HORIZON : The World’s First Creative Agency

Adrian Curiel
Jul 10, 2017 · 6 min read

SEPTEMBER, 1958 • VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1


I came across the Foreword by HORIZON, A Magazine of the Arts written in 1959 and it turned my perceived understanding of culture and launching my own creative endeavor for a loop. This is how you set sail on a new voyage, this is how I plan to take The Doberton.


Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen. . .

Thus, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” was Keats transfigured by the beauty to which man may aspire, by the splendor of his achievements, by the poignancy of his failures, and by thoughts “too deep for tears.” It is in this sonnet that he brings us across the horizon of history and down the long chasm of the centuries to our own beginnings,

to stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific — and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild sunrise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

We take for our title the word horizon because it is here, where earth and sky meet, that one may observe those jagged interruptions in the landscape that are the works of man: the squat mud houses of ancient Sumer; the gleaming statuary of the isles of Greece; the stately sky line of Venice when “she did hold the gorgeous East in fee” ; a perfect bridge in Peking; our own soaring, protean civilization; all that moved Milton to write that

Towred Cities please us then, And the busie humm of men.

Culture, the concern of this new magazine, is both achievement and dream, a work of the hands and a movement of the spirit, the special property of man since the great miracle of the Sixth Day — since Darwin’s hairy quadruped dropped from his tree and (how many millennia later?) first lifted up his gaze to seek something beyond mere food and drink. Culture is art and ideas, past and present, taken in the sum as a guide to life. It is history too, the science which Dionysius tells us is “philosophy teaching by examples,” with philosophy suspended between the I-believe of theology and the I-know of science. It is the concern of writers who fill libraries with it, of poets who leave it “apparell’d in celestial light,” of dramatists who represent it, of scientists who analyze it, of gifted men who chip and paint and mold their vision of the truth which lies, never fully revealed, within the complex whole. Culture, finally, is a birthright which we all inherit, the heritage man carrics with him on his earthly voyage.

The caravel on the opposite page was painted by Pieter Brueghel in 1557, when the Age of Exploration was under full sail. No lovelier ship has ever been portrayed, and we choose it for our frontispiece because it seems to symbolize the remarkable chapter of modern history in which the adventuring genius of Western Europe set forth, freighted with all the treasures of the classical Hellenic world and of Christian civilization, to seek a new Zion across the Western ocean.

The genius of Brueghel, the son of Flemish peasants, took fire in some measure from the great sun of the Italian Renaissance, which had reached its zenith half a century earlier, and his genius in turn helped to kindle, half a century later, the artistic blaze of young Dutch Republic. The story of that incandescent era in the Netherlands is told in this opening issue of HORIZON by C. V. Wedgwood and illustrated with some of the luminous are it produced. It was a triumph of pure spirit for a people who had little to start with except, as the historian Taine observed, “a salt mudbank on the North Sea.” The Dutch were a business people, much like ourselves, and it may be worth noting that their glory in the world of painting went hand in hand with their greatest commercial and military triumphs.

We may also observe the heartening fact, in a time of trouble like our own, that Holland’s greatest was achieved in an era of peril and uncertainty. The Attic light never shone so clear as under the threat of Persian might; Rome’s greatest orators and poets lived — and were banished and proscribed — amid fierce civil strife. The proud power of Spain threatened Shakespeare’s England, and during the Great Age of Exploration, as H. R. Trevor-Roper points out in his article in this issue, most of Western Europe trembled before the dark forces of the East that stood at the gates of Vienna.

History speaks to us often in riddles, with a Delphic voice. Yet it is clear that we in America today are the inheritors of many great a great golden age, heirs to much of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, and to the strength of a little island off the coast of Europe which bestowed poetry, literature, manners, and certain explosive ideas of freedom on half the earth. Whether, as some of our critics say, America is a kind of Rome and will never match the artistic and cultural achievements of Greece’s modern counterpart — England and Western Europe — no one may assert with assurance. Nor can any man say as yet whether it is time to sing a recessional or chant a magnificat for the United States at what seems from a historical standpoint its moment of greatest magnificence.

This magazine in any case is commenced in the belief that some better guide than now exists in America is needed to the house of culture, with all its thousands of rooms. Never has there been in history such an opportunity to explore this imposing edifice, or so wide a horizon open to our sight. The world is suddenly grown very small, and its treasures are visible to all. Never has so much been known about art and culture in all parts of time and space, never have so many of us, it would seem, had such an appetite for knowledge, of for travel in Keats’ realms of gold.

Such is the field we choose. We intend to pay attention to those aspects of life peculiar to high civilizations — to art and ideas; to the study of man and nature; to letters; to manners and customs; and, in the long view, to political and scientific subjects as they affect civilized man. HORIZON will have no limits in time or geography. It will deal with a past known only to the archaeologist or the myth teller. And it will treat of the great of the great non-Western cultures which have existed so long, so far away, and are now in the twentieth century thrown so suddenly into contact with the West.

But the great concern of HORIZON will be with our own civilization, Modern Western variety, №21 in Professor Toynbee’s grand catalogue of history, the culture pattern born in the dim Mediterranean past, shaped in modern Europe and brought across the unknown and terrifying horizon by brave men in little ships find — and found — a new citadel in North America.

We invite all those interests lie in this broad field, whether as contributors or readers, to join us in this venture.

The Editors


Whoa. This is how you launch a product. This take on culture is what has been lost in our digital era of content and consumption. No more.

The Doberton

thedoberton

Lifestyle Maple Syrup

    Adrian Curiel

    Written by

    Brand Development & Product Creation

    thedoberton

    Lifestyle Maple Syrup

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