Our Notes & References

Lovely example of this uncommon issue, with an attractive abstract-cubist cover by a Russian-born Armenian-American artist, complete with striking advertisements during the Great Depression.

After the modernist cover designed by Constantin Alajálov (1900-87), the main articles feature Mussolini’s advancements in his military fleet, Toscanini returning to New York to conduct a concert for unemployed musicians — “no photograph has ever before been published of Toscanini in the act of conducting a concert”, — horse racing, and unjust conditions of housing for labourers, with artistic photos of construction workers in the style of Aleksandr Rodchenko. Particularly remarkable are the issue’s brightly colourful advertisements, masterfully rendered on glossy paper, some selling office locations at recently constructed Manhattan skyscrapers and some offering industrial tours to the main factories of the Soviet Union.

Described by its founder Henry Luce as a “distinguished and de luxe […] Ideal Super-Class Magazine […] vividly portraying, interpreting and recording the Industrial Civilization”, Fortune officially launched its publication just a couple of years before, at the outset of the Great Depression in 1930.