Ctrl + See: Masterpieces from within the Louvre are getting a makeover
The Copyist exhibition, an unusual show, invites artists to re-imagine the classics. Meet an invisible maid, men under a lens, and see other histories rewritten
Mona Lisa is redrawn smattered with black paint, for a world of anti-oil protests and a climate crisis. A hidden servant steps forward, in a reimagined Rembrandt. A painting of nude women in a bathhouse is redrawn as men lounging under the glare of a CCTV lens.
The originals are all at the Louvre; the re-imaginings are on display at the branch of the Centre Pompidou in Metz, until February.
In all, works by 100 contemporary artists from around the world feature in the Copyist exhibition, an ambitious joint project by the two institutes.
Anything from among the 35,000 paintings and sculptures at the Louvre was fair game, the artists were told, when the invitations went out from co-curators Donatien Grau (advisor on contemporary programmes at the museum) and Chiara Parisi (director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz) earlier this year.
“These works now constitute a reality in and of themselves, a sort of metaverse version of the Louvre, in the real world,” Parisi says.
The French-Algerian artist Djamel Tatah, for instance, reconfigures a 19th-century portrait by Eugene Delacroix (The Orphan Girl at the Cemetery) as Sans Titre (Untitled), representing the richly layered subject of the original in flattened form and minimalist shades of brown and grey, against a two-tone background reminiscent of our era of digital art.
The Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming zooms in exquisitely to cut the Biblical queen out of his recreation of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654), focusing instead on her maid. This is a figure so relegated to the margins that one cannot at first tell what his painting has in common with the original. Look closely and it is the same face, though, and the same careworn hands. All that remain of the woman of privilege are the indolent feet.
“Rembrandt’s Forgotten Maid has no name. I pay homage to her,” Pei-Ming said in a statement.
Elsewhere, the French-Swiss artist Agnes Thurnauer juxtaposes imagery from Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 masterpiece Liberty Leading the People with an excerpt from Monique Wittig’s feminist novel Les Guérillères (The Women Warriors; 1969), which envisions a world in which women have overthrown patriarchy.
THE IMITATION GAME
The Louvre has often paid homage to the centuries-old tradition of artistic imitation.
The museum celebrated turning 200, in fact, with a show titled Copier-Creer (Copy-Create), in 1993. In that instance, the re-imaginings were meant to serve as a bridge between past and present.
The Louvre is also one of the few museums in the world still home to a copyists’ bureau. Since it opened in 1793, it has issued permits to a fixed number of artists, for a limited period, so they can reproduce classics from within its collection (with certain restrictions, such as that they must be either much smaller or much larger).
In doing so, the museum helps contemporary artists access the works of masters, and engage with art history itself.
Great painters, across centuries, have benefited from this approach. The Modernist Edouard Manet (1832-1883), post-impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Spanish master of Cubism Pablo Picasso were all once copyists at the Louvre, replicating the works of 16th and 17th-century masters such as Rubens, Titian and Diego Velazquez.
So effective did Cezanne find it that he would famously refer to the Louvre as “the book from which we learn to read”.
Echoes of Renaissance engraver Marcantonio Raimondi’s Judgment of Paris, meanwhile, are visible in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). Picasso’s early work reflects, in fascinating ways, elements of African sculpture.
With the rise of Modernism, this tradition began to be replaced by a thirst for the all-new. Amid the digital revolution and the rise of AI, the ongoing exhibition seeks to revive the discourse on what truly constitutes a “new creation”. If all art sits at the intersection of originality and duplication, where do the lines lie?
“Copying signifies that we are not alone; that we relate to a larger world, another work, to other artists and eras,” says Grau. That continuum has value too.
And even when it seems like there isn’t one, there is always a continuum.
Take the sculptor Georges Adeagbo of Benin, a former French colony. In his collage, he places, rather tellingly, Delacroix’s classic showing Liberty striding through a battlefield (robe askew, French flag held aloft) alongside Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (robe askew, wearing the white and blue of the same flag), a seeming reminder that while the standard signals freedom to those at home, it has meant very different things when it has travelled.
