Maurice Fréchuret's 'Les années 70, l'art en cause' at CAPC Bordeaux

Maurice Fréchuret, newly appointed director of CAPC Musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux, organized a major exhibition titled 'Les années 70, l'art en cause' from October 18, 2002 to January 19, 2003. The show featured 300 works by 140 artists across the entire museum space, accompanied by a substantial catalogue, colloquia, concerts, and films. Fréchuret classified works into five thematic categories—body, space, surface, text, and material—reorganizing them by formal criteria rather than by movements or groups like BMPT, Mono-HA, Supports/Surfaces, Body Art, Arte Povera, or Conceptual Art. This approach was criticized for imposing a formalist reading on works that often challenged form itself. The exhibition aimed to reassess the legacy of 1968–1977, proposing a measured historical perspective that avoids both outright rejection and uncritical celebration. It highlighted two avant-garde tendencies: art as an experience of limits (spatial deployment, physical engagement, objective withdrawal) and art as language (structural analysis of artistic activity). Fréchuret argued that the linguistic conception was later challenged by postmodernism, while the boundary-crossing impulse gave way to citation and high-low play, and the poverty of means was replaced by professionalization and technical perfection in the 1980s.