Crossing of time and time found again in Avignon, First Part by Audrey Courtin ; Version en Anglais de l'article "Traversée du temps et temps retrouvé en Avignon, première partie" par Audrey Courtin

Crossing of time and time found again in Avignon

1st part

Article and translation by Audrey Courtin
Second nevel Master Art History


(Article "Traversée du temps et temps retrouvé en Avignon, première partie", traduit par son auteur)

The Popes' Palace and the Bridge Bénezet are not the only tourist assets of the papal city, Museums are many there. Now, there are two very different exhibitions very different to see. Until November 20^th, the Foundation Lambert produces “The time found again. Cy Twombly and guests”. Yearly, the Foundation Yvon Lambert (collector and gallery owner since the 60s) organizes, from his collection of contemporary art and lendings, three exhibitions.

Photo L'Internaute Magazine /Tiphaine Bodin

Cy Twombly, after Blooming, in 2007, wished to collaborate again with The Foundation Lambert. He wanted to be associated as commissioner of exhibition and to be the chief guest as photographer. (He had never exposed his photos in France). Symbolically, the chosen works show a self-portrait of Cy Twombly. The American artist [born Edwin Parker Twombly on April 25^th, 1928 in Virginia, and died on July 5^th, 2011 in Rome, less than a month after the inauguration of the exhibition] chose to be called Cy (diminutive of Cyrius), nickname of his father, famous player of baseball in his days. It was a first symbolic act for a man who likes to pay tribute to people who he loves and admires, such the twenty artists in this exposition. Twombly chose some works of great artists of the art history of the XIXth and of the XXth century who was, as him, painters and photographers (Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard) or sculptors and photographers (Rodin, Brancusi). To join an artistic filiation. And he chose some works of important photographers and artists who create performance-based videos he likes (Lartigue, Diane Arbus, Ground Witt, Ed Rusha, Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon, Christian Boltanski).

The exhibition produces comings and goings between the end of the XIXth century to these days, between timeless Europe and America of the 1960s to nowadays, between the art history and the intimacy of an artist. In the first one, we may see the end of the XIXth and the Modernity in Europe. In the floor, in the 1st room, some photographs representing Auguste Rodin's sculptures in his studio are hung up. He retouched, annotated, repainted with ink and watercolour these images created by Charles Bodmer, Victor Pannelier and Eugène Druet. Rodin had invited them, in the 1880s, to illustrate the stages of his work for the press. Later, he re-appropriates these pictures: a strange poetry comes from them. Douglas Gordon (born in 1966) pays tribute to Cézanne and to Monet with an installation: some skulls becoming some water-lilies, on the murmur of the water. Like a reminiscence of Vittorio De Sica’s the Garden of Finzi-Contini, (Twombly likes a lot this movie). This work about the appropriation of some pictures enables to evoke the beauty of works of past. Dissatisfied by photos took by professionals, Brancusi himself photographed his sculptures. By a work on the underexposure he expresses the importance of the light to understand his sculptures.

Twombly chose some works of contemporary America. He lived, since 1959, in Italy, at Gaeta. With the exposed works; we see his linking for the repetition and the accumulation. In the 50s, Robert Rauschenberg, a very close friend, offers one photo created by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) to Twombly. In 1878, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion (the motions of the horse when he trots) which used multiple cameras to capture motion. The Gift of Rauschenberg is exposed with other works. These series of photos of models in movement are scientific and artistic. These works divide the time and the space intot aesthetic moments. Sol LeWitt (1908-2007) is a major minimalist and abstract American artist. He inventories the objects of the everyday life. On occasion of a removal from Brooklyn to Manhattan he listed every object of his apartment : blankets, art books about the artistic revolution of its time, records revealing his passion for Mozart. Edward Ruscha (born in 1937) presents a wall of black and white images of oversize, inhuman, almost empty parkings. The themes, the technique and the absence of style are commonplace. But the resultat is graphic and fascinant. Hiroshi Sugimoto (born in 1948 in Japan) exposes three immense photos representing smooth seas and skys of a high abstract and philosophic depth. These horizons steep us in a time without end that Twombly likes. These photos representing seas echo the last photos of Twombly. The works of Sugimoto are part of series of whom the themes are various. The repetition in the photos by these four artists betokenes the series, the obsession of the theme and the talent to use all the kinds of creation in the works of Twombly. Cindy Sherman (born in 1954) exposes some works from her series of self-portraits. These photos are more an abstract quest than an introspection. She wears various costumes and poses in various attitudes in her photos to question  the place of the woman, her identity and her representation in the American society of the 60s in our days. She criticizes, particularly, the image and the role assigned to American woman of the 60’s and 70’s.

