LASSCO Archive

Cahiers d’Art is a French artistic and literary journal originally founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos, a Greek philosopher, editor. Born in 1889 in Argostoli on the Greek island of Cephalonia he was brought up in Alexandria, Egypt, finally moving to Paris in 1922. In 1924 Zervos joined the publishing firm Editions Morancé writing art articles for the magazine L’Art d’aujourd ‘. As an editor, he met many of the artists about whom the magazine wrote: Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. He left Morancé in 1926 to found his own journal Cahiers d’art becoming simultaneously publisher, director, model maker, chief editor and main editor. Each issue balanced primitive arts with the modern and contemporary arts and articles by art critics with more literary and poetic texts. According to Zervos, the interest in prehistoric, ancient and extra-European arts was necessary to get a glimpse of contemporary art. It was Zervos who took on the enormous task of documenting all the works of Pablo Picasso into a33-volume catalogue raisonnée, published between 1932 and 1978. One of his deepest wishes was to build up with Cahiers d’Art the visual archives of the artists he considered important. Zervos married Yvonne Marion who ran an art gallery, Galerie du Dragon, next to the location of her husband’s shop, the rue Dragon on the left bank of Paris. Madame Zervos became an integral part of her husband’s accomplishment and assembling their art collection. Initially published from 1926 to 1960 Cahiers d’Art still exists today after Swedish collector Staffan Ahrenberg purchased the publication and relaunched it in October 2012.

Cahiers d’Art is a French artistic and literary journal originally founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos, a Greek philosopher, editor. Born in 1889 in Argostoli on the Greek island of Cephalonia he was brought up in Alexandria, Egypt, finally moving to Paris in 1922. In 1924 Zervos joined the publishing firm Editions Morancé writing art articles for the magazine L’Art d’aujourd ‘. As an editor, he met many of the artists about whom the magazine wrote: Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. He left Morancé in 1926 to found his own journal Cahiers d’art becoming simultaneously publisher, director, model maker, chief editor and main editor. Each issue balanced primitive arts with the modern and contemporary arts and articles by art critics with more literary and poetic texts. According to Zervos, the interest in prehistoric, ancient and extra-European arts was necessary to get a glimpse of contemporary art. It was Zervos who took on the enormous task of documenting all the works of Pablo Picasso into a33-volume catalogue raisonnée, published between 1932 and 1978. One of his deepest wishes was to build up with Cahiers d’Art the visual archives of the artists he considered important. Zervos married Yvonne Marion who ran an art gallery, Galerie du Dragon, next to the location of her husband’s shop, the rue Dragon on the left bank of Paris. Madame Zervos became an integral part of her husband’s accomplishment and assembling their art collection. Initially published from 1926 to 1960 Cahiers d’Art still exists today after Swedish collector Staffan Ahrenberg purchased the publication and relaunched it in October 2012.