Cahiers d'Art and the Evolution of Modernist Painting

In 1926 Christian Zervos launched Cahiers d'Art, a French art magazine that positioned itself as the defender of modern avant-garde art and the arbiter of a properly formalist modernism.¹ The magazine resembled the long-established Gazette des Beaux Arts in the seriousness of its presentation of art and architecture. Copious large-scale reproductions demonstrated the range and significance of contemporary artistic production, while art historical studies of both distant periods and the work of living artists served to buttress the magazine's self-determined role as both the judge and defender of historically significant developments in modern art. During the 1920s and 1930s a central preoccupation of Cahiers d'Art was maintaining and expanding the reputations of prewar modern artists by publishing extensive reproductions of their historical and contemporary work.

The magazine rapidly assumed a dominant position in the modern art world. One of its enduring claims to fame was its ongoing publication of Picasso's work, a project that expanded to Zervos's multivolume catalogue raisonné of Picasso's oeuvre, published between 1932 and 1970. While Picasso was the centerpiece of the magazine's dedication to the masters of modernism, the work of other artists was also showcased, and between 1926 and 1940 entire issues were devoted to Matisse, Léger, Braque, and Gris. The view of modern art promoted by Cahiers d'Art helped to establish the history of modern art enshrined in textbooks, museum catalogs, exhibitions, and art writing in general following World War II. This history prevailed until relatively recently, when scholars began to question the established canon of modern works, the narrative of their historical evolution, and the hierarchical evaluation of their importance.

Cahiers d'Art also played a key role in the development of post-World War II artistic production through its reproductions of European modern art. Clement Greenberg noted on several occasions the signal effect the magazine's illustrations had on the nascent New York School.² The magazine's early texts, however, are also of interest. In the 1920s and early 1930s in particular, they give insight into the critical expectations of modernist painting and the tensions created by presenting actual artistic production as conforming to those expectations. The pages of Cahiers d'Art bear witness to the complex dialectic created by negotiating between theoretical predictions of the future of modern art based on past production and the reality of contemporary artistic creation. In the 1920s the magazine's critics supported the formal evolution of modern art established in the previous decades and rejected Surrealist art as a retrograde development. Clearly, the magazine's early efforts to deny the significance of Surrealist art failed; nevertheless, Cahiers d'Art played an important role in determining historical views of Surrealist art and its value.

In the 1920s Cahiers d'Art promoted a group of young unkn own painters—Ismaël de la Serna, André Beaudin, Francisco Borès, Hernando Viñes, and Francisco Cossio—who were occasionally described as Neo-Fauves and presented as the most promising representatives of the next stage in modern art's formal evolution. The magazine's position of formalist modernism in painting may be defined in simple terms as the conviction that pictorial values (color, composition, chiaroscuro, quality of paint application, etc.) were of paramount concern. In 1890 the French painter and theorist Maurice Denis made one of the foundational formalist statements of modern art: "Before being a warhorse, a nude or some anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order." This statement was repeatedly quoted in Cahiers d'Art almost as a sort of mantra. The Cahiers d'Art critics' conviction that the Surrealists were unaware of the significance of formal values in modern art was also frequently expressed. Zervos even offered to teach the Surrealists how to recognize formal values and improve their understanding of the true achievements of modern art.

In their eyes formal concerns are incompatible with the moral position they want to express. And I cannot agree with the surrealist painters in this; I would...