Verve: The Ultimate Review of Art and Literature (1937-1960) Hardcover – October, 1988
From Publishers Weekly
An irresistible cornucopia of images, this oversized album reproduces excerpts from all 38 issues of what one of its backers called "the most beautiful magazine on earth." Verve was launched in 1937 by a Greek ex-law student in Paris, Teriade (whose real name was Efstratios Eleftheriades). Anthonioz, a director of the National Audiovisual Institute of Paris, examines Teriade's pre- Verve collaboration with art publisher Albert Skira, then follows the financially troubled magazine's history through its demise in 1960. Teriade reveled in theme issues: the human figure, war, the Orient, Chagall's illustrated Bible. In so doing, he forced modernism and classical equilibrium into dynamic collisions. Alongside art by Braque, Picasso, Bonnard, Matisse, Kandinsky, Miro, Giacometti, Leger and Masson, we find medieval manuscript illuminations, old Japanese photos, essays by Gide, Camus, Malraux, Henri Michaux, James Joyce, Pierre Reverdy. So much brilliance dazzles.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Dazzling to the eye, the quarterly journal Verve brilliantly documented Modern Art as a lively event in France from 1937 to 1960. Editor Teriade supported the likes of Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall by publishing their work in a journal as sophisticated as America's Esquire and interlarding the art with writings by Camus, Joyce, and the painters themselves. This retrospective volume re-illuminates this bright spot in the history of art publishing, offering hundreds of reproductions of the visual works and generous excerpts from the essays, along with well-conceived commentary by the author, who prepared the catalog accompanying the 1973 Grand Palais exhibit, "Hommage a Teriade." Brilliant color reproduction but badly weak binding. Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Verve (1937–60)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Verve was a modernist Parisian art magazine published by Teriade between 1937 and 1960.[1] The magazine was first published in December 1937.[1][2] The headquarters of the magazine was in Paris.[2] It published 38 issues in 10 volumes including lithographs by the most prominent artists of the Parisian art scene of the first half of the 20th century. In addition, the early contributors includedJames Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.[1] The magazine folded in 1960.[2]
References[edit]
Bibliography[edit]
- Hans Bolliger, Tériade Éditeur-Revue Verve. Klipstein & Kornfeld, 1960
- Hommage à Tériade, Grand Palais, 16 mai - 3 septembre 1973, textes de Michel Anthonioz, Paris, Grand Palais, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 1973, 68 p. : ill. ; . ISBN 0900946245
- Chara Kolokytha, 'The Art Press and Visual Culture in Paris during the Great Depression: Cahiers d'Art, Minotaure and Verve' in:Visual Resources, An International Journal of Documentation 3, vol. 29 September 2013, pp. 184–215.
- Chara Kolokytha, ‘L’amour de l’art en France est toujours aussi fécond : La Maison d’Editions Verve et la reproduction de manuscrits à peintures conservés dans les Bibliothèques de France pendant les années noires (1939-1944)’, French Cultural Studies 2, vol.25, May 2014, pp. 121–139.
External links[edit]
Tériade Museum
Teriade Project
Tériade was a Greek art critic and editor born on the island of Lesbos. In 1916, he moved to Paris to study Law. He is widely known for his collaboration with the influential Parisian art magazine Cahiers d'Art published by Christian Zervos (1926-1960). Subsequently he founded, in collaboration with the Swiss publisher Albert Skira, the luxurious magazine Minotaure (1933-1939), a key surrealist publication to which he contributed regularily until 1936. About a year later, in 1937, he published Verve magazine (1937-1960) with the finance of David Smart and the American corporation Esquire-Coronet Inc. His late activity includes the publication of 27 livres de peintres illustrated by the most prominent artists of the Parisian art scene of the first half of the 20th century, notably Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Chagall, Giacometti, Bonnard, Miro, Klee and others.
The Tériade Project aims to cast light on his activity as an art critic and editor by presenting the work that he produced over the course of his career.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(Henri_Matisse)
Diagnosed with abdominal cancer in 1941, Matisse underwent surgery that left him chair and bed bound. Limited in mobility, he could no longer paint or sculpt. Instead, he cut forms from colored paper that he arranged as collages, and decoupage which became known as the “cut-outs.”[2]
That same year, at the age of 74, Matisse began Jazz. His assistants helped prepare the collages for printing, using a stencil process known as pochoir in French. He worked on the series for two years, utilizing this new method that linked drawing and color—two important elements in Matisse’s work.[3]
The designs were initially intended as covers for Verve, a French art magazine published by Tériade. In 1947, Tériade issued the compositions in an artist’s portfolio. The book included 20 color prints, each about 16 by 26 inches, as well as Matisse’s handwritten notes expressing his thoughts throughout the process. Tériade gave it the title Jazz, which Matisse liked because it suggested a connection between art and musical improvisation. Despite the low number of books printed, Jazz was well received.[4][5]
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ART VIEW
ART VIEW; Flair for the Grand Gesture: Celebrating a Magazine
By John Russell
Published: October 9, 1988
In every decade there is a review of literature and art that could have come out at no other time, so neatly is it buttoned into the spirit of the age. This was true before 1900 of The Yellow Book in London and of La Revue Blanche in Paris. It was true of the Blue Rider Almanac in Munich in 1911 and of Blast in London in 1914-15. As run by Scofield Thayer in this country in the 1920's, The Dial had just that character.
