IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME since an exhibition has provoked the kind of intense debates that greeted the Musée du Louvre’s “De l’Allemagne, 1800–1939: German Thought and Painting, from Friedrich to Beckmann.” All the ambition of the enterprise was contained in its title, which asserted the show’s place within a prestigious intellectual genealogy. In 1813, Madame de Staël published her book De l’Allemagne, a fervent defense of the German thought of her time. She saw in German idealism and Romanticism the very blooming of modernity, the advent of a liberal Christian Europe that would look to the

For Joëlle de La Casinière’s first exhibition in the French capital since the early 1980s, thirty-five “tablotins”—the nomadic artist’s term for her small-scale image-and-text-infused single-sheet collages that make up the pages of her “impossible book”—were accompanied by works for radio and television that she produced with the collective she co-founded in 1972, Montfaucon Research Center. According to the artist, each tablotin provides a “cacophony of information,” defying narrative. Over the past forty years, de La Casinière has produced more than four hundred of them, filling each