Tériade

Henri Matisse's images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily revealed when consideration is given to two carefully devised interpretative filters that Matisse created. The first, a circus theme embodied in its original title Cirque, and the second, the intricate captions that Matisse accorded to each image. Enhancing the visual quality of his handwritten text with his richly drawn arabesques, he created a new text-image dynamic which gave primacy to the image. The paper reveals a congruency between the text in Jazz, which he declared had no relationship to the image, and the essay he wrote at the same time, "How I made my books", where he articulated a principle he adopted for his other books, the rapport between the image and the literary character of the text.

The complete prints of Georges Braque is the only comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the graphic works of the painter. Appearing 36 years after the well known work of Dora Vallier (Braque: The Complete Graphics and Braque: L’oeuvre gravé, both of 1982), this book of over 560 pages provides innumerable improvements over that classic. If the Vallier contained 192 entries covering over 300 prints, this new catalogue has 1014 prints, including dozens of new states ignored by or unknown to Vallier and other experts. It adds categories ignored by previous reviews, like pochoirs and lithographs of interpretation, the later including the best Braque lithographs ever. And it includes color photographs of all but a few of the prints described.

What Orozco did with his Picasso Lithographer and Activist was to comment and explain the lithographic work of the Málaga painter, which had been properly catalogued by Bernd Rau in 1988 and Felix Reuße in 2000, improving Fernand Mourlot’s catalog and bringing the number of lithographs and states from 407 to 777 (Rau) and 861 (Reuße). In the case of Braque, however, Orozco is doing what Rau and Reuße did with Picasso, i.e., to build a complete repertory of all Braque prints, including those already known and those he has unearthed in world galleries and auction sales in his 25 years experience as a collector and amateur.

This is volume 6 of the Catalogue raisonné of the Orozco collection of artist and illustrated books as well as prints, dedicated to Henri Matisse, Edouard Pignon and Fernand Léger. It describes the pieces of the collection, the circumstances under which they were produced, references to the museums throughout the world that keep a copy of the piece described, the appropriate catalogue references, their passage through auction houses, etc. and photographs of the pieces.

Picasso. 70 years of book illustration  is a new compendium of all the books illustrated by the painter. It does not aim to replace the prestigious 1983 Cramer catalogue raisonné Pablo Picasso The Illustrated Books. The purpose is rather to complement it by catering for needs that were not in the mind of Patrick Cramer. In this connection, Orozco’s catalog contains 265 entries, versus the 156 of the 1983 compilation, the main characteristic of the 109 added books being that the illustrations they contain are not registered in Georges Bloch’s Pablo Picasso. Catalogue of the printed graphic work, the requirement for a book to make its way to the Cramer. Orozco includes for instance books illustrated with pochoirs after Picasso, both because they constitute an important part of the artist’s graphic production and in view of the fact that Picasso gave the bon à tirer for many or most of the hundreds of pochoirs realized after his works. This was particularly the case with the prints made in the Paris workshop of Daniel Jacomet, his preferred pochoir printer from 1920 (Le Tricorne) to 1972 (Carnet de Paris). Other criteria used by Orozco in deciding what to include are that Picasso knew about the book and approved the inclusion of his illustrations or selected them or that Picasso participated in the production, gave the bon à tirer or designed the cover or interior. By including all these new books, the author hopes to bring a wider perspective on Picasso’s book illustration work.

Another purpose of the present book is to provide color visual information on how the books look like, including the covers and slip cases and boxes that house them; the page layout; the interaction between text and prints; and of illustrations other than original prints. It should be recalled that the Cramer catalog only includes photos –mostly black & white–of the original graphics the book contains, neglecting the rest.

This is volume 5 of the Catalogue raisonné of the Orozco collection of artist and illustrated books as well as prints, dedicated to books and portfolios including lithographs and etchings by several artists, e.g., Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Braque, etc. It also contains an introduction to the revue 'Verve',  printed in Paris but published by Tériade and the Hearst Corporationin the U.S. It describes the pieces of the collection, the circumstances under which they were produced, references to the museums throughout the world that keep a copy of the piece described, the appropriate catalogue references, their passage through auction houses, etc. and photographs of the pieces.

Picasso lithographer and activist is a revised English language version of the book Picasso litógrafo y militante, (WorldCat No. 952991448), published by the Picasso Foundation, Málaga, in 2016. It  is the first commented catalogue raisonné of Picasso litographs. The book enumerates practically all Picasso lithographs, illustrating most of them and explaining why or how they were made. It also reveals for the first time the reasons and circumstances of Picasso’s lithographic career, overcoming the painter’s attempts to hide the facts, and particularly Georges Braque’s role in the introduction. It also uncovers a formerly unknown new aesthetics developed by Picasso for years, and his motivations to do it: to mock the Communist Party and its pressure on the painter to adopt socialist realism. The aesthetic starts with the catalog of arbitrary signs contained in the 125 lithographs of the book Le Chant des Morts, and its best known oil painting examples are the two versions of La Cuisine.

