“The ever-shifting course of an extraordinary artist,” proclaims Jacques Charlier ironically on the cover of a magazine, a parody of Paris Match, which serves as his catalogue on the occasion of the “recap” (the artist doesn’t like the word retrospective) organized at the Casino-Luxembourg. The historical division of the exhibition—the ground floor covering primarily the years 1965–75, the first floor the period from 1975 to the present—corresponds to the generally admitted distinction between two Charliers: a first, “good” Charlier, the conceptualist, agitator, and caricaturist, and then the