Hunter College Exhibition Revisits BMPT's 1960s Radical Paintings and Manifesto

Hunter College's 205 Hudson Gallery in New York presented "Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni" from February 27 to April 10, 2016. The exhibition featured four artworks by the short-lived French group BMPT, active in 1967, alongside documentation of their public interventions. Daniel Buren contributed vertical green and white stripes on raw canvas, Olivier Mosset a black circle with a white dot, Michel Parmentier horizontal gray and white bands, and Niele Toroni uniform brush marks at 30-centimeter intervals on oilcloth. Each artist adhered to a singular motif, creating stylistically anonymous works that challenged authorship. BMPT staged four public events in 1967, using paintings as props to critique art commodification under capitalism. Their manifesto declared "We are not painters." The group dissolved in December 1967 after Parmentier accused others of deviating from strict repetition. A companion exhibition, "Critical Gestures & Contested Spaces: Art in France in the 1960s," provided context for BMPT's emergence from Paris's neo-Dadaist and Modernist scenes. The Hunter College show, while complete in representing each member, was criticized for transforming BMPT's radical works into aesthetic objects, stripping them of their original political critique.