BROOM: An International Magazine of the Arts (1921-1924) : une revue d’avant-garde américaine

Abstract

Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts published by Americans in Italy (1921–24) provides a remarkable account/ of the aesthetic and ideological project of its American editor, Harold A. Loeb. The magazine, which was one of the American little reviews that gave the genre new life, purported to be a tool for defending contemporary American literature and art that nevertheless gave allocated substantial space to Europe and its innovations. It championed a vision of artistic creation that was plural and international, one in which the United States and Europe joined forces to produce universal works. Published in Rome, Berlin, and then New York, Broom had a complex, multifaceted editorial line inspired by contributors from different cultures, encounters and voyages. The dialectic of the transcending of nationalist conservatism through the integration of European contributions was at the heart of the evolution of this publication, which embodied more than any other the richness of Americano-European exchanges in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Conceived as both an objet d’art with its refined aesthetic and as a tool for the dissemination of literary and artistic information, Broom magazine was a tribune freely open to American intellectuals of the 1920s, who expressed their explorations of culture and identity on its pages with increasingly more energy. The reader of this magazine immersed himself in a permanent transatlantic ideological confrontation, bringing together the prose of T. S. Eliot and Kenneth Burke and that of surrealists Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and Blaise Cendrars, juxtaposing the works of Joseph Stella and Charles Sheeler with those of the biggest names in European modern art, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris and George Grosz.