Title:
The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design
Date of Publication:
Apr. 1921; 1922
Place of Publication:
London, England.
Frequency of Publication:
Twice
Circulation:
Unknown
Publisher:
The Egoist Press (backed by Sidney Schiff)
Physical Description:
Issue I: 37.5 cm (high) by 25 cm, 12 pages. Issue II, “compact quarto” nearly 100 pages.
Price:
1 shilling, 6 pence per issue / 6 shillings, 6 pence per four-issue subscription
Editor(s):
Wyndham Lewis
Associate Editor(s):
Unknown
Libraries with Complete Originals:
Univ. of California Santa Barbara; Univ. of Colorado Boulder; Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst; Univ. of Minnesota, Morris Library; Princeton Univ.; Univ. of Tulsa; Univ. of Houston.
Reprint Editions:
Searchable PDFs available online at the Modernist Journals Project
The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design, marks Wyndham Lewis’s second, and more aggressive (though less well-known) attempt to provide “a rallying spot” for experimental painters in England for whom painting required “an intelligent applications as any science.” The magazine was published twice and bridged writing by the likes of T.S. Eliot with avant-garde illustrations. The first issue appeared in 1921 and covered 12 pages. The second issue was published a year later and expanded to over 100 pages with even more illustrations by avant-garde European artists.
In the first issue of The Tyro Wyndham Lewis makes clear the purpose of his newest magazine:
THE OBJECTS OF THIS PAPER,—To be a rallying spot for those painters, or persons interested in painting, in this country, for whom ” painting ” signifies not a lucrative or sentimental calling, but a constant and perpetually renewed effort: requiring as exacting and intelligent application as any science, with as great an aim. The only papers at present existing purely for painters are, in a more or less veiled way (usually veiled in a little splashing of bright colour and little more), tributaries of the official painting of Burlington House. There is actually at the moment no paper in this country wholly devoted to the interests of the great European movement in painting and design, the most significant art phenomenon in Europe to-day.
The number of painters experimenting in England in the European sense are very few. The reason for that, and the remedy for what appears to us that backwardness, will be ” explored,” as the newspapers say. Again, this paper will especially address itself to those living in England who do not consider that the letter of any fashion (whether coming to us with the intelligent prestige of France, or the flamboyance of modern Italy) should be subscribed to by English or American painters. A painter living in a milieu like Paris has a great advantage, it is obvious, over one working (especially in his commencements) in England. But it would be absurd not to see that the very authority and prestige of the Gallic milieu, that so flutters and transports our friend Mr. Bell, for example, also imposes its faults on those working in Paris, in the very middle of the charm. The Tyro will keep at a distance on the one hand this subjection to the accidental of the great European centre of art, and on the other hand the aesthetic chauvinism that distorts, and threatens constantly with retrogression, so much of the otherwise most promising painting in England to-day.
A paper run entirely by painters and writers, the appearance of the “Tyro” will be spasmodic: that is, it will come out when sufficient material has accumulated to make up a new number; or when something of urgent interest hastens it into renewed and pointed utterance.
One further point. The Editor of this paper is a painter. In addition to that you will see him starting a serial story in this number. During the Renaissance in Italy this duplication of activities was common enough, and no one was surprised to see a man chiselling words and stone alternately. If, as many are believing, we are at present on the threshold of a Renaissance of Art as much greater than the Italian Renaissance as the Great War of 1914-18 was physically bigger than preceding ones (substitute however intensity and significance for scale), then this spectacle may become so common that the aloofness of the Editor of this paper from musical composition would, retrospectively, be more surprising than his books of stories and essays. In the same way kindred phenomena, in letters, science or music, to the painting of such pictures as this paper is started to support and discuss, will be welcomed and sought for in its pages.
Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957)
Editor: 1921 – 1922
Wyndham Lewis was the founder and editor of The Tyro. As a painter, author, and editor of other modernist magazines such as BLAST and The Enemy, he was closely associated with the Vorticist movement in art and played a salient role in modernist thought in England.
No. 1
Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Guz Krutzsch, Robert McAlmon, John Adams, John Rodker, David Bomberg, William Patrick Roberts, O. Raymond Drey, Frank Dobson, and Herbert Read.
No. 2
Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, O. Raymond Drey, Jessie Dismorr, Stephen Hudson, John Adams, John Rodker, Herbert Read, Waldeman George, Jaques Lipschitz, Austin Dobson, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth.
Brooker, Peter. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009. Print.
Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazines: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.
Tyro. Modernist Journals Project. Brown University Library, Center for Digital Initiatives. Web. 08 Oct. 2010.