VIEW: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940-1947 ...

VIEW: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940-1947 edited by Charles Henri Ford (Thunder Mouth Press: $17.95; 288 pp . , illustrated). Charles Henri Ford, who edited View during its brief existence, offers an overview of the magazine that helped to present surrealism and existentialism to wartime America. The list of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of mid-20th-Century arts and letters: Albert Camus, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, Sam Cornell, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Miller, Fernand Leger. So many of these artists have been enshrined in the pantheon of Western Culture, it’s instructive to be reminded that much of their work was once considered marginal, incomprehensible and/or scandalous. (The U.S. Post Office banned the magazine in early 1944, apparently because an earlier issue had included reproductions of nudes by Michelangelo and Picasso.) This provocative anthology shows that no contemporary magazine approaches View’s level of sophistication and intelligence.