The Last Grand Magazine

https://www.affidavit.art/articles/last-grand-magazine



This story was not intended to be about Jean Stein. I wanted to know how an unusual magazine from the nineties and early-aughts came to be. That magazine is Grand Street, specifically in its second iteration under the editorship of Jean Stein, though I didn’t understand how crucial her role was when I pitched this conversation series. I was compelled by Grand Street’s mix of outstanding contributors and notable names on the masthead. This is how I came to find the thing in the first place—online shopping for used books by Mike Davis, Fanny Howe, Hilton Als, Amiri Baraka, or Antonin Artaud. I was reading them all in 2015, Grand Street had published them decades before. With one order, I became a collector. Over the next few years, I would amass a stack of the ever-relevant journal (easy at three to ten bucks per back issue) and wonder: How could all this coexist?

It is rare for money and taste to coincide, let alone with glamor, intelligence, and leftist politics. Jean Stein’s Grand Street also exhibits eros and the rough touch of the real. It is a high production journal filled with poetry and literature including many first translations, original reporting and interviews on everything from science to cinema, plus fine art portfolios. For a decade, issues of Grand Street were big-concept themed: Egos, Secrets, Detours, Dirt. This served to connect what otherwise might be hard to fathom together. Take the Models (no. 50, Autumn 1994) issue for example: there’s an interview with linguist and political historian Noam Chomsky; an essay by classical pianist Glenn Gould; a fetish-y photo collaboration between Lucian Freud, Annie Leibovitz, and Leigh Bowery; a multi-author report on ‘¡Revolución!’ in Chiapas, Mexico, including poet Rosario Castellanos in translation; a matte portfolio on an early American suburb by freak artist Peter Fend; a glossy portfolio of cocky sculptures by the now very famous artist Paul McCarthy; a testimony from Henri Matisse’s late-life nurse and model, Sister Jacques-Marie; and Dennis Hopper interviewing supermodels Kate Moss, Lauren Hutton, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell.



Publishing critical darlings from an array of fields, a good sum before they became famous, others in their Pulitzer prime, retired old age, or from niches they’ve remained in, Jean Stein’s Grand Street did not simply serve, as most magazines do, the trends of her day. Although with contributors like Hervé Guibert, Harun Farocki, Toni Morrison, Edward W. Said, Darius James, Rebecca Solnit, and Paul Virilio, its eclectic curation is now, decades later, dead on trend. And I still haven’t gotten to the masthead. What kind of magazine has Rachel Kushner as an intern? The award-winning novelist-to-be was later promoted to assistant editor. She worked closely under Deborah Treisman, now the fiction editor of The New Yorker. Everyone’s favorite emotive essayist Hilton Als was an advisory editor and feature contributor, publishing some of his early signature-style work in Grand Street. Stand-outs among the Contributing Editors list include filmmaker John Waters, journalist Robert Scheer, and the normcore trendsetting art dealer Colin de Land of American Fine Arts, Co.

Then there was Walter Hopps. The Ferus gallery founder and museum director informed much of what makes Stein’s Grand Street special. Beyond being a confidante to Stein and a catalyst to the whole project, in his job as art editor, Hopps made use of his connections with art superstars like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, while presenting a newer roster who would go on to top today’s MFA candidates favorites list: Mike Kelley, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Yayoi Kusama, Moyra Davey... According to John Heilpern of Vanity Fair, “Jean wasn’t about name-dropping at all,” so the forty-two stars I spangled my intro with—an uncouth move maybe. When I interviewed what former Grand Street associates I could—Hilton Als, Deborah Treisman, Rachel Kushner, John Waters, William T. Vollman, Anne Doran, Stein’s daughter Katrina vanden Heuvel (publisher and former editor of The Nation, once contributing editor at Grand Street), and Stein’s personal assistant Paul Hassett—the name they kept dropping was Jean. First-name. Jean.

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