VENICE.- On the occasion of the centenary of the French journal Cahiers d’Art, founded in 1926 by art historian Christian Zervos, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins international celebrations with a special installation dedicated to the renowned publication in the galleries of its permanent collection. A selection of ten issues of the historic journal, spanning from the 1920s to the 1950s, is presented in dialogue with the museum’s iconic works, highlighting the crucial role Cahiers d’Art played in establishing modernist visual culture and the artistic and cultural debate that shaped the twentieth century.
Founded in Paris as a journal, publishing house, and gallery, Cahiers d’Art became an experimental workshop where artists, writers, and intellectuals contributed to defining a new aesthetic and theoretical language. Its pages featured artists Alexander Calder, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, and Pablo Picasso, alongside poets and intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Lacan, and Tristan Tzara. The exceptional quality of its reproductions, commissioned to photographers including Dora Maar and Man Ray, made the journal a “portable museum” that canonized the avant-garde as it was forming.
The carefully curated selection presented in Venice—acquired for the occasion by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection thanks to a fundraising campaign, and now an integral part of its archival holdings—documents the vital connection between Cahiers d’Art and the museum itself. In fact, the ten issues on view in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni reproduce works acquired by Peggy Guggenheim. Furthermore, in 1955 the American collector contributed to the journal with an essay dedicated to Constantin Brancusi, which stands as further testimony to her active participation in the international art scene. “Cahiers d’Art made the avant-garde visible while it was still taking shape,” affirms Karole P. B. Vail, Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. “We share this ability to anticipate what is emerging. Peggy Guggenheim was among the leading figures of that same cultural scene, and we regard the museum as a place that continues to foster and share that experimental spirit.” Through this initiative, the museum renews its mission to promote modernity through its most innovative expressions, recognizing Cahiers d’Art both as an active agent in the establishing of modernism and its contemporary legacy, and a witness to its time.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the first institution to inaugurate the series of exhibitions dedicated to the centenary, which throughout 2026 will involve a network of international museums, including the Musée Départemental d’Art Moderne – Collection Zervos, Vézelay; LUMA Arles; the Musée National Picasso-Paris; the Benaki Museum, Athens; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. The global program, with the curatorial contribution of Daniel Birnbaum, also includes a commemorative publication, Cahiers d’Art: A Century of Modernism, a series of talks, and several exhibition projects at the journal’s headquarters in Paris.
Since its founding in 1926, Cahiers d’Art has published 97 issues and over 50 volumes, including the influential Picasso Catalogue Raisonné. Relaunched in 2012 by the Swedish collector Staffan Ahrenberg, it continues to be a platform for dialogue between different artistic generations, linking historic figures such as Calder and Picasso with contemporary practitioners including Arthur Jafa, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Thomas Schütte, and Rosemarie Trockel.
The special tribute installation by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to Cahiers d’Art will be on view through the fall of 2026.
