About London Bulletin

London Bulletin

London Bulletin was a monthly avant-garde art magazine published in London from April 1938 to June 1940, affiliated with the London Gallery at 28 Cork Street. It ran to twenty numbers, counting its double and triple issues, and was edited by E. L. T. Mesens, the Belgian surrealist who directed the London Gallery from 1937, working with Roland Penrose. Modelled on the Belgian magazine Varietes, it has been described as the most influential English surrealist periodical and as the first periodical published in English by surrealists themselves.

For just over two years, through the last months of peace and the first months of the Second World War, London Bulletin was the printed voice of surrealism in Britain. Its contributors included Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Samuel Beckett, Herbert Read, Paul Nash, Yves Tanguy, Eileen Agar, Humphrey Jennings and Conroy Maddox, and its issues mixed manifestos, poetry, criticism and reproductions with news of the London Gallery's exhibitions. Complete sets are now rare collectable objects, one set from the Guggenheim Jeune gallery having been sold at Bonhams, and the magazine is the subject of dedicated academic study.

The London Gallery at 28 Cork Street

The magazine was the organ of the London Gallery, at 28 Cork Street in Mayfair, the street that was becoming the centre of London's modern art trade. The gallery had been relaunched under the direction of E. L. T. Mesens, a Belgian poet, composer and collagist who had been a leading figure in Belgian surrealism and a close associate of Rene Magritte. Mesens became a director of the gallery in 1938 alongside Roland Penrose, the artist and collector who was surrealism's principal British patron, and together they made the gallery the centre of the surrealist movement in Britain.

A gallery magazine in this period was more than a catalogue. London Bulletin carried the gallery's programme into print, but it also argued, published poetry and reported on art abroad, functioning simultaneously as house journal and movement paper. Its succession of publishers, listed as Arno Press and Bradley Press and the London Gallery itself, reflects the improvised finances of the avant-garde. The first issue of April 1938 appeared under the title London Gallery Bulletin before the name settled as London Bulletin, the title under which the complete run is now catalogued and sold.

Mesens, Penrose and the Editorial Team

E. L. T. Mesens was editor-in-chief throughout the magazine's life, and his biography is the key to its character. A veteran of Belgian dada and surrealism who had edited journals in Brussels, co-organised the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and bought Magritte's work when no one else would, Mesens brought continental surrealism's networks with him to London. Under his leadership the gallery mounted exhibitions of cubist and surrealist work, including a collage show by Picasso in 1938 and a survey of Picasso in English collections in 1939, and the Bulletin reported and reflected that programme.

The assistant editorship changed hands in a way that maps the movement's inner circle. Humphrey Jennings, the filmmaker and painter, contributed to the first two issues and worked alongside Gordon Onslow Ford as an assistant to Mesens. Roland Penrose served as assistant editor from the double issue 8/9 of January 1939, and was replaced by George Reavey from issue 11, dated March 1939. Penrose also published sections of his photographic book The Road is Wider than Long in the Bulletin before Mesens published the book itself in 1939, an example of the magazine serving as the workshop in which its circle's projects first appeared.

Modelled on Varietes: A Surrealist Miscellany

London Bulletin was modelled on Varietes, the Belgian magazine that had mixed surrealist art with photography, reportage and the popular culture of its day. The model mattered: rather than a narrow art journal, the Bulletin was a miscellany in which an exhibition review could sit beside a poem, a manifesto beside a photograph. Photographs by Lee Miller, the celebrated photographer who was also Penrose's partner, appeared in several issues, giving the magazine a visual modernity that text alone could not have achieved.

The description of London Bulletin as the first periodical published in English by surrealists themselves distinguishes it from earlier sympathetic coverage. British art journalism had discussed surrealism; the Bulletin spoke from inside the movement, with Breton and Eluard, the leaders of French surrealism, among its contributors. That directness is why later historians call it the most influential English surrealist periodical: it did not merely report the movement to Britain, it constituted the movement in Britain, issue by issue, from an office in Cork Street.

The Double Issues: Machines, Living Art and Picasso

The Bulletin's twenty numbers included three celebrated double issues that organised its programme into statements. Issues 4/5, titled The Impact of Machines, confronted surrealism with technology and the machine age. Issues 8/9, Living Art in England, surveyed the contemporary British scene the gallery championed, appearing in January 1939 with Penrose newly installed as assistant editor. Issues 15/16, Picasso in English Collections, accompanied the gallery's exhibition programme and asserted Picasso's centrality to the art the Bulletin existed to promote.

