Galerie Claude Lemand

GRAND PALAIS - CEZANNE et NOUS.
September 23, 2026 - January 17, 2027.
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Centre Pompidou : Cezanne et nous.

This unique exhi­bi­tion offers a rich, ongoing dia­logue between works by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and those by artists who, from the late 19th cen­tury to the pre­sent day, have con­sis­tently drawn inspi­ra­tion from his body of work to rein­vent painting. It tells the story of an unpar­al­leled legacy, one that unfolds through an inter­play of influ­ence and the asser­tion of a shared master. The artist became one of the uncon­tested fathers of Western modern art. In the post-war period, he was still regarded by fig­ures driving a revival of abstrac­tion in Europe and the United States, whether pro­po­nents of lyrical and optical abstrac­tion or of hard-edge painting. Some 180 pieces are pre­sented: 70 by Cezanne and 75 by other artists.

List of artists pre­sented in the exhi­bi­tion : Paul Cezanne / Etel Adnan, Émile Bernard, Martin Barré, Georg Baselitz, Max Beckmann, Erwin Blumenfeld, Umberto Boccioni, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, (………), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Maurice de Vlaminck, Herman de Vries, Vincent van Gogh, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Wilson, Zao WouKi.
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Claude Lemand: The Mountain and Etel Adnan

The Mountain is emblem­atic of the most inspired paint­ings in the abun­dant pro­duc­tion of the last twenty years of Etel Adnan (Beirut, 1925 - Paris, 2021), with its vibrant and con­trasting colors, between the blue of the Mediterranean and the red sun of Lebanon. Although small in size, its com­po­si­tion is vast, plan­e­tary. This moun­tain, tire­lessly sung about, painted, and drawn by Etel, is Mount Tamalpais, which she saw when opening the window, adorned with flow­er­pots on the sill, of her house in Sausalito near San Francisco: it was her land­scape of par­adise lost, dreamed of, or hoped for. During her Californian exile, she had adopted this uni­versal symbol, which con­soled and reas­sured her in the absence of Mount Sannine, a memory of her child­hood and ado­les­cence in Lebanon, which she could see from every­where and in every season. In her essay Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1985), Etel writes: “Mount Tamalpais has become my home. For Cezanne, the Sainte-Victoire was no longer a moun­tain, but an abso­lute, a painting. She adds: “I need to move around the moun­tain because I am water. The moun­tain must remain, and I must leave. Standing on Mount Tamalpais, I par­tic­i­pate in the rhythms of the world. Everything seems right. I am in har­mony with the stars. For better or for worse, I know, I know.” Etel had become a pan­theist over time, like the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran of The Processions or The Prophet. The Mountain is the self-por­trait of this lumi­nous woman, firmly anchored to the Earth and her head turned toward the Universe, so dis­tant and yet so near.

I met Etel Adnan in Paris in March 1989, at my first exhi­bi­tion of Abdallah Benanteur’s paint­ings, which she and her partner, the artist Simone Fattal, knew and admired. Etel was a great writer and artist, a long­time friend in Paris, a won­derful person. Her fem­i­nist activism was clear, deter­mined, calm, and very pos­i­tive. A uni­ver­salist wisdom inspired her writ­ings and her fas­ci­nating inter­views. Her lit­erary and artistic cre­ativity flowed nat­u­rally. Aware of her own value, she remained amazed and happy by her late-blooming suc­cess. Etel was very loyal and dis­creetly gen­erous, not only to her many friends, but also to young women artists, writers, trans­la­tors, gallery owners, and fem­i­nist activists. I wit­nessed this during the last thirty years of her life.

In June 2018, Claude and France Lemand donated 26 of her works to the Arab World Institute Museum in Paris: 10 his­tor­ical leporellos, 4 oil paint­ings (including her iconic 2014 work, The Mountain), and 12 large water­colors and ink draw­ings on paper. To date, this dona­tion con­sti­tutes the largest museum col­lec­tion in the world. Loan requests have come from major museums across Europe: after the Arab World Institute in Paris and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Pompidou-Metz, the museums in Munich and Düsseldorf, the Museum of Modern Art of Paris, the Grand Palais-Centre Pompidou-Musée d’Orsay, and others.