“Echo Delay Reverb, Art Américain, Pensées Francophones,” at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo” contemporary art museum, revisits various ways in which successive generations of artists in the United States have been influenced by social, political and theoretic concepts shaped in France (to February 15, 2026).
The exhibition pays special attention to a group of Postmodern French intellectuals collectively known as “French Theory.” The term emerged in American universities and research work in the 1970’s, from a school of thought born in the 1960’s in France and owes much, in terms of dissemination, to the journal “Semiotext(e) founded by Sylvere Lotringer in 1974 at Columbia University. It contributed to the emergence of cultural. postcolonial and gender studies.
The exhibition illustrates how art in the United States catalysed the revolutionary energy of such thinkers as Roland Barthes, MIchel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet. Sometimes before their recognition in France, these authors’ ideas were translated and provided tools for a critique of social and political institutions. Curated by Naomi Beckwith, the exhibition occupies the totality of the vast Palais Tokyo exhibition space with work by nearly sixty artists from the 1960’s to the present day.
“Echo Delay Reverb, Art Américain, Pensées Francophones” at Palais de Tokyo to February 15, 2026.