Biography

Jean Carzou was an Armenian-French painter and illustrator, recognized for his illustrations that graced the pages of the novels by Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus. Born in Syria in 1907 as Karnik Zouloumian, into an Armenian family, the artist was first educated in Cairo, Egypt, before moving to Paris, where he studied art and architecture. Carzou, like his contemporaries, Dali, and Picasso, was part of a generation that witnessed many wars. Haunted to the point of obsession by the horrors he had witnessed, Carzou's style went through a period where the artist seemed to be desperate to remind the world of the horrors of the past. Today, his works have permanent homes in America, Great Britain, Egypt, Japan and his adopted homeland, France.