La Piscine in Roubaix opened on 10 October “Ni Dieu ni maître ! Arts et anarchie de Courbet à Banksy.” It runs to 24 January 2027. Then Besançon, 27 February–4 July, then Musée Ziem, Martigues, from 18 September. It is not a rally. It is a museum show, in the city’s art-deco former pool, with loans from Orsay and the Bibliothèque nationale. Curators: Adèle Taillefait, of La Piscine, and the Besançon keepers. Scientific adviser: Tancrède Ramonet. The catalogue, 39 euros, from Octopus.

The title is the old slogan. The museum found in store a banner of the Libre Pensée Roubaisienne, 1897, with the same words. Roubaix was a mill town, shared baths for bosses and workers, conceived by mayor Jean Lebas as hygiene, not revolt. Taillefait says art and politics sit in the place’s DNA. The preface is the worker’s condition, idealised or denounced. Then the gallery: Proudhon painted by Courbet, Louise Michel, Signac, Pissarro, Vallotton, Steinlen, Luce, Derain, Vlaminck, Van Dongen. The anarchist press, illustrated, under the counter.

The 1890s in France: attacks, about ten dead, the “scélérates” laws of 1893–94. The show puts them, it does not replay them. The large piece is Signac’s Le Démolisseur, 1897–99, from Orsay: a builder with a pickaxe into bourgeois buildings. Taillefait: he wants to strike at the established order. The Fauves, 1905, colour squeezed from the tube, also against salon art. Further on: the anarchist summer in Spain 1936, May 68, Ferré, punk, comics, street art, the web. Banksy is the end of the title, not the whole path.

Lille Métropole did the tour on 16 October. Le Monde spoke of a “fruitful” dialogue between art and anarchism. That dialogue is on the walls, not in the street. Ticket, in exhibition season: 11 euros full, 9 reduced. The museum is in Roubaix, not Paris. Paris appears as a theme — the Commune, 1905, 1968 — not as the opening’s city.

Anarchism, the press pack writes, is without dogma, different in each country and age, and it touched fashion, design, architecture, cinema, music. That is the curators’ thesis. It is not a verdict. It is a list of objects, from an 1897 banner to a contemporary graffiti, in a basin emptied of water.

Anyone who wants the idea can read it on the walls until January. Anyone who wants only the building has it: a pool turned museum, in a city that made cloth and conflict. The rest is a loan from Orsay and a slogan found in store.

Image: Jamain, La Piscine, Roubaix, 4 November 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows the museum in the former pool, not a work in the show.

Sources consulted: Ni Dieu ni maître ! Arts et anarchie de Courbet à Banksy — La Piscine Roubaix; Roubaix : Ni Dieu ni maître ! à La Piscine — Métropole européenne de Lille.