An intimate history of art - Yvon Lambert, a collection, a donation, a venue

The Yvon Lambert Donation is made up of works acquired either during 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 attentive to the upheavals in art history. From the 1960s onwards, Yvon Lambert was a pioneer in France when he championed minimal and conceptual art, and 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 State in 2012, which is held by the Cnap, stands out for its incredible wealth and for its ensembles 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, etc.

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 the nearly 600 works in the Yvon Lambert Donation. Each of the art historians and critics invited to take a look at this exceptional collection anchors the donation in the major artistic movements of the last sixty years and associates it with the aesthetic and social upheavals that have shaped the history of contemporary art. The various chapters of the publication are divided 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 reality as it is addressed by multidisciplinary practices at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.