Even a blind man would know those publications one from another - by format, by touch and by smell. The same was true of Art & Literature, edited in the 1960's by John Ashbery, Anne Dunn, Rodrigo Moynihan and Sonia Orwell. In its chunky little pages - so plump, so white - many an invaluable text still deserves to be sought out. Every generation has its own mode of expression in these matters, and a visit to the shop called Printed Matter Inc., 7 Lispenard Street, will show that the urge to show and tell in new ways is very far from being extinct.
Fifty years ago in Paris, the magazine to look for was Verve, which first came out in December 1937 and kept going in one form or another till 1960. That first cover (by Henri Matisse) sang out from the other side of the street in a way that made us run across the road to look at it more closely. And when we turned its pages, Verve had a bosomy, full-fleshed, slightly slithery quality that this former subscriber would know in his sleep.
The 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Verve is being celebrated with no more than minimal delay in a book called ''Verve: The Ultimate Review of Art and Literature.'' Edited by Michel Anthonioz, it is published in an English version by Harry N. Abrams at $95. By using the original first cover, the book gets away to a start that even Carl Lewis would rate as brisk. Thereafter, it epitomizes the noble format, the luxurious presentation and the flair for the grand gesture that marked the magazine in its great days. As a book to look at and look through, this one is in a very high class.
With covers by Matisse, Braque, Bonnard and Rouault and special issues devoted to Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Bonnard and Chagall, Verve hewed to what today seems a consistently safe line. But we have to remember that 50 years ago those painters had by no means the mandatory importance that they came to have later. Nor were they pushed into print by people who couldn't wait to make a fortune out of them. Auctions of contemporary art were virtually unknown. Prices had been stable for a long time, and the major artist was still a private person, unharried by the media.
For these reasons, Verve was really bringing the news when, in its first issue, it printed Dora Maar's historic photograph of ''Guernica'' in Picasso's studio. It also brought the news when it persuaded the great old men of the School of Paris to let it reproduce not just one or two new canvases but a whole corpus of recent work. After World War II, and before the exhibition industry had got fully under way, virtually the only way to keep in close touch with what was being done by Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Chagall was to grab the relevant issue of Verve. What may look today like automatic choices had at that time a revelatory quality.
But Verve was not simply a magazine that put the best possible face on the senior masters of the School of Paris. It was powered in its earlier years by a wild range of editorial fancy that came as a continual suprise to most readers. There was no knowing what would come next - a 16th-century doll from the Himalayas, a bust of Louis XIV by Houdon, an essay on ''Fire'' by John dos Passos, an essay on the sculptor Henri Laurens by his colleague Alberto Giacometti, a detail from Giotto's ''St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata'' in gold and color photogravure, a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe by the American photographer Matthew Brady, an illustrated account by Fernand Leger of the Paris Exposition of 1937, a still life by the 17th-century Spanish painter Sanchez Cotan or an early extract from Andre Malraux's ''Psychology of Art.''
James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway were early contributors, and the still young Jean-Paul Sartre made his debut as a writer on food (Neapolitan cuisine, to be precise). Matisse and Bonnard spoke off the cuff to Verve about whatever was on their minds; John Rewald allowed Verve to publish some letters from the young Cezanne to Emile Zola. Meyer Schapiro introduced Chagall's illustrations to the Bible, and in the 1950's the English novelist and reporter Rebecca West was invited - not with the happiest of results - to write on both Braque and Picasso.
Among the traits that marked Verve in its beginning as a child of the late 1930's were an interest in French 18th-century visionary architecture, a delight in Oriental myth and legend and a taste for Indian miniatures (no matter how rough). It was on to the ''Mahabharata'' many years before Peter Brook produced his monumental staging of it. It was on to cartoons and calligraphers that dated from not long after the Middle Ages, and it was on to the memorable photographs of British housemaids that Bill Brandt took in London around the time of the coronation of King George VI. Altogether, it was an astonishing mixture, the like of which no one had ever seen. Fundamentally it was a hedonistic publication. Marvels, not monsters, were its first field of interest. But the late 1930's had more than its fair share of monsters in life, and the very first number of Verve had an illustrated feature called ''In the Blood of the Martyrs'' that reminded the reader, however obliquely, that in more than one European country martyrs were shedding their blood at that very moment.
When the worst scenario turned out to be true, and the German armies overran France in 1940, Verve did not refer to it directly. The cover of the issue dated ''Summer 1940'' was once again by Henri Matisse, and once again Matisse made color and form dance for him as they danced for no one else. (Twenty-six print runs were needed to get the colors right, by the way.) But what distinguished that cover was the sumptuous funerary black of the ground on which those colored shapes danced. Unique in Matisse's output was the predominance of that grief-laden and premonitory black.
