Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Lambert collection is a collection of contemporary works of art brought together by the Parisian galleryist Yvon Lambert since the 1960s. Located in the Hôtel de Caumont in Avignon, it was opened to the public in July 2000 with 450 works exhibited for a period of twenty years. This museum is now one of the most important in France for contemporary art, thanks to major artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly or Nan Goldin, often absent from national collections.

The hotel of Caumont, located at 5 rue Violette, was built from 1720 by Jean-Baptiste Franque and completed by his son François after 1751. Acquired in 1878 by the General Council of Vaucluse, it successively housed a normal school of teachers and the national gendarmerie. Despite transformations, it remains an architectural masterpiece of the Franque, before becoming the frame of the Lambert collection.

In 2009, a project to extend to the nearby Montfaucon hotel was envisaged to exhibit works in reserve. After tensions with the municipality of Avignon in 2010, the project ended in 2011 with the donation of 450 works to the French state, provided that the museum space was enlarged. The works, entrusted to the architects Berger & Berger and Christiane Schmuckle-Mollard, allow the inauguration of the new building in July 2015.

The Lambert collection has organized major exhibitions, such as those dedicated to Cy Twombly in 2007 or Andres Serrano in 2011, the latter having provoked controversy after the vandalism of the work Piss Christ by Catholic activists. In 2007, another controversy broke out when an artist laid a kiss on a Twombly canvas, leading to a trial and an exhibition in response entitled I'm not kissing.

Today, the Lambert collection, with its 1,200 works, remains a must for contemporary art in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. It illustrates the complicity between Yvon Lambert and the artists he supported, while offering an exceptional historical setting with the hotel of Caumont, jewel of the Avignon heritage.

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