European Culture as a Bulwark Against Barbarism: A Call for Cultural Cartography

An editorial by Bruno Racine on Artribune argues that European culture must be understood as a dynamic network rather than a melting pot, drawing on a recent Centre Pompidou Metz exhibition on Yves Klein that highlighted Milan's role in the European avant-garde. The exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, emphasized Klein's connections to Japan and Milan, where the Galleria Apollinaire, under Pierre Restany, became the birthplace of the Nouveaux Réalistes. Racine recalls the legendary exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris in the late 1970s—Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow, Paris-New York—curated by Pontus Hultén, which decentered Paris and revealed a broader artistic geography. He suggests that European museums should now map mid-20th-century cultural networks to counter defensive nationalism, noting that the 2020 Venice Biennale of Architecture, canceled due to the pandemic, instead exhibited its own archives, revealing an expanding global art scene beyond the West. The article appears in Grandi Mostre #23.