A forum for encounters: modern art and its global sources in Cahiers d’Art

When Cahiers d’Art first appeared in Paris in 1926, the new publication was quickly prized among the international cognoscenti for the diversity of its contents and the quality of its photographic reproductions. Founding editor Christian Zervos deftly intermixed a diverse range of subjects and approaches in the pages of his review. This essay examines how, why, and to what lasting effect the editor and his contributors interlaced European modern art with objects from non-Western cultures. Such rapprochements began as a formalist strategy, where objects met in opposition to aesthetic constraints imposed since the Renaissance; they evolved to emphasize a spiritual affinity or kinship between European artists and their cultural others. While focusing upon texts and images from the interwar period, the height of the review’s global influence and distribution, my intention is to suggest the wider cultural legacy of this visual and discursive space, in which the works of temporally and geographically distant cultures conversed across time and space.status: publishe