Art: Paris 1937-1957: An Elegy

The Pompidou Center documents a drama of cultural history

"Paris-Paris," which fills a floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris until Nov. 2, is—so to speak—the fourth panel of a triptych. When "le Pompidoglio" opened in 1977, it started a series of exhibitions meant to show, in detail, how the capital cities of modernism had reacted to one another in our century. These were "Paris-New York" (1977), "Paris-Berlin" (1978) and "Paris-Moscow" (1979). The emphasis would be on painting and sculpture, but other wells of memory were also tapped—period rooms, reconstructions, photos, slide displays...