In his statement, Adeagbo said: “Since my person, Georges Adeagbo’s, path is not the path of the painter Delacroix, my person, Georges Adeagbo, doesn’t know how to copy the painter Delacroix...!”
Mona Lisa is redrawn smattered with black paint, for a world of anti-oil protests and a climate crisis. A hidden servant steps forward, in a reimagined Rembrandt. A painting of nude women in a bathhouse is redrawn as men lounging under the glare of a CCTV lens.
The originals are all at the Louvre; the re-imaginings are on display at the branch of the Centre Pompidou in Metz, until February.
In all, works by 100 contemporary artists from around the world feature in the Copyist exhibition, an ambitious joint project by the two institutes.
Anything from among the 35,000 paintings and sculptures at the Louvre was fair game, the artists were told, when the invitations went out from co-curators Donatien Grau (advisor on contemporary programmes at the museum) and Chiara Parisi (director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz) earlier this year.
“These works now constitute a reality in and of themselves, a sort of metaverse version of the Louvre, in the real world,” Parisi says.
The French-Algerian artist Djamel Tatah, for instance, reconfigures a 19th-century portrait by Eugene Delacroix (The Orphan Girl at the Cemetery) as Sans Titre (Untitled), representing the richly layered subject of the original in flattened form and minimalist shades of brown and grey, against a two-tone background reminiscent of our era of digital art.
The Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming zooms in exquisitely to cut the Biblical queen out of his recreation of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654), focusing instead on her maid. This is a figure so relegated to the margins that one cannot at first tell what his painting has in common with the original. Look closely and it is the same face, though, and the same careworn hands. All that remain of the woman of privilege are the indolent feet.
“Rembrandt’s Forgotten Maid has no name. I pay homage to her,” Pei-Ming said in a statement.
Elsewhere, the French-Swiss artist Agnes Thurnauer juxtaposes imagery from Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 masterpiece Liberty Leading the People with an excerpt from Monique Wittig’s feminist novel Les Guérillères (The Women Warriors; 1969), which envisions a world in which women have overthrown patriarchy.
THE IMITATION GAME
The Louvre has often paid homage to the centuries-old tradition of artistic imitation.
The museum celebrated turning 200, in fact, with a show titled Copier-Creer (Copy-Create), in 1993. In that instance, the re-imaginings were meant to serve as a bridge between past and present.
The Louvre is also one of the few museums in the world still home to a copyists’ bureau. Since it opened in 1793, it has issued permits to a fixed number of artists, for a limited period, so they can reproduce classics from within its collection (with certain restrictions, such as that they must be either much smaller or much larger).
In doing so, the museum helps contemporary artists access the works of masters, and engage with art history itself.
Great painters, across centuries, have benefited from this approach. The Modernist Edouard Manet (1832-1883), post-impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Spanish master of Cubism Pablo Picasso were all once copyists at the Louvre, replicating the works of 16th and 17th-century masters such as Rubens, Titian and Diego Velazquez.
So effective did Cezanne find it that he would famously refer to the Louvre as “the book from which we learn to read”.
Echoes of Renaissance engraver Marcantonio Raimondi’s Judgment of Paris, meanwhile, are visible in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). Picasso’s early work reflects, in fascinating ways, elements of African sculpture.
With the rise of Modernism, this tradition began to be replaced by a thirst for the all-new. Amid the digital revolution and the rise of AI, the ongoing exhibition seeks to revive the discourse on what truly constitutes a “new creation”. If all art sits at the intersection of originality and duplication, where do the lines lie?
“Copying signifies that we are not alone; that we relate to a larger world, another work, to other artists and eras,” says Grau. That continuum has value too.
And even when it seems like there isn’t one, there is always a continuum.
Take the sculptor Georges Adeagbo of Benin, a former French colony. In his collage, he places, rather tellingly, Delacroix’s classic showing Liberty striding through a battlefield (robe askew, French flag held aloft) alongside Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (robe askew, wearing the white and blue of the same flag), a seeming reminder that while the standard signals freedom to those at home, it has meant very different things when it has travelled.
In his statement, Adeagbo said: “Since my person, Georges Adeagbo’s, path is not the path of the painter Delacroix, my person, Georges Adeagbo, doesn’t know how to copy the painter Delacroix...!”
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