On the occasion of the centenary of the French magazine Cahiers d’Art, founded in 1926 by art historian Christian Zervos, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the international programme of celebrations with a special installation dedicated to the renowned publication, presented within the galleries of the permanent collection.
A selection of ten issues of the historic magazine, spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, enters into dialogue with iconic works from the museum’s collection, highlighting the central role that Cahiers d’Art played in shaping modernist visual culture and in the critical and cultural debate that animated twentieth-century Europe.
Founded in Paris as a magazine, publishing house, and gallery, Cahiers d’Art became an experimental laboratory in which artists, writers, and intellectuals helped define a new aesthetic and theoretical language. Its pages featured Alexander Calder, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, and Pablo Picasso, alongside poets and thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Lacan, and Tristan Tzara. The exceptional quality of its reproductions—entrusted to photographers including Dora Maar and Man Ray—made the magazine a true “portable museum,” capable of canonizing the avant-garde while it was still in the making.
The refined and carefully curated selection presented in Venice—acquired for the occasion by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection through a fundraising campaign and now part of the museum’s archival holdings—documents a significant historical connection between Cahiers d’Art and the Collection itself. The ten issues on view in the galleries of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni reproduce works that are part of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, and in 1955 Guggenheim herself contributed to the magazine with a text on Constantin Brancusi, once again attesting to her active engagement with the international art scene.
“Cahiers d’Art made the avant-garde visible as it was taking shape,” says Karole P. B. Vail, Director of the museum. “This ability to anticipate the new is something we share. Peggy Guggenheim was among the leading figures of that same cultural landscape, and we like to think of the Collection as a place where that spirit of experimentation continues to be cultivated and shared.”
With this initiative, the museum renews its mission to celebrate modernity through its most innovative expressions, recognizing Cahiers d’Art not only as a witness to its time, but as an active agent in the construction of modernism and its contemporary legacy.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the first institution to inaugurate a cycle of exhibitions marking the centenary, which throughout 2026 will involve a network of international museums, including MDAM – 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 programme, with curatorial participation by Daniel Birnbaum, also includes a celebratory publication, Cahiers d’Art. A Century of Modernism, a series of conversations, and a programme of exhibitions at the magazine’s Paris headquarters.
Since its founding in 1926, Cahiers d’Art has published 97 issues and more than 50 volumes, including the seminal Picasso Catalogue Raisonné. Relaunched in 2012 by Swedish collector Staffan Ahrenberg, it continues to serve as a platform for dialogue between generations of artists, bringing together historic figures such as Calder and Picasso with contemporary voices including Arthur Jafa, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gabriel Orozco, and Rosemarie Trockel.