M'lle New York de FLEMING, Thomas

New York: Fleming, Schiller & Carnrick. unbound. Fleming, Thomas. Print. Color lithograph. Page measure 11" x 20".<br/> <br/> This 1890s poster advertises the avant-garde magazine M'lle New York with an illustration by Thomas FLeming. A devil face floating in a cloudy night sky shoots out red tentacles that spell out the magazine's name. Emblazoned in the darkness, the magazine announces itself to its viewers as simultaneously entraving and threatening, hinting at its content of experimental art and literature. In very good condition. Some chips to edges. Repair to back.<br> <br> M'lle New York was an avant-garde magazine founded in 1895 by James Gibbons Huneker, a bohemiam musician, and Vance Thompson, a Princeton graduate, both of whom had spent time in Europe and become enmesshed in fin-de-siecle literature, drama, and music. Struck by the tameness of New York magazines in comparison to their counterparts in France and London, they put together their pink-and-black-printed attack on American gentility with fiction, poetry, illustration, and decadeny critiques - often published anonymously or with pen names - of what they saw as the lowbrow public. Despite the magazine's ridicule of democratic culture, it participated in introducing New Yorkers to the work of some important Modernists. Its editorial run only lasted four years, and while both men went on to continue their cultural crusade in other publications. M'lle New York stands out as a manifesto of their anti-philistine perspective.<br/> <br/>