A one-man publication in its every detail, Verve owed everything to its publisher and editor, E. Teriade. Once again, Teriade was not a star editor in our contemporary mold. But even in a Paris that prized individuality and knew how to cherish it, Teriade stood out. Greek by birth, and the nursling of a cosmopolitan, many-tongued circle in Mytilene, Teriade was born Efstratios Eleftheriades in 1897. From that thicket of consonants, and from his native city, he escaped as soon as he could and arrived in Paris in 1915 as E. Teriade.
It was not until he was 40 that he got to be his own master, in professional terms. But he could hardly have founded Verve with better credentials - assistant to his fellow-countryman Christian Zervos on ''Cahiers d'Art'' (1926-31), art critic for the newspaper L'Intransigeant (1928-33), artistic director of Minotaure (1933-36) and co-founder (1935-36) of a short-lived periodical called La Bete Noire, whose function was to provoke, to annoy and to ridicule the stuffed shirt in his every form.
Never a natural subordinate, Teriade tailored Verve to suit his own image, which was that of a portly, benign, amused and amusing man who had been in and out of the Parisian art world for many years and is not known to have made an enemy. Unlike some of his former associates (on Minotaure, especially), he never showed his sharp teeth (and was widely believed not to have any). What he wanted was for the artists he liked best to realize themselves completely in Verve. He also wanted Verve to be as rewarding to read as to look at.
In later life he appeared to have no regrets and never to have suffered disappointment (not least, in his conspicuously happy private life). He never boasted. If asked about this or that among his many achievements, he would feign to remember nothing. ''You know so much more about all that than I do,'' he would say, while sitting the long afternoon through in a luxuriant garden that overlooked the sea at St. Jean-Cap Ferrat.
To condense Teriade's activity on ''Verve'' into a single volume is not easy. Teriade's sense of rhythm, as an editor, was both perfect and personal. ''Highlights from Verve'' may sound very well, and in many ways it looks rather good, but in reality it falsifies the character of the magazine. Verve was not a picture book, and it was conceived as a work of art in its own right, not as a treasure house of reproductions.
Many of the texts that appeared in the magazine are merely ''excerpted'' in the book. Here and there a wonderful phrase comes to the surface, as when the poet Pierre Reverdy says of Matisse that ''the final syllable of his name hisses slightly, like a soaring rocket, the flash of light above the soil in a dazzling flower bed.'' The Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux has some apt and memorable things to say about the ''inconceivable delirium'' that affects every observant visitor to India. But the book as a whole has a jerky, restless, unanchored structure that is the very reverse of what we find in Verve the magazine. The reproductions of Matisse's late cut-paper works have a high shine that is totally false to the matte character of the originals. To call Verve the ''ultimate review'' could be said to be an exaggeration, given that so many of the big-name writers were running on empty when they sent in their contributions. But what images Verve had, all the same!
Photos of two Verve illustrations: ''Death of Bali,'' an 18th-century lithograph (based on a 13th-century manuscript) that accompanied an essay on idolatry by Henri Michaux, and Matisse's ''De la Coleur,'' the cover for the November 1945 issue
*****
Remembering “Verve,” the Journal That Helped Define Modernism
Few magazines managed to embody the creative aesthetic of their time as Verve magazine did in the first half of the 20th century. And although the Paris-based journal last received some attention in 1988, when Verve: The Ultimate Review of Art and Literature was published, it has mostly faded into obscurity; that retrospective, edited by Michel Anthonioz, has since gone out of print. It’s easy to consider the role of artists in magazines as consigned to, say, Shepard Fairey schlock on the cover of Time or a Koonsy T cover, but for a significant chunk of the 20th century, magazines played a significant role in cultivating the public audience for the artists of their day.
This isn’t to say that excellent art is impossible to come by in the pages of today’s journals, just that its role in high-visibility magazines, or its concentration in a single publication, has been diminished — and, in fairness, so has the significance of magazines as vessels for culture. Writing in 1988, John Russell of the New York Times remembered it thus:
Fifty years ago in Paris, the magazine to look for was Verve, which first came out in December 1937 and kept going in one form or another till 1960. That first cover (by Henri Matisse) sang out from the other side of the street in a way that made us run across the road to look at it more closely. And when we turned its pages, Verve had a bosomy, full-fleshed, slightly slithery quality that this former subscriber would know in his sleep.
Yes, it was a publication for the ages. Verve featured art for art’s sake, not as an accessory to an editorial vision, a narrowly conceived commission, or a luxe signifier. Here are some standouts from the nearly fifty years of Verve, all culled from eBay because, well, there is no better repository of Verve lithographs, as far as we can tell (get on that, digital archivists).
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Miró (1938) (via eBay)
Another Miró (1938) (via eBay)
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