ABSTRACT
This chapter reads View magazine, edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler from 1940 to 1947, as a map of the queer cultural networks that animated modern art scenes from Paris to New York, and further suggests that its queerness resides not only in the identities of its contributors and subjects, but in its editorial practice. Rather than claiming art’s autonomy, View explored its imbrication in both social and sexual life; rather than espousing notions of medium-specific purity, it privileged the disciplinary promiscuity offered by theater, interior décor, and fashion. And rather than bow to the dominant nationalism of the period, View expanded creative energy to expand and sustain creative partnerships across territorial borders. Looking at midcentury modernism through the lens of View, this chapter argues, reveals the practice of collaboration as a significant aspect of cultural production often ignored by conventional historical accounts. Re-viewing View, in other words, makes visible modernism’s debt to queer relationality.
