1998-2017, long-term loans, donations and acquisitions for the museum

December 3, 2017 – May 20, 2018

Since the opening of the Collection Lambert almost twenty years ago, artists have followed in each other’s footsteps and paid tribute to the papal city: Cy Twombly and his famous “Temps retrouvé” Pure Consciousness (Avignon) by On Kawara created in Jean-Henri Fabre’s little primary school; Francesco Vezzoli’s reinterpretation of the famous photo of Agnès Varda with Jean Vilar and Maria Casarès; Claude Lévêque, Yan Pei-Ming, Miquel Barceló and Christian Marclay, who ironically brings some variety by reworking a disc cover of Mireille Mathieu and Joey Kötting which takes the famous nursery rhyme Sur le pont d’Avignon (On the bridge of Avignon) with a class of children.

In 1998, when Hôtel de Caumont was converted into a museum after some time as a humanities university, the schoolchildren’s blackboards escaped destruction. Lawrence Weiner, Bertrand Lavier and Niele Toroni revisited them with an artistic licence. For the exhibition “J’♥ Avignon”, new paintings of schoolchildren enrich this unusual collection, particularly with Djamel Tatah and Yan Pei-Ming.

Finally, the museum’s attic has been given a lease of life, recalling the cult exhibition from 2015 in the prison of Avignon, “La Disparition des Lucioles” (“The Disappearance of Fireflies”). A new piece by Christian Boltanski will bring to memory the dark moments of our history, with, in tandem, the much-requested projection of the video work where the documentarian and author Marceline Loriden-Ivens returns to prison after 70 years: she was consigned there with her father during the war – a father she would not see again as she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was here that she became a bench-mate with Simone Veil. They remained friends until her death in July 2017.

The artists

Adel Abdessemed, Pierre-Marie Agin, Miquel Barceló, Christian Boltanski, Cartier Bresson, Auguste Chabaud, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Vincent Fosse, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, François Halard, Roni Horn, On Kawara, Idris Khan, Joey Kötting, Jannis Kounellis, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Hamid Maghraoui, Christian Marclay, Pascal Martinez, Jonas Mekas, Vik Muniz, Yan Pei-Ming, Adam Pendleton, Man Ray, Andres Serrano, Kiki Smith, Niele Toroni, Cy Twombly, Francesco Vezzoli, Lawrence Weiner.