S | THEORY

Minotaure (1933 - 1939)

In 1933 Albert Skira, a young publisher of elegant art books, released the first two issues of a periodical which, though it would only last for 6 years, remains to this day one of the most impressive publications of its kind ever produced.

“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…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.”

Looking at it now, all these years later, with the canons of modernity firmly and irrevocably established in our minds, the list of contributors to Minotaure is almost comical: Breton, Picasso, Éluard, Miró, Chagall, Bataille, Magritte, Lacan, Matisse, Queneau, Duchamp, Man Ray, de Chirico, Dalí, Giacometti, Ernst, Rivera, Masson, Balthus, Matta, Bellmer, Arp, Brassaï, Huxley, Kandinsky, Jung…and these are just some names any average person is likely to recognize, add to it the archeologists, sinologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, numismatists, musicologists, historians, etc, etc, and the pedigree becomes overwhelming. 

via the phenomenal Nonist.

There's a dire lack of translated content from Minotaure online, although I was able to find an excerpt from a certain Dali article I sought “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern style,” Minotaure, no. 3-4 (1933), p. 74 

In a surealist exposition of edible architecture, Dali explores a conflation between the two in a manner not dissimilar from his visual works.

He describes two Art Nouveau houses that Gaudi designed on the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona, explaining how one was inspired by the ocean’s waves during a tempest, and the other by the tranquil waters of a lake.

“These are real buildings, veritable sculptures of the reflections of crepuscular clouds in water, made possible by recourse to an immense and mad, multicolored and gleaming mosaic of the pointillist iridescence from which emerge forms of poured water, forms of spreading water, forms of stagnant water, forms of mirroring water, forms of water curled by the wind, all these forms of water constellated in an asymmetric and dynamic-instantaneous succession of bicyncopated, interlaced reliefs, melted by the ‘naturalist-stylized’ nunuphars and nympheas concretized in impure and annihilating excentric convergences, thick protuberances of fear bursting from the incredible facade, simultaneously twisted by all the insane suffering and by all the latent and infinitesimally soft calmness equaled only by that of the horrifying ripe and apotheosic flakes ready to be eaten with a spoon—with the bloody, greasy, soft spoon of gamey meat that approaches.”

Minotaure was sold for 25 Francs when it was in print. Needless to say, I would hand over a lot more dough to get my hands on a boxed set today.

Below are some of Minotaure's fucking epic covers.

André Masson, Minotaure no. 12-13, 1939.

Diego Rivera, Frontispiece Minotaure no. 12-13, 1939.

Max Ernst, Minotaure no. 11, 1938.

René Magritte, Minotaure no. 10, 1937.

Henri Matisse, Minotaure no. 9, 1936.

Salvadore Dalí, Minotaure no. 8, 1936.

Joan Miró, Minotaure no. 7, 1935.

Marcel Duchamp, Minotaure no. 6, 1934.

Francisco Borés, Minotaure no. 5, 1934.

André Derain, Minotaure no. 3-4, 1933.

Gaston-Lois Roux, Minotaure no. 2, 1933.

Pablo Picasso, Minotaure no. 1, 1933.