On the eve of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jean Giono (October 2020), the Mucem offers, through nearly 300 works and documents, a retrospective that, far from the simplified image of the Provencal writer, follows the path of his written and filmed work with all his "darkness", his nerve and his universality. Giono, a poet who survived the First World War, was as committed to describing the depth of evil as well as to finding the antidotes: creation, work, pacifism, friendship of painters, refuge in nature, escape into the imaginary.

To embody one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century, almost all of his manuscripts, here exposed for the first time, will enter into dialogue with many works and documents: family and administrative archives (including those of his two imprisonments), photographic reports, press, original editions, annotated books, sound and filmed interviews, as well as all the writer's workbooks, films made by him or that he has produced and scripted, cinematographic adaptations of his work by Marcel Pagnol and Jean-Paul Rappeneau (without forgetting the animated film by Frédéric Back, The Man who planted trees), the naive paintings of the mysterious Charles-Frédéric Brun who inspired him The Deserter, the entirety of his terrible Journal held during the Occupation, and the paintings of his painter friends, first and foremost Bernard Buffet.