This is volume 7 of the Catalogue raisonné of the Orozco collection of artist and illustrated books as well as prints, dedicated to Marc Chagall and Raoul Dufy. It describes the pieces of the collection, the circumstances under which they were produced, references to the museums throughout the world that keep a copy of the piece described, the appropriate catalogue references, their passage through auction houses, etc. and photographs of the pieces.

La Maison d’Editions Verve a été fondée par le critique d’art et éditeur grec, Tériade (1897-1983), avec le financement de David Smart, directeur de la corporation américaine Esquire-Coronet Inc (1937-1939). Verve a acquis une solide réputation internationale, au cours des trente-six ans d’activité, tout en poursuivant des résultats de haute qualité pour la reproduction en couleurs des œuvres d’art à travers la publication de la revue artistique et littéraire Verve (1937-1960) et la série de vingt-sept livres de peintres (1943-1975) illustrés par l’élite des artistes contemporains. La thèse présente l’activité d’éditeur et de critique d’art de Tériade (Cahiers d’Art, l’Intransigeant, Minotaure, La Bête Noire) à partir du moment de son arrivée à Paris en 1916 jusqu’en 1973, quand l’exposition Hommage à Tériade a eu lieu aux Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais à Paris, en mettant en lumière des aspects inconnus de la vie et l’œuvre de cet éditeur à travers la contextualisation de plus de 200 documents inédits et l’analyse d’un demi siècle de vie artistique en France ; de la fin du cubisme au triomphe de l’école de New York. Le deuxième volume de la thèse présente un répertoire complet de plus de 300 textes critiques de Tériade, une liste de ses publications, un index complet des textes et des illustrations de la revue Verve, photographies, images d’archives et 55 notices biographiques.

This paper discusses several aspects of the “art des masses” concept that flourished in Paris during the Popular Front years (1936–1938) and the contribution of three of the most important Parisian art magazines to the establishment of a visual imagery: Cahiers d'art, Minotaure, and Verve. These magazines addressed in each case the ideological and formalist concerns of their editors in respect to the contemporary discussions on the place of the artist in society, the leftist anti-capitalist discourse against social inequality, and the Popular Front cultural policy as reflected in the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Discussing the period of the 1930s, it is pertinent to consider the conditions of artistic production during the Great Depression along with the sociopolitical turmoil that the rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Joseph Stalin's (1878–1953) dominion in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reinforced. Focusing on Verve magazine, this article seeks to identify the factors that led this publication to put into practice, as early as 1937, the idea of a “museum without walls” that André Malraux (1901–1976) would explore on a theoretical level during the following decades and the editorial lines that this luxurious art magazine adopted in reference to the developments in the artistic and intellectual spectrum only a few years before the outbreak of World War II.

Publiée entre 1934 et 1939, la revue Le Voyage en Grèce, branche grecque du Minotaure, apparaît comme une des aventures éditoriales les plus accomplies de l’entre-deux-guerres. Son contenu est indissociable des aspirations de son directeur, Héraclès Joannidès, représentant à Paris de la société de tourisme Neptos, qui voulait « créer un lien entre la Grèce et ses voyageurs par l’intermédiaire des écrivains, des artistes et des savants contemporains ». Une double nostalgie animait Joannidès : le regret de son Asie Mineure natale et celui d’une demeure rêvée, la Grèce.
C’est ainsi qu’il rebâtit sa patrie dans un monument de papier, avec l’aide de son ami Tériade, le célèbre éditeur d’art. Venus de tous les horizons, peintres, architectes, écrivains, archéologues, photographes, les collaborateurs s’appellent Le Corbusier, Giorgio De Chirico, Pierre Reverdy, Fred Boissonnas, Jean Charbonneaux, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Raymond Queneau, Roger Caillois, Marguerite Yourcenar… Ils dialoguent ici dans un esprit de synthèse sans précédent. Les chapitres de ce volume, fruit d’une rencontre à l’École française d’Athènes et à la Fondation Vassilis et Eliza Goulandris à Andros, forment la première étude d’ensemble sur l’image de la Grèce des années trente, vue de France.
Cet ouvrage est issu du colloque international organisé à l'École française d'Athènes et à la Fondation Vassilis et Eliza Goulandris à Andros (23-26 septembre 2004).

