The Blind Man No. 1 does not read as a merely preliminary document in the history of the 1917 scandal. Even before Fountain was submitted, refused, and defended in print, the magazine’s title and cover already position the viewer as someone who looks without seeing, confronted by an operation whose logic remains deliberately withheld. The issue does not wait for the scandal in order to define its audience. It defines that audience in advance.
That anticipatory quality matters because the Fountain episode had not yet occurred when the first issue appeared. The magazine therefore cannot be understood simply as a reaction to events already in motion; rather, it establishes the tone in which those events will later be staged and received. Its cover is taunting in precisely this sense: it assumes blindness before the blindness has been publicly demonstrated.
The title itself names the condition the magazine addresses. A blind man is not someone outside the field of vision altogether, but someone present to appearance and unable to grasp what is in front of him. That distinction is crucial. The magazine does not imagine a public that lacks access to art; it imagines a public already standing before the work and still failing to see.
Under that description, the first issue begins to look like an opening move in a larger coordinated structure. It prepares the ground for a provocation that will only later become visible at the Society of Independent Artists, where the contradiction between proclaimed openness and actual refusal can be publicly exposed. What appears retrospectively as reaction already bears the marks of prior preparation.
This changes the meaning of the later second issue as well. The Richard Mutt Case no longer appears as an improvised emergency defense written after an unforeseen rejection, but as one half of a magazine already committed to a two-level operation: public argument on one side, withheld or coded content on the other. In that light, the first issue is not separate from the scandal that follows. It is the first sign that the scandal has been conceptually prepared before it arrives.
The importance of the cover lies precisely in this posture of advance address. It speaks as if the misunderstanding were already guaranteed, as if the public had already taken its place in the role assigned to it by the title. The scandal to come does not create that blindness; it reveals it.