Figures de l'acteur, le Paradoxe du comédien (Faces of the player, The Actor's Paradox)

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival, the Collection Lambert in Avignon is exhibiting paintings depicting actors and stage-craft. More than four hundred works over four centuries of artistic creativity, from the Comedia dell'Arte to Kabuki, from classical theatre to romantic, from Modernity to the first actor-players in cinema.
The project would not have been possible without the help of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Comédie-Française.
Works form Nicolas Mignard to Nadar, Delacroix to Brassaï, Daumier to Van Dongen, from Géricault to Picasso, vie for attention with installations, photos and videos by contemporary artists such as Candice Breitz, Catherine Sullivan, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, or Francesco Vezzoli...This exhibition provides the opportunity to discover or rediscover the big names of French theatre such as Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Jouvet, Denis Podalydès, Maria Casarès, Isabelle Huppert etc.
Two rooms in the museum are devoted to the work of Miquel Barceló, who is presenting Paso Doble with Josef Nadj at the Église des Célestins, an exhibit of terracotta masks and very large-scale paintings.

Commissioner, Eric Mézil has supervised a richly illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, co-published by Gallimard.