Picasso: 70 years of book illustration  is a new compendium of all the books illustrated by the painter. It does not aim to replace the prestigious 1983 Cramer catalogue raisonné Pablo Picasso The Illustrated Books. The purpose is rather to complement it by catering for needs that were not in the mind of Patrick Cramer. In this connection, Orozco’s catalog contains 265 entries, versus the 156 of the 1983 compilation, the main characteristic of the 109 added books being that the illustrations they contain are not registered in Georges Bloch’s Pablo Picasso. Catalogue of the printed graphic work, the requirement for a book to make its way to the Cramer. Orozco includes for instance books illustrated with pochoirs after Picasso, both because they constitute an important part of the artist’s graphic production and in view of the fact that Picasso gave the bon à tirer for many or most of the hundreds of pochoirs realized after his works. This was particularly the case with the prints made in the Paris workshop of Daniel Jacomet, his preferred pochoir printer from 1920 (Le Tricorne) to 1972 (Carnet de Paris). Other criteria used by Orozco in deciding what to include are that Picasso knew about the book and approved the inclusion of his illustrations or selected them or that Picasso participated in the production, gave the bon à tirer or designed the cover or interior. By including all these new books, the author hopes to bring a wider perspective on Picasso’s book illustration work.

Another purpose of the present book is to provide color visual information on how the books look like, including the covers and slip cases and boxes that house them; the page layout; the interaction between text and prints; and of illustrations other than original prints. It should be recalled that the Cramer catalog only includes photos –mostly black & white–of the original graphics the book contains, neglecting the rest.

Conference proceedings, La Demarche Critique, CESL, Tours, September 2013.

Au début des années vingt, L’Art Vivant d’André Salmon a exercé une influence considérable sur la jeune critique d’art en France. Avec l’expansion de la presse artistique, être critique est devenu une profession, voire une profession digne d’estime. Cette communication vise a l’examen du discours critique de Tériade et de Christian Zervos, le directeur de la revue Cahiers d’Art, en commentant leurs principales prises de positions, leur rôle dans le domaine artistique, et leur contribution au développement du discours critique professionnel à Paris pendant l’entre deux guerres.

Η παρούσα ανακοίνωση επιχειρεί να εξετάσει τις κοινωνικό-ιστορικές και καλλιτεχνικές εξελίξεις που πλαισιώνουν την δραστηριότητα του Τεριάντ στο Παρίσι του 20ου αιώνα μέσα από την ανάλυση του ρόλου και της σημασίας της ίδρυσης του εκδοτικού οίκου Verve και την έκδοση της ομώνυμης επιθεώρησης από τον Δεκέμβριο του 1937 έως τον Ιούλιο του 1960. Ένας από τους βασικούς στόχους της ανακοίνωσης είναι ο σχολιασμός και η αποτίμηση της αλληλεπίδρασης που σημειώνεται μεταξύ των ιδεολογικών και αισθητικών κατευθύνσεων και επιλογών του Τεριάντ κατά το πέρας τριών σχεδόν δεκαετιών συνεχούς δράσης στο πεδίο των τεχνών. Τέλος, δίνεται έμφαση για πρώτη φορά, με βάση την υπάρχουσα βιβλιογραφία, στον ιδεολογικό προσανατολισμό του Τεριάντ και την αντίληψη του περί προέλευσης της γαλλικής τέχνης όπως διαφαίνονται μέσα από μια πολύχρονη και πλούσια εκδοτική παραγωγή που αγγίζει ταυτόχρονα τα όρια του ακραίου αισθητισμού και του μετριοπαθή εθνικισμού.

Ce papier vise à l’examen des développements socio-historiques et artistiques qui encadrent l’activité de Tériade à Paris au vingtième siècle à travers l’analyse du rôle et de l’importance de la fondation de la maison d’éditions Verve qui publiait l’homonyme revue artistique et littéraire à partir de décembre 1937 jusqu’à juillet 1960. Le but principal de cette conférence c’est de commenter et d’évaluer l’interaction entre les directions esthétiques et idéologiques de Tériade au cours de presque trois décennies d’activité dans le domaine des arts. En tenant compte de la bibliographie existante, enfin, on présente ici pour la première fois l’orientation idéologique de Tériade et ses idées autour des origines de l’art français comme en témoigne sa riche production éditoriale qui a fini par devenir l’emblème d’un esthétisme extrême et, en même temps, d’un nationalisme modéré.

Kolokytha, Chara: Museum Acquisition Policies in Germany and France, in: Drost, Julia, Ivanoff, Hélène und Vernerey-Laplace, Denise (Hrsg.): Arts et politiques: Le marché de l'art entre France et Allemagne de l'Entre-deux-guerres à la Libération, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2022 (Passages online, Band 13), S. 52-73.

