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. It was called Minotaure and the reasons it is damned near legendary are simple– lavish production values of a quality unseen previously, and contributors who, from the editors to the essayists to the artists, went on to storm the hallowed annals of history.

Quote: “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, Kandisnky, 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. One can easily imagine that even the snot-nosed kid who delivered baguettes and wine to the magazine’s offices went on to sell his dirty underpants at auction for a record breaking sum.

In any case, populist as the periodical form is, and impressive as this particular undertaking was, there seems no decent centralized source on the internet to look at Minotaure in greater detail. (At least not one that I could find with my English language searches, perhaps someone with more patience, or a command of French, can point us in the right direction.) As much as I would love to offer you excerpts from the poems and essays and criticisms and surrealist outbursts therein, alas, I can not. What I can offer you, however, are some pretty pictures.

Below you will find decent-sized representations of each of Minotaure’s 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.

In closing I would just like to offer the following ten words to the many grandchildren and foundations and private owners and museums in whose collections and under whose copyright all of the material ever printed in Minotaure is held– “I’d buy a boxed set of reproductions in a second.” To which I’ll even add an eleventh word- “Please.”

For a bit more on the subject see here.

Hope you enjoyed.

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Buried below all which came after they lay, still existent in some nebulous manner but hidden and changed and forgotten, like the tiny little child’s bones which were once, and in some way continue to be, inside all of us. Beneath the surface is a second face, the rejected or reformed one which was actually the first. The first face, the first gesture, the first straining motions toward harmony and beauty; The first chase after that most wily wild-goose. Though willfully obscured and subsumed within what’s judged more glorious, these presences haunt their old corporeal boundaries still. In just the right light you can see them appear like apparitions.

Portrait of a man in oriental attire. circle of Rembrandt.

Christ’s Charge to Peter. By Raphael.

St. John the Evangelist. By Anthony van Dyck.

The Wood Sawyers. By Jean-François Millet.

Adoration of the Magi. By Leonardo Da Vinci.

Portrait of a man in a black hat. Unknown.

‘A view of Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay. By William Hodges.

Portrait study of Mary Villiers. By Anthony van Dyck.

Byzantine Icon. Unknown.

The Healing of the Lame Man. By Raphael.

Coronation of St. Catherine. By Peter Paul Rubens.

The Old Guitarist. By Pablo Picasso.

Sibylla Palmifera. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew. By Caravagio.

L’Infante Marie-Marguerite. By Édouard Manet.

Self-Portrait. By Rembrandt.

The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Sts. Francis and Homobonus, Bernardino da Feltre and Beggar. By Bartolomeo Montagna.

A Montenegrin with a Shotgun. By Vlaho Bukovac.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergére. By Édouard Manet.

Portrait of Sebastià Vidal Junyer. By Pablo Picasso.

Fête Champêtre. By Jean-Antoine Watteau.

Mona Lisa. By Leonardo Da Vinci.

Portrait of Duke of Alba. By Antonis Mor van Dashorst.

The Calling of Matthew. By Caravaggio.

All of the above images are actual X-radiography photographs, taken by conservators, of the titled paintings. Some reveal forgotten painted-over images, some reveal added or edited details, others simply show the physicality of the paint’s application itself. All are spectral and surprising and strangely melancholy.

Hope you enjoyed.

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Paraphrased: The area around Naples was known locally as the Campi Phlegraei, or ‘flaming fields’, owing to the frequent and violent eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. William Hamilton (Britain’s envoy to the Spanish court at Naples) from his country house at the foot of the volcano, was ideally placed to witness and investigate the eruptions of the 1770s. The prevailing view at the time was of volcano was a purely destructive force. Hamilton sought to show that in a broader time scale, volcanoes had been responsible for the mountainous landscape and rich, fertile soils that characterized the area. Hamilton employed the Anglo-Neapolitan artist Peter Fabris to create sketches in situ to illustrate the work (Hamilton himself is pictured in many of the plates as the figure in the red coat). These were then reproduced in prints that were hand coloured individually by local artists by the application of gouache. The resultant work was published in 1776 (with a later supplement describing the great eruption of Vesuvius in August 1779) as Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies.

Take a closer look at this beauty at Glasgow University Library, Georgetown’s Campania site, Ingenious UK, Nortwestern’s Campania Felix, and Stromboli Online. Also Hamilton’s Apparatus.

Quote: Beginning in the early 1860s, Plains Indian men adapted their representational style of painting to paper in the form of accountants ledger books. Traditional paints and bone and stick brushes used to paint on hide gave way to new implements such as colored pencils, crayon, and occasionally water color paints. Plains artists acquired paper and new drawing materials in trade, or as booty after a military engagement, or from a raid. Initially, the content of ledger drawings continued the tradition of depicting of military exploits and important acts of personal heroism already established in representational painting on buffalo hides and animal skins. As the US government implemented the forced relocation of the Plains peoples to reservations, for all practical purposes completed by the end of the 1870s, Plains artists added scenes of ceremony and daily life from before the reservation to the repertoire of their artwork, reflecting the social and cultural changes brought by life on the reservation within the larger context of forced assimilation. – Enjoy the 1021 plates spanning 15 ledgers at Plaines Indian Ledger Art.

For more see: Tribal Arts, Kiowa Drawings, Fort Marion Artists, and Picturing Change.

Above is an update of a piece created by Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas over 30 years ago. In the original it’s Gerald Ford being tugged into life by those puppet strings, and the companies are different, smaller really, with fewer banks and investment firms and conglomerates and LLC’s in evidence. On the whole though, the times… they aren’t a changin’. Check out Emory Douglas’ work at It’s About Time and at the MOCA who are exhibiting his work through January 08. For a bit more check out The Revolution Will Be Visualized. Previously: The Black Panther Coloring Boook.