At the second floor some works evoke France of the 1st ½ of the XXth century and the sphere of the private life. In 1915, Sacha Guitry produces a documentary film in black and white, Those from our country: he interviews, at home, some major artists of the art of the XIXth. We can hear Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Auguste Renoir (1831-1915). Next, some photos taken by four great painters are exposed: the subjects are similar to those of their paints. Degas takes photographs during the last years of his life. He is the first modern artist who he paints according to the photographic image, for example these three radiant dancers whose he gets the movement of shoulders, with the sensuality of the pastellist. He combines structure and movement. Twombly was interested in “nabis”. In his painting practice, we can see the use of large stroke of brush with unalloyed colours, the use of high light, the use of false perspective and he likes the decoration and the symbolism. The last floral paints of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) inspired very much the peonies of “Blooming” painted by Twombly. The subjects of the photos and the paintings created by Bonnard are the same: merry and simple family scenes (a lunch, a nap, a bathing), and intimate subjects, nudes at the toilet, (for example. Marthe in the tub, his wife). The snap-shot enables to watch in his black and white pictures the same sense of a free and audacious composition, the same propensity for a feeling of ornamental harmony, and the same relish for lively and graceful gesture as in his paints. Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) depictes still-lives, interior, domestic spaces and decorative panels of landscapes. Also, his photos fix commonplace scenes of every day and fix subjects which move the pure representation (for example: A woman of back with a hat) by moved centrings stemmed from the “japonisme”. From 1890, Maurice Denis (1870-1943) photographs, ardently, some festive moments of his life, fleeting memories of the everyday life and the intimate evolution of the members of his family. In the next room, the photos fixed by Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), born in an upper-class, represent his favourite theme: the universe of his omnipresent family (hobbies, sports, holidays…). 16 double pages of his teenager's diaries (of 1911 and 1912), 20 photos with their sketches at the bottom of the page and 10 stereoscopic views (among 5 000 created from 1902 till 1928) are exposed. Lartigue wants to fix the movement. He thinks the photography could “catch” the life and operate the miracle “to find the lost time" like Proust. These autobiographical photos display the childish emotion by vivid memories of leisure and of arch moments. He uses snap-shot and various and original angles of shooting. In this 1st ½ of the XXth century, these artists made use of the photography as more and more numerous amateurs (to fix private moments) because its practice becomes more democratic, but with a more developed aesthetic feeling!

Let’s meet some American and European artists of the 2nd ½ of the XXth century who refer to the tradition or who work about the notion of time. Diane Arbus (1923-1971) reinvents the documentary and urban style of masters of the 30s. After 1962, she imposes her own style by photographing, in New York, in black and white, full-length and full-face, without staging, many deviant and marginal people: transvestites, mentally handicapped persons, circus performers, dwarfs, giants… (People whose normality seems ugly or surreal). She mixs the familiar with the bizarre to draw up a disturbing image of America of the 60s . David Claerbout (born in 1969) is a Belgian artist working in the media of photography, video, sound, drawing and digital arts. His work exists at the meeting point between photography and filmic image, to create works constituted by a simple static plan or by series of pictures making an impression of movement. He presents two installations which the subjects are time and space. The first installation is an old black and white postcard representing a secular tree and far away a wind-mill. This iconic image of a landscape which could be Impressionist or Pictorialiste was edited (with a great virtuosity in the passage between the fixed image and the image in movement) to give the illusion of the rustle of the leaves of the immobile tree. Claerbout is also very heedful of the light in his slow and repetitive works, so that the spectators are captivated and so that the time seems to them be stopped. He evolves a thought on the viewpoint. His installations tell a story. For example, the second is an immense video which shows , in front of a house, an old woman sleeping in a rocking chair which rocks eternally. We see overleaf her back and a landscape in front of us.The illusion is perfect ! The spectators seem to see a true person, in a state of the South of the United States (maybe the Virginie where Twombly is born). These two works pleased me very much by their mysterious, poetic, meditative and melancholic aspect. Christian Boltanski (born in 1944) is French photographer, sculptor and film maker. His works question the limits between absence and presence, the memory and the unconscious. His installation, the staircase of the black images, evokes recollections which disappear: old portraits coming from a manor-house fade till turning into black frames.