Double issues were partly economic, avant-garde magazines commonly combined numbers when money or material ran short, but in the Bulletin's case they became its monuments. Each gathered a theme, a group of contributors and a body of reproductions into something closer to a book than a magazine issue, and collectors and cataloguers cite them by their titles. The final issue extended the logic further: numbers 18 to 20 appeared together as a triple issue on surrealism in June 1940, closing the run with a summation of the movement as war overtook it.

Guernica in Issue 6

Issue 6 of the Bulletin, dated October 1938, carried Herbert Read on Picasso's Guernica, alongside contributions in which Read and Paul Eluard addressed the painting. Guernica, Picasso's response to the bombing of the Basque town in the Spanish Civil War, was then touring as the most famous political painting in the world, and its exhibition in Britain was a major event for the left and for modern art alike. The Bulletin's attention to it placed the magazine at the intersection of surrealism and anti-fascist politics at the moment of the Munich crisis.

Read, Britain's leading critical champion of modern art, was a regular contributor, and his presence connected the Bulletin to the wider British avant-garde beyond the surrealist group itself. The Guernica issue is regularly singled out in accounts of the magazine because it shows the Bulletin doing cultural work no other British periodical could: mediating between the continental avant-garde, Spanish republican solidarity and the London art world, in English, from inside the movement, within eighteen months of the painting's creation.

Contributors: From Beckett to Agar

The contributor list of London Bulletin reads as a roll of the interwar avant-garde. Andre Breton and Paul Eluard represented French surrealism at its source; Samuel Beckett, then a young Irish writer in the surrealists' Paris orbit, contributed criticism, including writing on the painter Geer van Velde; Herbert Read and Paul Nash connected the magazine to British modernism; Yves Tanguy and Francis Picabia brought the authority of surrealist and dada painting; and Marcel Marien represented the Belgian surrealism of Mesens's own formation.

The British surrealist generation was present in strength: Eileen Agar, John Banting, Conroy Maddox and Humphrey Jennings, the artists and writers who had emerged around the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, wrote and were reproduced in the Bulletin. Giorgio de Chirico's work appeared, including on the cover of the final triple issue. Few British art magazines of any period have published, within twenty issues, a comparable concentration of the figures who defined their movement, and the list explains why the Bulletin, rather than any rival, became the documentary record of English surrealism.

War and the Final Triple Issue, June 1940

London Bulletin continued publication into the Second World War, which had begun in September 1939, midway through its run. The final triple issue, numbers 18 to 20, appeared in June 1940, devoted to surrealism, with a lead article by John Banting and a cover image by Giorgio de Chirico. June 1940 was the month of the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk; for a magazine whose contributors included refugees, exiles and French writers now cut off by occupation, the conditions for an international avant-garde journal had ceased to exist.

The magazine did not resume after the war, although Mesens and Penrose revived the London Gallery itself, which continued until 1951. The Bulletin's two years and twenty numbers thus form a closed, complete artefact of the last phase of pre-war surrealism: founded in the spring of 1938, as the Spanish war ended and the European crisis deepened, and closed as that crisis became total war. Its brevity is part of its historical precision. It documents, month by month, a movement presenting itself to the public at exactly the moment its world was destroyed.

Rarity, Scholarship and the Bulletin Today

Complete sets of London Bulletin are rare, and their market history reflects the magazine's standing. The complete set held by the Guggenheim Jeune gallery, Peggy Guggenheim's London gallery and a fellow institution of the Cork Street avant-garde, was sold at Bonhams, and dealers such as Sims Reed handle individual issues as significant items; the Ben Uri Research Unit and the Cambridge Group for the History of Art's CaGeWeb project include the magazine in their records of British art periodicals. Rarity has a simple cause: a small-circulation monthly from 1938 to 1940, printed as war began, was not systematically preserved.

Scholarship has caught up with the collectors. In 2022 the magazine was the subject of a dedicated academic essay, Shaping Surrealism in Britain: The London Bulletin, 1938-1940, by Caputo, treating it as the instrument through which surrealism was formed as a British phenomenon rather than merely received. That judgement summarises the modern consensus. London Bulletin was at once a gallery's magazine, a movement's newspaper and an anthology of the avant-garde's best writing in English, and its twenty numbers remain the first place historians look for surrealism speaking for itself in Britain.