris
Monthly magazines published in France
Quarterly magazines published in France