The story
From 1932 until his death in 1970, Christian Zervos worked on the catalogue of Picasso's work, volume after volume of photographs that scholars and dealers still consult. He was a Greek-born critic and publisher in Paris, and from 1926 to 1960 he ran Cahiers d'Art, the magazine where Picasso, Miró, Giacometti and Kandinsky were reproduced and argued over while their reputations were still being made. Many of those artists were his friends, and their works ended up in his own collection.
Zervos left that collection to Vézelay, the hilltop Burgundian town where he had a country house. It went on show in 2006 in the house of the writer Romain Rolland, who lived there from 1938 until his death in 1944. The museum covers roughly 1925 to 1965. On the ground floor a mobile by Alexander Calder hangs near sculptures by Henri Laurens and Julio González and works by Picasso. Upstairs come Giacometti, Max Ernst, Miró and Kandinsky, whom Zervos backed after the painter settled near Paris in 1933. His 1934 canvas Black Forms on White gave its title to an exhibition here in 2022. Rolland's bedroom has been kept as it was.
