In 1927, Christian Zervos, the editor of the prominent art magazine Cahiers d’Art, published an article on the “Dernières œuvres de Picasso.” This article discussed the new direction in Pablo Picasso’s recent body of surrealist-influenced paintings: unlike the restrained compositions of the postwar rappel à ordre, these paintings demonstrated a new expressive dynamism, and signaled Picasso’s openness to novel, disruptive currents in the cultural life of les années folles. For Zervos, this body of work exemplified the path forward for contemporary painting in the wake of cubism, a return to a more expressive pictorial form—a tendency sometimes described as a type of néo-fauvisme. However, this path was not without peril, and one goal of the article was to acknowledge Picasso’s recent accomplishments. To this end, Zervos recounted a recent conversation with Picasso to question the artistic direction of the emerging generation of painters: Whatever anyone may say, Picasso never seeks to express literary or metaphysical ideas in his painting. It is enough for him to create works with plastic form, persuaded that a work with perfect plastic form contains all the suggestions of the mind. Several days ago, at a picture dealer on the left bank, Picasso had just seen canvases by artists of the so-called avant-garde. As we were talking, Picasso said to me: “Truly, it wasn’t worth all the efforts our generation made just to see these fellows fall back into literature and forget the most elementary plastic form [ la plastique la plus élémentaire].”

Sometimes, when entering a text in search of an angle on translation and modernism, we end up with something altogether different. Alejo Carpentier’s “Lettre des Antilles” (1929) was a starting point of what became for me a game of modernist serendipity. The article appeared in Bifur (1929–31), a multimedia magazine edited by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, a one-time affiliate of the Surrealists who turned his back on André Breton in the company of Georges Bataille, who had become something of a...

In a charged essay recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia offer a sharp corrective to the utopian claims that have so often been used to describe the digital humanities. Noting the overlap with Silicon Valley’s rhetoric about “disruption,” they contend that digital humanities is about “the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing, the rebranding of insecure campus employment as an empowering “alt-ac” career choice, and the redefinition of technical expertise as a form (indeed, the superior form) of humanist knowledge.” [1] This new field, they conclude, aligns too neatly with a neoliberal view of a higher education that uses the digital to hollow out the core critical, intellectual, social, and even professional practices of the humanities.

This article was originated by Davidson College class of 2011 students in a collaborative research seminar on “Modernism, Magazines & Media.” Rachel Andersen, Zoe Balaconis, John Evans, Lisle Gwynn, Hamilton May, Josh Parkey, Susan Ramsay, Danny Weiss, and Liza Winship conducted the initial research and wrote the first full drafts. After the seminar, Anderson and Balaconis received a grant to investigate the Contempo Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. If an author is “a person who makes or originates something,” then these students deserve credit as co-authors of this article.