Cy Twombly, one of the greatest living artists, is better known for his painting and his sculptures than for his photography, although he has been doing it for 60 years, along with his friends from the beginning Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. This is the first time this important part of his creative output has been displayed in a French museum. In 2007, Twombly put on the sublime exhibition Blooming at Avignon, for which he painted a cycle of massive paintings of peonies. This time Twombly has been invited as a photographer and associate exhibition curator. At the Collection Lambert in Avignon Cy Twombly’s photographic work is to be shown alongside that of Diane Arbus, Sol Witt, and Sally Mann. At the Chapelle du Méjan, Douglas Gordon and Miquel Barceló question the very idea of the portrait and what it can become. Gordon was featured in Don Delillo’s novel Omega Point (Actes Sud). Delillo’s started with the hypnotic video installation 24 Hours Psycho, where the film’s running time had been stretched by the artist to cover an entire day. This installation will be on show in the Chapelle du Méjan, accompanied by burnt photographs of stars, Selfportrait as you+me, 1998—it is as if a series of icons were consumed by fire before our eyes— Catherine Deneuve, Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant; our own face appears in reflection in the mirrors on the back of these burnt-out images. Barceló is not a photographer, and yet his very latest series of paintings will be involved in this disturbing exhibition. In 2010, for Terramare, his new departure was to paint portraits of albino Africans with bleach. These days Barceló paints portraits ‘blind’ onto a black linen canvas that reacts chemically to the bleach to reveal faces which seem to have gone through the fire of a strange developing liquid: Deneuve, Podalydès as well as close friends. It is all highly redolent of Rembrandt, in a blackness that evokes the flames and ashes of Douglas Gordon’s enigmatic portraits.There is a double catalogue, published jointly with Éditions Actes Sud, of photographs by Twombly and other artists—all chosen with Twombly’s poetic intelligence.

Éric Mézil