BMPT was a Paris-based late Modern art group formed in the mid-1960s by painters

Daniel Buren Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938, in Boulogne-Billancourt) is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He has won numerous awards including the Golden Lion for best pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1986), the International Award for ...

, Olivier Mosset, , and Niele Toroni, which, together with the

Supports/Surfaces Supports/Surfaces was an art movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s which came out of the south of France. It has significantly impacted contemporary art. The group combined a material examination of the formal elements of painting with a rig ...

movement, was one of the main representatives of

Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

in France in the 1960s.

Ideals of the Group

BMPT was founded to challenge established methods of art-making and to theorize new social and political functions for art and artists. This often included radical criticism of the traditional methods and assumptions of art.

History

In 1966–67, BMPT presented five exhibitions, called ''manifestations'', which questioned authorial prerogative and the institutionalizing role of the

Paris Salon The Salon (french: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: ''Salon de Paris'' ), beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art ...

s. More broadly, BMPT reflected critically on the spectacular, self-conscious nature of the new avant-garde in France. They tested established ideas of artistic authorship and originality by implying that they often made each other's works, while emphasizing the objecthood, rather than the originality, of their paintings. In one, the painters presented their iconic artworks as decor for a performance that never occurs, leaving the audience to look at it intently for a long period as they wait for the show. In another ''manifestation'', the artists painted their works in a public space, before removing them, replacing the finished canvases with a banner that read, in French, "Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni Do Not Exhibit."http://www.artcritical.com/2016/03/06/saul-ostrow-on-bmpt/ Seeking to create art that was simple and self-evident, they suppressed

subjectivity Subjectivity in a philosophical context has to do with a lack of objective reality. Subjectivity has been given various and ambiguous definitions by differing sources as it is not often the focal point of philosophical discourse.Bykova, Marina F ...

and expressiveness in favor of practical systems, such as the utilization of neutral, repetitive patterns and an apparent eschewal of aesthetic historical grounding: as in Daniel Buren's painting with woven black and white stripes or Niele Toroni's metric square brush strokes of oil on canvas. This stance reached its apotheosis in the ''zero degree paintings'' of Olivier Mosset—more than 200 identical oil paintings of a small black circle at the center of white canvas one meter square produced between 1966 and 1974.

Footnotes

References

{{Authority control French artist groups and collectives Modern artists French conceptual artists Postmodern artists