Arresting show in former Avignon prison

Lambert Collection installs works in disused gaol while its home is closed for expansion

By Victoria Stapley-Brown. Web only

Published online: 01 July 2014

The 18th-century Sainte-Anne prison is the venue for an exhibition of contemporary art. Photo: © François Halard

While the Lambert Collection’s Avignon premises are closed for renovation and expansion, the curatorial team has turned to the city’s disused 18th-century Sainte-Anne prison for its current exhibition. Taking its title from a 1975 essay by Pasolini, “The Disappearance of the Fireflies” (until 25 November) inhabits the “memory-steeped” spaces of the prison—unaltered for the show—to explore themes like time, love, solitude and, naturally, imprisonment. It features works from the Bologna-based contemporary art collection of Enea Righi, shown along with pieces from other private and public collections.

Some of the works, scattered throughout the cells, corridors and courtyards, have an obvious connection to prison, such as Andy Warhol’s 1971 Electric Chair print, or Xavier Veilhan’s statues of five police officers,Sans titre (Les Policiers)/Untitled (The Police), 1993. There are also work with more ambiguous subjects that speak powerfully within the spare space, like Barbara Kruger’s Who do you think you are?, 1997, while others take on a haunting new dimension inside the prison walls. The installation of Kiki Smith’s Girl with Globe, 1998, is particularly striking—the small body of a child frozen in motion, perched on a ledge in a high and narrow cell, a large mass hanging above her head.

The show also includes archival documents of the prison’s history up to its closing in 2003. One cell looks at the darkest moment of its past, when French Jews were detained here during the Second World War before being sent to death camps. 

Kiki Smith's Girl with Globe, 1998, installed in a cell of the Sainte-Anne prison. Photo: © François Halard

Bright future for Lambert Collection

Major step in making Avignon the “Davos of culture”

By Jean-Christophe Castelain. Museums, Issue 252, December 2013

Published online: 16 December 2013

The collector and dealer Yvon Lambert’s gift comes with conditions

The Collection Lambert will move to a temporary home next month at the start of an expansion project that will see the institution more than double in size. Converting the Hôtel de Montfaucon, next to the Hôtel de Caumont, the home of the Collection Lambert in Avignon since 2000, was a condition imposed by the art dealer and museum founder Yvon Lambert when he promised 560 works to the French State in 2011. The donation of works by artists including Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, has been described as France’s largest gift of art since the Picasso estate’s donation in 1974.

Work on the Hôtel de Montfaucon is due to be complete by summer 2015. (A clause in the donation contract stipulates that it must be finished by that date.) As well as more space, from 2,500 sq. m to 7,500 sq. m, the Collection Lambert will enter a new stage in its history. “We have a very particular public-private status,” says Hervé Digne, the president of the board of directors and Lambert’s chief negotiator with the French government. “The walls belong to the city, the collection to the State, the administration is a private association and funding comes from all sides,” he says. 

Collector and dealer

The two historic mansions belong to the city of Avignon and the €14m cost of the conversion is coming from the French government (€8m) and local authorities, including the Department of Vaucluse. The department will eventually be represented on the collection’s board. During building, works will be show in the former Sainte-Anne Prison, near the Papal Palace.

“The public subsidy of €1.2m is not going to be enough,” says Digne, who will seek other sources of funding to cover its annual operating cost. He says the Collection Lambert aims to emulate the “model museum based on the donation of a collector-dealer: the Beyeler Foundation”. He would also like to enrich the collection by prompting other donations and to establish a collaboration with Maja Hoffmann’s planned Luma Foundation in Arles, and the Château la Coste in Aix-en-Provence, and possibly also the University of Avignon or the Forum d’Avignon. The consultants Lord Cultural Resources will come up with recommendations for the development of a strategic plan. 

Negotiator-in-chief

The confidence that Yvon Lambert has demonstrated in Digne, especially in assigning him responsibility for negotiating the donation with the State, is not based simply on their shared Provencal origins. This 56-year-old graduate of the ENA (the École Nationale d’Administration, which has been described as the finishing school of the French Establishment) is well acquainted with the corridors of power, having worked for three years at the ministry for the economy and finances and having been, from 2005 to 2007, the media adviser to Dominique de Villepin, the then prime minister. As well as the president of the board of the Collection Lambert since 2011, he is the vice-president and founder of the Forum d’Avignon, which aims to make the city in the south of France the “Davos of culture”.