The Art Press and Visual Culture in Paris during the Great Depression: Cahiers d'art, Minotaure, and Verve

Abstract

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.