In 1933, during the CIAM 4 event Zervos traversed the Aegean, in the company of Léger, Le Corbusier, Giedion, among others. Presenting the results of his expedition (artifacts from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the archaic and classical Greece), Zervos appealed to a “prehistoric primitivism” which hinged on the replacement of the Oceanian and African arts. However, instead of building his narrative on prehistoric art in terms of rupture with Antiquity, as was the case with “primitive art”, Zervos chose the teleological narrative of the historical continuum. For Zervos the “fragmentary forms” of the Neolithic and the “better articulated” ones of the Bronze Age were rooted in the distant past of Greek art and of Western tradition as a whole. This presentation will discuss the search for continuity in Zervos’ writings from 1926 to 1969.

Respondent: Effie Rentzou, French and Italian

All Princeton University staff, faculty and researchers are invited.