A Story of Art: Yvon Lambert, A Collection, A Donation, A Venue

A Story of Art: Yvon Lambert, A Collection, A Donation, A Venue paints a portrait of the art of the last sixty years through the tastes and passions of Yvon Lambert who, since the opening of his first Paris gallery in 1965, has never ceased to support the most audacious creation of his time. Yvon Lambert's Donation is made up of works acquired either on the occasion of exhibitions organised in Yvon Lambert's various spaces between Paris and New York, or directly from artists at the very moment of their creations. It should above all be seen as the collection of a man who is attuned to the upheavals of art history. From the 1960s onwards, Yvon Lambert was a pioneer in France when he championed minimal and conceptual art, then, in the 1980s, the new figurative and expressive painting, and finally photography, the moving image and installation art. The donation he made to the French state in 2012, preserved by the Cnap, stands out for its incredible wealth, with groups of works by artists who are often little represented in French public collections: 35 works by Nan Goldin, 16 by Cy Twombly, 14 by Sol LeWitt, 7 by Robert Ryman, 6 by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 6 by Miquel Barceló, and so on.

The book, co-published by the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), the Collection Lambert and Éditions Dilecta, presents a selection of more than 250 emblematic works from among the nearly 600 in the Yvon Lambert Donation. Each of the art historians and critics invited to take a closer look at this exceptional collection anchors the donation in the major artistic movements of the last sixty years, linking it to the aesthetic and social upheavals that have shaped the history of contemporary art. The various chapters of the publication are structured as follows: the new avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of a new figurative painting in the 1980s, the attachment to the artists of the Pictures Generation and the revival of photography, and the question of the real as explored by multidisciplinary practices at the crossroads of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Co-published by Centre national des arts plastiques, Collection Lambert and Éditions Dilecta

Edited by Jean-Baptiste Delorme and Stéphane Ibars

Texts by François Aubart, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jean-Baptiste Delorme, Donatien Grau, Béatrice Gross, Stéphane Ibars, Pascale Le Thorel, Aurélien Lemonier, Alfred Pacquement; Prefaces by Béatrice Salmon and Alain Lombard

Graphic design: Dune Lunel
Published in French and English
22 x 28 cm
448 pages / 350 images
Published in March 2023
ISBN : 978-2-37372-159-1

© Collection Lambert
© CNAP