The paper discusses the cosmopolitan character of Paris, the greatest artistic metropolis of the modern era, examining the influence it exerted over the Greek and several other European societies during the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the example of Tériade, an influential art critic and editor of Greek origin, it is pertinent to consider his role in the phenomenon of cultural mobility and artistic diffusion throughout his career as a critic and editor. Tériade was born to a bourgeois family on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of the nineteenth century. In his youth, he was raised under the influence of French culture, he wrote poetry and practiced painting in an amateurish impressionist style, deeply influenced by the modern trends that Paris, the ‘centre’ of western civilisation, diffused to the European ‘peripheries’ mostly by means of periodical publications such as the Écho des deux mondes, Vers et Prose and La revue des deux mondes to name but a few French periodicals and papers of wide circulation. In 1916, he moved to Paris to study Law and over a decade later he launched with his compatriot, Christian Zervos, the influential art magazine Cahiers d’Art (1926-1960). Together with Zervos, they established a Paris based international art network propagating the aesthetics of French modern art abroad and thereby encouraging an important number of Spanish, German, Argentine, Russian and Greek artists to move to Paris and benefit from the ideas of Parisian modernism. This suggestion is supported by archival information. What is important about Tériade and Zervos is that they form a significant example in the phenomenon of ‘transculturation’, since they assimilated several aspects of Greek philosophy and culture to the Parisian modernist tenet in order to generate novel ideas that contributed to the establishment of modern classic aesthetics. This is evident in their art critical writings. The paper will examine the way the work of foreign artists is presented in Cahiers d’Art during the inter war period and the contribution of Tériade and Zervos to the establishment of transnational aesthetics in modern artistic production. It aims to bring into light the role of art publishing and the contribution of the Parisian art networks to the diffusion of ideas and their escalating influence in Europe and overseas. The example of Tériade will be used here to highlight both the ‘passive’ and the ‘active’ role of this editor in the phenomenon of cultural diffusion and mobility.

This article deals with the uses of the concept of the Mediterranean by the art critic Tériade in interwar France. Aligning himself with the then dominant intellectual and artistic trend that considered Southern/Mediterranean art superior to Northern/German art, he stressed in his writings the Mediterranean origin of the artists that he wished to promote as well as the Mediterranean features of their art. Being himself of Greek origin his arguments about the mediterraneity of art and artists reflected back on him as a means of integration into the
French cultural establishment.

The thesis examines the activities of Cahiers d’Art as a magazine, gallery and publishing house active in Paris from 1926 to 1960 with special attention, and without particular regards to biography, to the intellectual development of its founder Christian Zervos from his early years in Alexandria at the beginning of the century to his professional establishment in the French capital. Its originality resides in the presentation of a significant corpus of unpublished archival information and the examination of the role that the network centred arounnd Cahiers d’Art played in the institutionalisation of independent art in the first half of the century, the propagation of abstraction through the popularisation of European primitivism which was presented as a direct link to the modern era, and the passage from the Mechanist to the Atomic Age, its effects in the artistic domain and the ideological connotations it encased. The overall analysis focuses on particular transitional phenomena that marked the course of the 20th century. Particularly, the passage from analysis to synthesis which found diverse expressions in the contemporary artistic discourse since the beginning of the century giving birth to an increased interest in pragmatist approaches to art and architecture, social engagement, and a course towards formal simplification. The thesis observes the way in which the medieval and the primitive past contributed to the consecration of the international School of Paris and the conflicts of interest of their exponents. It furthermore pays close attention to Zervos’ position-taking with regards to these conflicts, his disdain for antiquity, its aftermath in western art, and the way that these positions affected his presentation of Picasso’s work in the voluminous catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. Finally, it seeks to re-appreciate from the perspective of Cahiers d’Art, a significantly influential network of worldwide reputation, issues associated with the consecration and popularisation of international independent art in France and abroad, as well as the conflicting aspirations for decentralisation in a context dominated by Eurocentric attitudes and the formal and ideological projections of post-WWII liberal critique.

The thesis examines the activities of Cahiers d’Art as a magazine, gallery and publishing house active in Paris from 1926 to 1960 with special attention, and without particular regards to biography, to the intellectual development of its founder Christian Zervos from his early years in Alexandria at the beginning of the century to his professional establishment in the French capital. Its originality resides in the presentation of a significant corpus of unpublished archival information and the examination of the role that the network centred around Cahiers d’Art played in the institutionalisation of independent art in the first half of the century, the propagation of abstraction through the popularisation of European primitivism which was presented as a direct link to the modern era, and the passage from the Mechanist to the Atomic Age, its effects in the artistic domain and the ideological connotations it encased. The overall analysis focuses on particular transitional phenomena th...