Christian Derouet

Christian Zervos was an influential art critic, collector, publisher, and scholar. He played a critical role in establishing a new international network of artists, critics, dealers, and writers while working as an editor in Paris from 1923 until his death in 1970.

Born in Argostoli on the Greek island of Céphalonie, Zervos spent his childhood and adolescence in Alexandria, Egypt, and Marseille, France. In 1911, at the age of twenty-two, he relocated to Paris to pursue his studies in philosophy. Five years later, he took on his first job as the editor of L’Art d’aujourd’hui (Today’s Art) and Les arts de la maison (The Arts of the Home) published by Editions Albert Morancé. His affiliation with these two art magazines provided Zervos with access to art historians, critics, and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1923. In addition to becoming one of the central subjects of Zervos’s various publications and exhibitions, the two men also formed a long-lasting friendship.

In 1926, Zervos left the Editions Albert Marancé to publish Cahiers d’art, which not only revolutionized reporting about modern art but also introduced a new professionalized type of art press. Acclaimed for its modern design, crisp typography, and engaged coverage of the contemporary art scene, the bulletin also provided a model for Zervos’s magnum opus: a thirty-three volume catalogue raisonné documenting Picasso’s oeuvre, pursued with the artist’s full collaboration, that featured more than 16,000 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. This major project took forty-six years to finish.

At first a review, the entity of Cahiers d’art soon expanded into a publishing house and, in 1934, into an art gallery, all known by the same name and installed on the same premises at 14 rue Dragon in Paris. It was at this location on the left bank that Zervos’s wife, the gallery owner and collector Yvonne Zervos (née Marion), first organized an exhibition of work by Piet Mondrian in 1932, the year the couple got married. While she continued to run the gallery, which beginning in 1939 doubled as the M.A.I. Galerie, she was also integral to her husband’s editorial work at Cahiers d’art, his exhibition projects, and the assembly of their art collection. The latter included paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by French as well as foreign artists and ranged in style from Cubism to post-World War II abstract painting and sculpture.

Little information can be found about how the couple built their collection. Over the years, the couple forged lasting friendships with artists, which likely resulted in gifts. Moreover, artists affiliated with the review Cahiers d’art donated works that were then sold to support its publication. Starting in 1929, the world economic crisis, followed by the publication of the first volume of the Picasso catalogue raisonné a few years later in 1932, threw the art journal into a severe financial crisis. On April 12, 1933, Zervos was forced to put the journal’s collection up for auction at Paris’ Hôtel Drouot to save his publishing house from bankruptcy The auction included around fifty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by an international group of contemporary artists including Hans Arp, Francisco Borès, Georges Braque, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Joan Miró, Picasso, Joaquín Torrès-Garcia, and Kurt Seligmann and resulted in about eighty thousand francs in profit.

The 1930s proved to be a particularly intense period in Christian’s career. The beginning of the decade saw the publication of the first volume of the Picasso catalogue raisonné. Its release in 1932 not only coincided with the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition, which had been mounted at the Parisian Galeries Georges Petit that year, but also with the first of three Picasso special issues of the Cahiers d’art review. Publication of the other two issues would follow in 1935 and 1937. By the second half of the 1930s, Zervos had also published numerous other books and helped to organize various exhibitions at the Galerie Cahiers d’Art as well as at Parisian art institutions. A public project that encapsulated both Christian’s and Yvonne’s strong commitment to modern art was the Jeu de Paume’s 1937 exhibition, Origines et développement de l’art internationale indépendant (Origins and developments of independent international art), which they and others such as the Surrealist poet-collector Paul Eluard helped to organize and which opened just two weeks after the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich. In August 1937, Christian and Yvonne purchased a farm at La Goulotte, a hamlet in the town of Vézelay in Burgundy, southeast of Paris. In subsequent years, Yvonne enlarged the house and welcomed occasional guests such as René Char, Paul Eluard, Le Corbusier, Picasso, and Fernand Léger, who came to stay with the couple during the German Occupation of France.

Despite continuous disruptions due to the war, Christian continued to work both in Paris and in Vézelay. By the time Cahiers d’art folded in 1960 (it was re-launched under new ownership in 2012), Christian had published ninety-seven issues of the journal on a variety of subjects. He had also edited more than fifty books—including monographs on Henri Matisse (1931) and Braque (1933), a history of contemporary art (1938), as well as numerous studies on ancient Greek and prehistoric art objects (1950s)—many of which remain key sources for art historians and writers today.

Christian bequeathed his entire property, including his art collection, to the city of Vézelay. Today this collection is housed at the Musée Zervos.

For more information, see:
Anonymous. “Vente de la collection des ‘Cahiers d’Art.’” Cahiers d’art, nos. 1–2 (1933).

Green, Christopher. “Zervos, Picasso and Brassai, Ethnographers in the Field: A Critical Collaboration.” In Art Criticism since 1900, edited by Malcolm Gee, 116–39. New York: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Weiss, Jeffrey. “Picasso Raisonné.” In A Fine Regard: Essays in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe, edited by Patricia G. Berman and Gertje R. Utley, 119–33. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008.

Zervos et Cahiers d'art. Archives de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky, edited by Christian Derouet. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2011.

A portion of the archives of Cahiers d’art, donated by Yves de Fontbrune, the son of Zervos secretary Marc de Fontbrune, are preserved at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. For more information, see Fondation Zervos and the Musée Zervos in Vézelay.… (más)

This landmark book is the first to capture the diversity of American artistic production of the interwar period in Paris. Assembling works from American and European collections to illustrate the presence of American artists at the heart of numerous avant-garde movements, including Purism, geometric abstraction, and surrealism, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde chronicles an uncertain time of transition when many American artists resisted the nationalist trends of Stieglitz and his circle and flooded the French capital seeking artistic exchange.

Abundantly illustrated, this book includes over 200 color reproductions of artwork by both American artists and those European artists with whom they came in contact, including Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Albert Eugene Gallatin, Jean Hélion, and Fernand Léger, as well as those from the surrealist circles, such as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. It also includes portraits of the illustrious characters by Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, and Edward Steichen.

This book reflects the transatlantic dialogue of the era by bringing together groundbreaking research in eight essays by both American and French authors. It is further enriched by a detailed chronology, bibliography, and illustrated insets that trace the incessant travel, encounters and ensuing friendships, exhibitions and publications of the American avant-garde.

A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939 accompanies a major traveling exhibition organized by the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny.… (más)