Sally Mann (born in 1951) is an American photographer. She is born at Lexington, Virginia (like Twombly) and she always lives in this city. Twombly had a house and a studio there where every year he came. And he met her there. She became a close friend. She was the first artist invited for the exhibition. She lives and works in her big property in the wood of hills "Blue Ridge Mountains" near Lexington. She develops the large black-and-white photos she makes in a personal laboratory in his house. Her favourite subjects are intimate images of her life, the members of her family, the close friends, the nature around, strange landscapes, centred faces too much which become disturbing... Thanks to utilization of deep contrasts in her photos, sensuality and mystery emanate from these subjects. Her works, so different to those of Cy Twombly, illuminate by opposition the gloomy side of this solar artist.

In the last rooms, many photos (took between 1951 and 2011) of Twombly are presented for the first time in France. Before, we can tell about the modesty and the poetry of all his work he created out of the main movements of the American art. In 1957, Twombly moved in Italia and he lived at Gaeta near Rome till his death, refusing all the interviews. The first room evokes the stay int Black Mountain College, in 1951 and 1952, where he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and met the musician John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham etc, He realized photographic portraits of these friends and took still lives where the time is stopped. In the second room; the photos of interior of palace in Rome and his home at Gaeta are exposed. References to the art history are all over the place: books, furniture, works of art (antique busts, picture of Picasso, neo-classic sculpture of Pan photographed under several angles). We could believe we are in a movie of Visconti like The Leopard, senso... In the 3rd room the spectators can see photos in black and white or in colors: still-lives with bunches of grapes, petals of tulips and leaves of lemon tree. We think about the art of Murillo and Chardin. In the 4th room, photos of landscapes and still lives with rich colors (carmine red of peonies, vivid orange of roses, intense yellow of carnations) are presented. They sometimes evoke vanities (walnuts, fallen petals). In the 5th room, photos took in 2007, at the time of a stay between Boston and Lexington, are exposed. Twombly photographed the shop windows of stores with showy toys, and the studio of her friend Sally Mann (by testing some angles and lightings). Three self-portraits catch the eye by the strength of their expression. The blurred effect makes them ghostly. In the 6th room, photos represent his daily universe: studio, brushes, pails of colors. In one picture, his slippers, far from any aesthetic speech, display the hours spent to paint (blobs cover them completely). The last room pays tribute to the Mediterranean Sea. Everyday, In Gaeta, Twombly went to the restaurant Miramar. And he photographed, with his Polaroid, an always different sea: empty and lonely the winter, and with the beach covered with swimmers the summer

Through this visit in a great museum of contemporary art, among works of two centuries and two continents, we can determine the themes which move closer to Cy Twombly of his guests: the time which spends, the nostalgia, the recollection of the beauty of works of past, the series and the obsession of themes. The fate wanted that as France discovered 120 of his photos to the languid or evanescent beauty, Cy Twombly died. This exhibition became his artistic will.

Audrey Courtin 

audrey.courtin1@gmail.com

http://www.collectionlambert.fr/

http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/art/mort-de-cy-twombly-il-etait-au-niveau-de-matisse_1009972.html

http://blog.madame.lefigaro.fr/stehli/2011/06/cy-twombly.html

http://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/2011/07/05/03015-20110705ARTFIG00589-cy-twombly-autoportrait-pour-l-eternite.php

http://www.cytwombly.info/

http://www.edruscha.com/

http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascape.html

http://www.cindysherman.com/

http://www.lartigue.org/fr2/actualites/calendrier/index-now.html

http://www.davidclaerbout.com/Site_eng/Home.html