While
transition was foremost a literary review, it also featured avant-garde visual art, beginning with its inaugural issue (April 1927), which included reproductions of paintings by
Max Ernst,
Lajos Tihanyi, and
Pavel Tchelitchew. The periodical's cover initially bore only textual elements; but commencing with the thirteenth issue, Jolas began to feature art on the outside of his publication as well–much of it created specifically for
transition. In the order of their appearance, the magazine's covers included art by
Pablo Picasso,
Stuart Davis,
Man Ray, Gretchen Powel,
Kurt Schwitters,
Eli Lotar,
Jean Arp,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp,
Paul Klee,
Fernand Léger,
Joan Miró,
Marcel Duchamp, and
Wassily Kandinsky. In his essay "Fontierless Decade", in the magazine's final issue, Jolas reflected that "all the new painters, photographers, and sculptors were reproduced [in
transition], beginning in 1927, when many of them were unknown outside of a small circle on the continent." While Jolas's program for his magazine was outwardly focused on literature, his comments in his essay "A New Vocabulary" indicate that he considered visual art's inventiveness to be a model for the possibilities of the poetic word. He wrote: "While painting . . . has proceeded to rid itself of the descriptive, done away with classical perspective, has tried more and more to attain a purity of abstract idealism, should the art of the word remain static?" Much of the visual art in
transition belongs to a small number of avant-garde moments that later became a part of the Modernist canon, especially (but not exclusively)
Dada,
Surrealism,
Cubism, and
Constructivism. Other artistic selections, like the reproduction of
Marie Monnier's embroidery
Birth, in
transition no. 4, highlight Jolas's interest in both new and re-invented means of expression as well as marking the milieu in which he and his co-editors worked and socialized. For instance, Jolas knew Marie Monnier's sister,
Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, where Marie's work was exhibited in 1927. Moreover, the writer
Léon-Paul Fargue, who Jolas admired and included in his magazine, wrote text the catalog to the 1927 exhibition of Marie Monnier's embroidery. Similarly, Jolas obtained a number of the reproductions of Surrealist paintings and objects that appeared in the magazine's first two years–including work by
Yves Tanguy, who was little known at the time–by way of his friend Marcel Noll, who was director of the Galerie Surréaliste until it closed in 1928.
Transition, in turn, ran advertisements for the gallery in several issues. ==Post-war revival==