Restoring proto-modernist little magazines--known as ephemeral
bibelots--to the scholarly canon.
Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue
spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as
"ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians
passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat
Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These
journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness,
astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes,
innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism.
In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this
late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of
periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this
forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist
little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature
at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements
take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three
major themes--"vogue," "ephemera," and "obscurity"--with authors and
artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of
bibelot covers.
This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of
pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics; women writers like
Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells; the graphic artists Will
Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan; the dancer Loie Fuller; and
twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita
Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into
conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral
Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various
media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its
staying power.
