The Paul Valéry Museum in Sète exhibits the dialogue between Jean Vilar and the painters.

The Paul Valéry Museum in Sète is dedicating all of its temporary exhibition spaces to Jean Vilar, founder of the Avignon Festival, until November 8, through an exhibition entitled The colours of Jean Vilar, exploring his privileged relationship with the painters of his time.

Seven sections devoted to 40 paintings and one hundred graphic works

Created in close collaboration with the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon and curated by Camille Bertrand-Hardy, the exhibition brings together nearly 40 paintings, around 100 graphic works, as well as costumes, tapestries, and sculptures from public and private collections. Organized into seven thematic sections, the exhibition traces the dialogue between theater, painting, and the decorative arts during the 1950s to 1970s, a period in which Jean Vilar's collaborators considered themselves not decorators, but "theatre painters," making color a true actor on the stage.

Founder of the Avignon Festival in 1947 and of the Théâtre national populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in 1951, Jean Vilar had profoundly renewed and democratized post-war French theatre, driven by a resolutely plastic conception of staging.

Léon Gischia, artistic partner for nearly twenty years

Among the artists featured, Léon Gischia occupies a central place in the exhibition: his meeting with Jean Vilar in 1941 marked the beginning of a collaboration spanning nearly twenty years, during which he became much more than a simple set designer for the theater director. It was Gischia who encouraged Vilar to abandon realistic sets in favor of minimalist spaces, where a few elements suffice to suggest a location, leaving costumes and colors to structure the stage space and guide the viewer's gaze.

The exhibition also explores Jean Vilar's dialogue with other artists of the New School of Paris, including Édouard Pignon, Mario Prassinos and Gustave Singier, as well as a section devoted to oriflammes, those stage signatures that became emblematic of the Avignon sky during the festival's great years.