La thèse s’intéresse aux expositions de design graphique, à la fois en tant qu’événements constitutifs de l’histoire de la discipline et en tant qu’espaces (scénographiques et discursifs) où se manifestent ses liens plus ou moins assumés avec la création artistique. Elle s’appuie sur un corpus de quatre cents expositions, organisées entre 1895 et 1995, au sein de trois institutions muséales : le Stedelijk Museum d’Amsterdam, fondé en 1895, le Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) de New York, créé en 1929 et le Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle (Mnam/Cci), né en 1993 de la fusion de deux départements du Centre Pompidou. L’étude des archives de ces manifestations met au jour ce que furent les choix de programmation des musées (quels objets, quelles époques, quels graphistes mettent-elles en avant ?) ; mais aussi les différents statuts qui sont conférés aux objets imprimés, par la scénographie ou par les discours qui les environnent. La thèse révèle, notamment, la préférence des musées d’art moderne pour l’affiche, pour le graphisme « d’utilité publique » et pour le travail des « graphistes-auteurs ». À ce graphisme « de musée » sont appliqués des cadres interprétatifs qui le rapproche de la création artistique : assimilation du graphiste à un artiste, omission des circonstances de la commande, description des styles, recherche des influences… Les expositions de « communications visuelles » organisées par le CCI offrent un singulier contrepoint à ce modèle, dans la mesure où elles consacrent moins les « œuvres » du graphisme qu’elles ne s’interrogent sur leur contexte social de production et d’utilisation. / This dissertation looks at graphic design exhibitions both as events that are part of the history of the discipline and as scenographic and academic forums for expressing, more or less consciously, its links with artistic creativity. It is based on the analysis of four hundred exhibitions, held between 1895 and 1995 at three modern art museums : the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, founded in 1895, the MoMA in New York, inaugurated in 1929 and the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle (Mnam/Cci), created in 1993 after the fusion of two separate departments of the Centre Pompidou. The archives of these exhibitions highlights both the choices of programming (what objects, eras and graphic designers do they ?), and the various status confered to printed objects by scenography and surrounding texts and discourses. The dissertation reveals the preference of modern art museums for posters, for graphic design for the public domain, and for the work of ‘graphic designers-cum-authors’. This specific graphic design elected by museums is envisionned according to interpretative frames that likens it to artistic creation through the rapprochement between graphic designers and artists, the omission of circumstances pertaining to commissions, descriptions of styles, search for influences, etc. The ‘visual communication’ exhibitions organised by the CCI provide a striking contrast to this model in so far as they concentrated less on the actual ‘works’ of graphic design than on the social context of their production and use.

The main focus of this thesis is to analyze three architecture models, displayed at three major art museums. Using Roland Barthes concept of the mythology as a meta layer to the language of the exhibition, the study of the models is also a way of studying their visual and institutional environment – thus inquiring into how the display of architectural models, in the context of the modern art exhibition, activates and displaces the discourse of the exhibition. Taking into consideration the different kinds of objects on display (and those that are not), as well as their relation to the artist and the artworks, the discussion is largely affected by the notion of the representation, as well as the ideology of the modernistic narrative. Upon analyzing these aspects, it becomes clear that the models all convey narratives of their own, that in turn are activated and transformed in their dialogue with the rest of the exhibition. The models become part of the larger narrative that visualizes different ideas about modernism and modernity. But the analysis of the interplay between model and display also show how underlying narratives of nationalism and the relationship between art and architecture are a dominant pretext in the exhibitions.

This dissertation traces the history of a diagram. The diagram shows four circles of gradually diminishing sizes, lodged one inside the other, like the layers of a circular or spherical body. For a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists centered around Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the diagram represented a new type of museum: a museological Information Center modeled on the computer, operating as a site for radically democratic social experiments. The four layers stood for different functions: information capture, processing, interface, storage; or, put differently: social spaces and media resources, workshop floors, exhibition facilities, collection. Through close readings of a series of exhibitions and institutional projects in Sweden, the US, and France, this dissertation follows the development of this diagram: its prehistory and formulation, its different implementations, and its direct and indirect effects. It studies Moderna Museet’s original, unrealized project for Kulturhuset in Stockholm, according to which the museum should project its dynamic energies across the city center, serving as a “catalyst for the active forces in society”. It discusses the museum’s confrontation with digital technologies in the late 1960s, through pioneering museological organizations such as the Museum Computer Network in New York. It analyzes the exhibition formats developed in correspondence with the notion of the museum as a “vast experimental laboratory” and a “broadcasting station”: the exhibition as critical information pattern, as tele-commune. And it studies the diagram’s afterlife as one of the models informing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, during that project’s early phases. The Exhibitionary Complex reads these endeavors and visions as attempts to devise a critical understanding of the exhibitionary apparatus in relation to new information environments and media systems. It sheds light on a largely forgotten aspect of the exhibitionary, museological, and cultural history of the late twentieth century, in Sweden and internationally. But it also seeks to establish new models for grasping the exhibition’s singularity and potentials as a cultural and media technological form, in relation to the emergence of new information networks, as they exert increasing control over social, cultural, and political existence. / Space, Power, Ideology

1- En primer lugar se ha elaborado sucintamente la perspectiva histórica del museo de arte moderno, es decir desde que nace la ayuda institucional al artista con la celebración de los Salones y la creación del primer museo de artistas vivos del mundo en el palacio Luxemburgo de París. 2- Posteriormente, nos centramos en el nacimiento del Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York, Moma, creado en 1929 con apenas 13 obras, el cual se convirtió en referencia obligada desde el punto de vista museológico para la creación de los futuros museos de arte moderno en el mundo durante casi seis décadas. Termina el trabajo con el modelo creado en los años setenta, la factoría beaubourg, el museo de la época postindustrial, y el museo postmoderno de los ochenta y sus repercusiones en la nueva museología. Si el Moma de Nueva York, creó una colección enciclopédica del arte del siglo XX, el Musée National d'art Moderne, consiguió implicar a la ciudadanía en el arte moderno. Tan importantes eran las colecciones que se mostraban en su interior como el flujo de visitantes y curiosos que se agolpan en el exterior. Finaliza con una aproximación a los Fonds Regionaux d'art Contemporain y el nacimiento de los Centros de Cultura Contemporánea. / 1- In the first place, a historic perspective of the modern art museum has been concisely elaborated, that is to say, since institutional grants to artists are created with the celebration of the Halls and the creation of the first museum of living world artists at the Luxembourg Palace of Paris.2- Subsequently, we focus on the birth of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MOMA, created in 1929 with only thirteen pieces of art. This museum became an obliged reference from a museological point of view for the creation of the future modern art museums all over the world for almost six decades. The work concludes with the model created in the 1960s, the factory "Beaubourg", the postindustrial period museum, and the postmodern museum of the 1880s and its repercussions in the new museology. If the MOMA in New York created an encyclopedic collection of the art of the 20th Century, the "Musée National d'art Moderne", achieved to involve the citizens with the modern art. The collections showed inside were as important as the flow of visitors and curious that crowded outside. It ends with approximation to the "Fonds Regionaux d'art Contemporain" and the birth of the Centres of Contemporary Culture.