291. No. 7/8. September-October 1915. [Publisher: Alfred Stieglitz. Editors: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Haviland, Marius de Zayas, Agnes Ernst Meyer.]

New York, 1915.. (4)pp. Tabloid folio. Texts by Haviland, de Zayas, in parallel English and French. This issue was to serve as a folder for Stieglitz’s photogravure, “The Steerage,” which is lacking from this copy. “291” occupies a uniquely interesting position among the great reviews of modernist art. It is really the first magazine to style itself as a work of art in its own right: not simply a venture in luxury printing, as many art reviews had been before it, but a new kind of publication altogether, an experimental series of multiples run off on a monthly basis in an edition of 1100 copies. It is also the first expression of the dada esthetic on American shores; proto-dada, actually, dada avant la lettre, before dada had had its baptism in Zürich in 1916. Only Arthur Cravan’s short-lived “Maintenant” can be said to precede it as an instance of pre-dada sensibility anywhere in the periodic press. “291” took its original inspiration from Apollinaire’s “Soirées de Paris,” emphasizing calligrammatic texts and an abstracted kind of satirical drawing, but it cast these into a much more dramatic form by moving into a gigantic folio format and simultaneously dematerializing into a single gatefold sheet of paper.  Always envisioned as a limited run of twelve numbers, “291” is the critical link between “Camera Work”--which Stieglitz duly suspended in the interim--and Picabia’s own “391”--styled as its radical successor. Issued in a deluxe edition of 100 copies and a regular edition of 1000, “291” was a financial fiasco, failing to sell more than eight subscriptions on vellum and a hundred on ordinary paper, and in the end Stieglitz sold the entire backstock to a ragpicker for $5.80 (“perhaps my gesture was a satirical one,” he wryly remarked).  “In design and content, there was no periodical in America more advanced than ‘291’.... [It] was unparalleled anywhere in the world as a total work of art” (William I. Homer, “Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde”). Never folded, and in excellent condition.