War & Peace Quote by Kenneth Koch

War usually arrives in archives as catastrophe; Koch catches it arriving as a shipment of aesthetics. French surrealists "at the beginning of the war" "come over to New York" and, almost absurdly, "brought out this magazine". The phrasing is plain, even offhand, but the subtext is barbed: displacement gets translated into production. Refuge becomes publishing. The violence that tears artists from Paris also seeds a new cultural circuit in Manhattan, where avant-garde ideas can be repackaged, literally, as a "big, glossy" object.

Koch's intent feels less like reverence than a poet's documentary curiosity. He doesn't mythologize Surrealism as heroic resistance; he reduces it to matter and surface: gloss, size, "things". That last word is doing heavy lifting. "Surrealist things" refuses to dignify the contents with interpretation, as if the movement's prized irrationality turns, in exile, into a catalog of props. It's an affectionate deflation: the high seriousness of European modernism meets the American knack for making culture into a product you can hold, flip through, and display.

Context matters. The wartime migration of artists and intellectuals to New York helped shift the center of gravity of modern art from Europe to the U.S., fertilizing everything from gallery culture to Abstract Expressionism. Koch, a New York School poet, is tuned to how scenes form: not through manifestos alone but through venues, print objects, and the social glue of shared consumption. The sentence reads like a memory of influence arriving not as doctrine but as a glamorous magazine on a table, quietly changing what local artists thought was possible.