In Monaco, art history is a mixed bag

Depending on your point of view, you will find the exhibition "Colors!" organized at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, brilliant and particularly stimulating, even enjoyable in many respects, or on the contrary fundamentally scandalous. Conceived by Didier Ottinger for the Centre Pompidou, where he holds the position of general curator and deputy director of the Musée national d'art moderne (MNAM), it raises, in any case, a certain number of subjects, essentially museographic, which are daring and irritating enough to merit (and, one hopes, to provoke) debate. So, in that respect, it is important.

The curator acknowledges his debt to the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, which in 1988 showed "Color Alone. The Experience of Monochrome," and to the MoMA in New York, which in 2008 created "Color Chart," which demonstrated the abandonment by some artists of traditional colors in favor of industrial color charts. His approach is radical: to show a selection of around a hundred masterpieces (some of the pieces on display do not deserve this description, but are not the least interesting) from the collections of the MNAM-Centre de création industrielle, organizing them not by historical schools, not by major movements, nor even simply in chronological order, but by dominant color.

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