The Paris Review

Picabia’s Covers for André Breton’s Literary Magazine

The cover of Littérature from May 10, 1923.

, founded in 1919 by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, was couched as an innocent literary journal, but it was known for its avant-garde writings and critiques. In March 1922, André Breton launched He asked his friend, the shape-shifting artist Francis Picabia, to create drawings for the covers. Ultimately, only nine of Picabia’s twenty-six covers were chosen and published. The rest

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review35 min read
An Eye In The Throat
My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
The Paris Review32 min read
The Art of Poetry No. 116
Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
The Paris Review1 min read
Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

Related