A visit to any good newsagents will confirm that there are more magazines around than ever before. The shelves groan under the weight of generic and specialist titles, and the standards of production and printing are extraordinarily and uniformly high. Yet there is a sense of superfluity about it all, something that undoubtedly relates to the relentless commodification involved, the way the emphasis is almost invariably on consumerism and celebrity.
The fact is that the great days of "the magazine" have long passed. Its role has to some extent been taken over by television and the Internet, which have grown exponentially, but really in today's multi-channel, multi-choice, fragmented cultural environment, no single agency can aspire to offer the apparently coherent, comprehensive perspective on things of, for example, Life magazine in its heyday.
Front Page: Covers of the Twentieth Century is a picture book that revisits the golden age of the magazine, charting its rise in terms of the covers of individual issues of 30 or so publications, from Actuel to Vu by way of Paris-Match and Time. A round-up of more than 500 covers provides a remarkably informative guide to the way the events, personalities and trends of the century were often brilliantly encapsulated in a primarily visual medium, one that grew up with the century and inspired collaborations between some of the most brilliant designers and artists of the time.
The magazine was a product of the 19th century. Illustration, initially in the form of engravings, and then photographic reproductions, were always integral to it, but it took some time before the possibility of the cover as an art form in itself was realised. Titles such as Harper's Weekly and Punch were typically keen to establish and maintain an identity, so aimed for consistency to the point of dullness. But with dramatic improvements in lithographic printing methods toward the end of the 19th century and then the revolutionary development of the offset lithographic printing process - still used - early in the 20th century, then the advent of the Leica 35mm camera in the 1920s, the technology was there for editors, art directors, photographers, designers and artists to exploit. And they did.
Some of the 20th-century collaborations between artists and designers are unsurpassed and likely to remain so. The great Cubist painter Ferdinand Leger, for example, was among many artists commissioned to do a cover for Fortune magazine in a long-running, unlikely marriage of avant-garde aesthetics and capitalist economics. More predictably, Vogue forged a sustained alliance with photographers and artists to produce memorably beautiful covers. The New Yorker covers have changed by staying the same: laid-back and anachronistic, they look comfortably at home because they are integral to the established identity of the magazine. It's all too easy to mock the dated "sophistication" of Playboy or Lui, and the overweening sentimentality of Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers with their idealised image of small-town America.
Reportage photography, sometimes shocking or sensational, was central to the success of many news and current affairs magazines. Larry Burrows's 1965 cover image for Life, a black-and-white photograph of the interior of an American helicopter under fire in Vietnam, still packs an immediate, visceral punch. Stern picked up on the German avant-garde tradition of innovative graphic design with its punchy, provocative use of photomontages. So effective is Time's trademark red border that it has been widely imitated.
In large measure, the book is a trawl through the myriad appearances of iconic faces, figures, families and groups, including Churchill, Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, the Kennedys, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-Tung, The Beatles, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Diana, Madonna. There's the startling, ambiguous cover of Rolling Stone featuring a naked John Lennon embracing a reserved Yoko Ono.
Everyone knows that Monroe's image is ubiquitous, but it's still sobering to see how, in page after page of covers, her presence is weirdly, obsessively fetishised. Surely no human being could bear that level of iconographic significance being thrust upon them and, in her case, it was largely posthumous. The cult of personality didn't seem to bother Mao, though it did go to his head. And, trailing after Monroe, Madonna's mutable identity comes across as empty and infinitely malleable, a series of calculated re-inventions.
We can partly blame sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, incidentally, for the standardised women's magazine cover format of a model's head framed by bars of text headlining content. Her seminal 1960s study found that apparently insignificant deviations from a precise head-and-shoulders design formula could deter thousands of potential purchasers. So market research stifled inventiveness.
Many magazines have themselves attained an iconic status: the Saturday Evening Post, Time, Life, Paris-Match, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Vogue, Elle, Playboy, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Stern, Harper's Bazaar and, inaugurating the age of the colour supplement, The Sunday Times Magazine. All of them have become part of cultural history and their covers all have distinct and instantly recognisable visual styles. Perhaps surprisingly, leafing through this book, it's tempting to conclude that, for sheer beauty and inventiveness, it's hard to beat the 1930s.
Front Page: Covers of the 20th Century, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £20 in the UK
