Zervos Museum - Romain-Rolland House - ROMSO Multilingual Master Wiki

Zervos Museum - Romain-Rolland House

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The Zervos Museum - Romain-Rolland House is a modern art museum (1925-1965) located in Vézelay.

Museum description
The establishment is housed in an old house where the writer Romain Rolland lived from 1938 and where he died in 1944. The museum, opened in 2006, houses the most beautiful pieces of the collection left in 1970 to the city of Vézelay by Christian Zervos. Critique et éditeur d'art, founder of the magazine Les Cahiers d'art published from 1926 to 1960, Christian Zervos met the greatest artists of the 19th century.

On the ground floor, small sculptures and an impressive cast-iron relief of Henri Laurens stand alongside a large Calder mobile, while in the Picasso room, works by Pablo Picasso and Julio González show the links between these two artists.

Upstairs there are sculptures by Giacometti, paintings by Ernst (La Sauterelle), Kandinsky, Miró, Jean Hélion, Victor Brauner and Willi Baumeister. For the 1950s, works by Jacques Villon, Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff, Joseph Sima and Étienne Hajdu.

Romain Rolland's room is preserved; furniture of the writer is presented.

In the attic are exhibited the Cahiers d'art, the reasoned catalogue of Picasso's work (undertaken by Zervos in 1932, at the request of the artist) and his publishing activity showing the great diversity of the talents of Zervos, and his curiosity with the collection of objects of the old Mediterranean world: idols of Cyclades, figures of Egypt, Cyprus and archaic Greece.

Fernand Léger's first mural, made in Vézelay, is presented on the ground floor in a space giving access to the terrace and the gardener's house, reserved for temporary presentations.

The museum has medieval basements and its terrace opens onto the Morvan.

An association, the Christian Zervos Foundation, has existed since 1983. Its president was Christian Limousin, a doctor of letters, a writer, a former professor of letters, an art critic who wrote an essay on Georges Bataille in 1974.