Modern Tastes in Rhythm: The Visual and Verbal Culture of Advertisements in Modernist Magazines1

Abstract

This article analyses the role of advertisements in the visual and verbal culture of modernist ‘little magazines’, and focuses upon Rhythm (1911–13), the magazine edited by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. It traces how advertisements are implicated in the culture of the ‘little magazine’ as much as in commercial magazines, and indicates how Rhythm provides an interesting case-study for demonstrating how modernism engages critically with the commodification represented by the discourse of advertising. The article analyses how the visual ‘look’ of Rhythm as an avant-garde magazine, as applied in the illustrations to poems by Mansfield, also extends to the design of advertisements for commercial organisations such as the department store Heals. Rhythm thus demonstrates a dilemma over the relation between art and commercial culture that runs throughout modernism, one which is noticed most acutely in modernist magazines.