100 Years of Cahiers d’Art and LUMA Arles

In 2026, Cahiers d’Art celebrates its hundredth anniversary with an international program including exhibitions in major museums, a jubilee publication, a series of talks, and presentations. Together, these initiatives honor the publication’s enduring influence while reaffirming its founding ambition to create a forum where the past, present, and future of art enter into dialogue.

Since its founding, Cahiers d’Art has played a defining role in the intellectual history of modern and contemporary art. Its pages brought together artists, writers, and thinkers at pivotal moments of aesthetic transformation, shaping how modern art was discussed, interpreted, and historicized. Today, its archive stands not only as a record of this history but as a dynamic site through which the past can be revisited and reconsidered.

This perspective resonates with the approach of the LUMA Arles Living Archives Program, which treats archives not as static repositories but as active systems that influence what can be remembered, interpreted, and transmitted.

The Cahiers d’Art archive presentation at LUMA Arles reveals moments that made modern and contemporary art legible while also exposing artists, ideas, and geographies that remained marginal or overlooked. To revisit this archive is to confront the foundations of how art is seen, interpreted and valued. Reactivated, the archive becomes a space of renewed discovery, where forgotten images, experimental gestures, and overlooked contributions challenge established narratives and ensure that new futures for artistic knowledge can emerge.