Sex and Death: Interwar French Pulps
Curated by Luc Sante, May 12-August 4, 2012 On View at the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library Vitrines. The populist avant-garde. In Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, highbrow and lowbrow met on the terrain of pulp publishing. Crime tabloids, skin magazines, and the flimsy pamphlets called ‘train-station novels’ were eye-catching and breathlessly modern. Employing photographs, photomontages, and an adventurous sense of page design, these very unrespectable publications echoed Soviet constructivism in creating an advanced visual culture for a public that was unschooled and not entirely literate.
