Name whimsically after a Paris Street that turned out to have an Irish connection, a new magazine from the Irish Museum of Modern Art has an appealingly radom feel - though it is stacked with big-name poets, artists and writers, Imma director Enrique Juncosa tells ARMINTA WALLACE.

IS IT A bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Boulevard Magenta. About the same size as the Radio Times, but an awful lot thicker, it comes in an unassuming pink cover. Inside, however, is a veritable cornucopia of delights. New poems by Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery and Derek Mahon; new pieces of fiction by Colm Tóibín and David Mitchell; and a host of visual treats, from quirky portraits of the contributors by Francesco Clemente through Miquel Barceló's superb sea creatures to a fistful of Sean Scullys.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Boulevard Magenta hails from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), which has a track record of outstandingly handsome visual arts publications. But visual arts magazines don’t generally contain enough poems and short stories to keep the most avid reader munching for several months, while literary magazines – however intellectually stimulating – aren’t usually noted for their good looks. And that, says Imma’s director, Enrique Juncosa, is precisely the point.

“I’m interested in cinema, and in music, and in books,” he says. “So I thought it would be great to try to make a magazine from the museum that is about the visual arts but is also a multi-disciplinary project.”

The magazine’s title also has a tale to tell. Once upon a time, while driving through Paris, Juncosa was struck by the name of a particular street: Boulevard de Magenta. “It is on the way to Paris from the airport,” he says. “It’s quite ugly actually. It has nothing really special on it. But I liked the sound of the name.”

When the time came to put a name on this new museum baby, he reckoned this one would work. The Boulevard part, he explains, suggests the idea of going for a walk along a wide, lively street.

“You see things that you would see on a major street,” he says. “You see a bookshop, or a restaurant, or a florist – things that you don’t expect. And then Magenta is the name of a colour, so there’s the connection with the visual arts as well. I also liked the idea to have a name that was not in English, to show that it’s an international magazine.”

When Juncosa tried out the potential title on his putative contributors, he got a pleasant surprise. As poet Derek Mahon explained, the Paris street is named after a place in Italy where French troops, fighting for Napoleon III, defeated the Austrian army in 1859. After the battle, the victorious French general was dubbed Duc de Magenta. His name was Patrice de Mac-Mahon, and he was a member of the French nobility whose family originated in Co Limerick. His ancestors had left Ireland with the Flight of the Earls. The link seemed serendipitous, so the name stuck.

What seems somewhat less serendipitous is the idea of starting a new publishing venture at a time of recession. Juncosa, however, is unrepentant.

“At the moment a lot of people are doing things on the web – blogs, and things like that. So I think maybe to make a magazine sounds a bit old-fashioned,” he says. But he insists that a magazine such as this is not terribly expensive to produce – and is therefore perfect for a recession, when innovation without massive expenditure is on the agenda.

Having said that, Boulevard Magenta would not exist without the help of artist Sean Scully, who donated a print which people can buy as part of the Imma Limited Edition Print Collection, and Marie Donnelly, who gave financial support. Donnelly has been associated with various innovative multi-disciplinary fundraising projects over the years, among them the Hospice Foundation’s glorious recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Gavin Friday and illustrated by Bono, and Artpack, a pack of playing cards, each one of which is designed by a different artist.

FOR THE FIRST issue of Boulevard Magenta, Juncosa contacted friends, friends of friends, and people who were either about to show at Imma or had already shown there.

“You see, because we are not paying the contributors – because we don’t have any money – we thought it would be a bit cheeky to ask people we didn’t know,” he says.

The fact that the magazine is produced by a museum already noted for its high-class publications undoubtedly helps. But did he get any refusals? “Some people said no,” he says. “Especially writers, but I think mostly because they didn’t have anything ready at the time. They had just published a book or whatever.”

Taking a stroll along the boulevard, it's frankly difficult to imagine anyone in the arts world being unwilling to set out their stall there. The first thing you notice are the big, glittering, familiar names: Heaney's poem, Loughanure, inspired by a painting by Colin Middleton; Tóibín's A Story, based on an undeveloped plot from Henry James's notebooks; an interview with poet Czeslaw Milosz by an artist and an art critic just before Milosz's death, never published before. The real joy, however, comes from poking around in odd corners and discovering something new. Into this category would come a tantalising slice of script from a long-awaited forthcoming film by Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, an extraordinarily visual 1970s musical score by Kevin Volans, and design drawings for an utterly out-of-this-world house in Dublin by Amanda Levete Architects.

Juncosa’s expertise in Spanish literature is also apparent, with the inclusion of work by two poets who are, he says, very well-known in Spain but haven’t been translated into English before, José Carlos Llop and Luis Antonio de Villena. There’s also an evocative piece – part essay, part prose-poem – about the light in Rome at various hours of the day, by the Egyptian-born American writer, André Aciman.

"He's a very interesting writer," says Juncosa. "He writes for the New York Review of Books and he has published four books. They're all very different. I like them a lot. One is a novel, Call Me By Your Name, another is a memoir of his Jewish family's escape from Alexandria, one is a book of essays about exile, and, in another, he asks different writers to choose their favourite bit of Proust and explain why."

The visual art content is equally varied, with work by Indian artist Nalini Malani alongside such familiar names as Barceló, Clemente and Sean Scully, whose series, Cut Groundand Wall of Light, offer a taster of the major exhibition of his work planned for next year by Imma in collaboration with the Hugh Lane gallery. There's also a taste of Terry Winters, the American painter whose latest show has just opened at Imma.

“He’s one of the major painters of his generation working after minimalism, which was seen as the end of painting by some people,” says Juncosa. “He has tried to assimilate the ideas of minimalism and conceptual art, and use them to make a way forward for painting. He uses motifs and images from science – botanic diagrams, minerals and things like that – and now he’s more interested in mathematics, computers, engineering and architecture. His drawings are very important as well. He does a lot of drawing, and they become like systems to generate these strange scientific images.”

JUNCOSA IS ADAMANT that despite – or, rather, because of – its freewheeling nature, Boulevard Magentarepresents an intrinsic part of what Imma is all about.

“I like to do multi-disciplinary projects in the museum,” he says. “We made an exhibition of the books of Seamus Heaney, and another of the artwork of William Burroughs and Hans Christian Andersen.”

Next year, the museum will mount an exhibition about Morton Feldman, the composer, who was connected to the New York School of painting, and was friends with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

“These kind of projects I find very appealing,” says Juncosa. “And the magazine feeds well into this idea, that we should not try to show the visual arts as something separate from the rest of the arts.”

Meanwhile, the second issue is underway and will appear in October. Will it be pink? Will the fashion designer they’ve approached cough up some drawings? Will rock music ever make it on to the boulevard? Juncosa isn’t telling. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Boulevard Magentais available from imma.ie, priced €25