December 14, 2008 – May 31, 2009
This is the second part of an exhibition entitled “Le Grand Tour” (a reference to the journeys to Italy undertaken by European intellectuals from the seventeenth century onwards) which opened in spring 2008 at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Medicis). ‘After Roma’ looks at the Collection Lambert from a new perspective.
While the first part featured the work of 40 artists and reflected Yvon Lambert’s private passion for Rome and its history, the second will continue to demonstrate that the supposed break between contemporary art and the art of the past is not quite so straightforward. Even more significantly, it shows how the collector’s artistic choices resonate with classical culture: Virgil, Cicero, Heliogabalus, Dante, Goethe, Stendhal on the one hand; Poussin, Caravaggio, Corot, Uccello, Delacroix and Bernini on the other, all influence the paths followed by the collection, from the earliest acquisitions in the 1960s to those still being made today.
Cy Twombly’s superb works on paper are references to mythology and are as full of love as any ‘Painter and his Model’ by Matisse or Picasso; Brice Marden’s collages are closely linked to the history of the art of the Quattrocento. And what of the busts of Dante by Andres Serrano, of Virgil by Miquel Barceló, and of a Roman emperor by Jean-Charles Blais, or references to the Three Graces and the tragedy of Niobe by Giulio Paolini.
The artists
Miquel Barceló, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean-Charles Blais, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente, François-Xavier Courrèges, Kendel Geers, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, François Halard, Roni Horn, Anselm Kiefer, Janis Kounellis, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Claude Lévêque, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Duane Michaels, Rei Naito, Giulio Paolini, Robert Rauschenberg, Kay Rosen, Charles Sandison, Julian Schnable, Andres Serrano, Cy Twombly, Francesco Vezzoli.