Ebook: Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

The new photo-illustrated magazines of the 1920s traded in images of an ideal modernity, promising motorised leisure, scientific progress, and social and sexual emancipation. This is a pioneering history of these periodicals, focusing on two of the leading European titles: the German monthly UHU, and the French news journal VU.
This book is the first major study of UHU, and the first scholarly work on VU in English. It explores, in particular, the striking use of regularity and repetition in photographs of modernity, reading these repetitious images as symbolic of modernist ideals of social order in the aftermath of the First World War. The book’s novel methodology, called pattern theory, represents a cautious, empirical attempt to apply the science of perceptual organisation to critical practice.
Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal provides synoptic accounts of interwar magazine culture, followed by detailed case studies of UHU and VU, as representative of the broad class of popular titles launched in the 1920s. Comparisons and contrasts with rival publications are woven into the book’s thematic chapters, which describe the evolution of the two magazines’ photography in the tumultuous years up to 1933. A final chapter considers the visual culture of popular magazines in the era of Nazism and the Popular Front.