i10 INTERNATIONAL REVUE
Volume 2, Number 20, April 1929
Arthur Müller Lehning and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

[Moholy-Nagy] Arthur Müller Lehning (editor): i10 INTERNATIONAL REVUE. Amsterdam: Lehning, Volume 2, Number 20, April 1929. Text varies between English, Dutch and German (for that truly international feel...) A very good to near-fine softcover magazine in stiff printed wrappers. Cover design and typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Cesar Domela. Wrappers lightly worn and textblock has extremely neat ink underlining to multiple paragraphs. A very uncommon example from the heroic era of avant-garde graphic design.

8.25 x 11.75 saddle-stitched magazine with 24 pages of amazing editorial content. The masthead for i10 lists Arthur Müller Lehning as editor, with a stellar roster of contributing editors: J. J. P. Oud (Architecture), Willem Pijper (Music) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (Film and Photo). How's that for authentic?

Contents for i10 International Revue 20, April 1929:

  • Architecture by C.Van Eesteren (multiple pages and images)
  • America/Europe by Henry Russell Hitchcock: English text predates MoMA's International Style exhibition by three years.
  • England's Next Labour Government by A. Fenner Brockway
  • Article by Dr. Ernst Bloch
  • Georges Sorel by Ernst H. Posse
  • Het Groote Dementi by Arthur Müller Lehning
  • Scharf oder Unscharf? by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: 5 pages with b/w photographs by Moholy-Nagy, Marianne Brandt and Foto Scheper Dessau (?)
  • Book Reviews by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Dr. M. Ter Braak
  • Limerick by A. Roland Holst.

A magnificent snapshot of the European Avant-Garde movement after the 1928 Dessau Diaspora. My highest recommendation.

Arthur Müller Lehning (1899-2000) aligned himself with the antimilitarists and libertarians he met in Paris and Vienna after World War I. Lehning eventually returned to his native Netherlands and settled in Amsterdam where he published the i 10 International Revue from 1927 to 1929.

Within the pages of i10, Lehning collaborated with many of the greatest minds of the era, including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Upton Sinclair, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Netlau, Otto Rühle, Henriette Roland-Holst, Alexandre Berkman and Alexander Shapiro.

Lehning was awarded the most significant literary prize in Holland, the PC Hooft-Prijs in 1999 for his work relating to the history of the anarchistic movement and anarcho-trade unionist and its theorists.

Here is Lehning's obituary from the International Institute of Social History (IISH):

On January 1, 2000, Arthur Lehning died at his residence at Le Plessis, Indre (France). Born on October 23, 1899, he was 100 years old. Others will no doubt commemorate his life as an anarchist and anti-militarist, an essayist and the sole editor of the avant-garde journal i 10. He was, among many other things, a secretary of the anarcho-syndicalist International Working Men's Association in 1932-1935, at a time when the IWMA was closely involved in the revolutionary activities of the Spanish Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo.

At the International Institute of Social History, Lehning will be remembered as an important representative of its founding generation. In 1935 he was among the Institute's first staff, with a special responsibility for the South-European and Anarchist collections. From April 1939 all through WW II he was in charge of the Oxford branch of the IISH, to which the most sensitive archival records had been sent after the conclusion of the Munich Agreement. In 1957 he returned to the Institute as editor of the collected works of the Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, published under the title Archives Bakounine. Some of his major scholarly articles were collected in From Buonarroti to Bakunin (1970).

A real internationalist, who lived in many countries and used to travel widely, Lehning always took a lively interest in political and cultural affairs that far outranged the traditional scope of the Institute. The IISH owes him deep gratitude for the tremendous work he has accomplished on its behalf.

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