"Fruits of Passion" displays contemporary works that were acquired during the last decade by the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM), Centre Pompidou. The exhibition begins, though, with the final threads of modernism — the period shift away from 19th-century realism and the subsequent reductionism to artistic essentials that began with Edouard Manet and ended up in the late 1960s and early '70s with Minimalism and color-field painting.
The reference points for the latter movements are found in works such as Cy Twombly's "Untitled" (1969), with its the graffiti-like gray surface, and Robert Ryman's "Chapter" (1981) of subtly daubed white-on-white painting. The late 20th century's return to geometrical abstraction is seen in the horizontal stripes of Agnes Martin's "Untitled" (2002), and the vertical ones of Daniel Buren's "Photo-Souvenir" (1985-86), which, while supposedly calling attention to the internal architecture of the museum as a space for display, also appears as stark modernist wallpaper that carries with it the threat of high modernist abstraction being reduced to mere decoration, repetition and conformity.
Modernist painting was ostensibly exhausted by the early 1970s, its internal logic of progressive flatness having terminated in one-color canvases and clean-cut geometrical abstraction. Extremities had been established, with realism at one end and abstraction at the other, and anything thereafter having to sit between them. "Contemporary" became the designation for all that came after, though modernism could still inspire.