Copy that: in a new exhibition, one hundred artists reinterpret Louvre masterpieces

“Wouldn’t it be marvellous to paint as if painting had never existed?” Paul Cézanne once said. He called the Louvre “the book from which we learn to read”, full of Old Masters that were both the fount of wisdom for a young artist and a past to be jettisoned if they ever wanted to make something true to themselves.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz this month opens an unusual group show, Copyists, which is animated by precisely this high-voltage duality. The museum’s director, Chiara Parisi, invited 100 artists to copy an object of their choice in the Louvre, as artists have done for centuries. The one constraint was to make a new work. But quite how they conceived of a “copy” in the 21st century was wide open.

The first surprise, Parisi says, was that 100 artists accepted the invitation. She and her co-curator, Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programmes at the Louvre, had anticipated “20 yeses”. The resulting roster of participating artists represents a hefty wedge of the contemporary spectrum, from Rita Ackermann and Danh Võ to Glenn Ligon and Mohamed Bourouissa.

Diabolical choices

The second surprise is how they all responded to the commission—choices Parisi describes as “diabolical”. She says: “They were surprising in interpretation, in finesse, in the way they turned things on their head: paintings becoming sculptures and vice versa.”

Some painters have picked single works to copy in a relatively traditional way. Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s After Goya, Portrait de la comtesse del Carpio, marquise de la Solana is about a third smaller than the original and his brushwork more gestural, but in composition and palette there is little mistaking what he set out to do. Yan Pei-Ming has cropped Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath to focus only on the attendant kneeling at Bathsheba’s foot. The source is as unmistakable as the greyscale palette and expressive mark-making are peculiar to Yan.

Others, though, have taken the assignment in radically different directions. The French author Théo Casciani has focused on an entire room—the Salle des Caryatides, that vaulted ballroom full of Greek marbles and Roman copies—for a digital piece. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Hausaltar focuses on a small reproduction of Le Déjeuner by François Boucher that he found 40 years ago by the bins near his Paris apartment. It had been glued to a piece of wood and he has treasured it ever since. The wooden altar he is now housing it in, with flowers, a mirror, candles and incense, is an exhilaratingly abstruse take on Boucher’s domestic idyll.

Only the contemporary copies will be shown in Metz, the originals left in Paris. For Grau, ensuring the process was “porous” left vital space for each artist’s inventiveness to unfurl. The curators have also opted for a freeform exhibition design, inspired by the maverick Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa’s renowned approach to making improbable connections. “What was important, almost ideologically, for this show was freedom—freedom and constraint,” Grau says. “It’s about getting to the heart of what is the museum experience and the experience of creation too.”

Calling through the centuries

Look through the list of works and you will see that several artists found their way to the same spot. Delacroix appears repeatedly, with various copies responding to his easel, his will and his 1830 masterwork, Liberty Leading the People. Chardin is another popular choice, which Grau puts down to the 18th-century French master being “a bridge” between the Dutch still-life tradition and the revolutions of Modern painting.

This idea of a lineage between generations of artists, even when the new has sought to break with the old, is really the whole point of the show. The Louvre has had a copyists’ bureau since its founding in 1793. Each year, 90 artists are granted a three-month permit to work from one of the pieces in the galleries during opening hours. The process is strictly managed to avoid forgeries: the canvases are stamped and numbered, and the copy has to be bigger or smaller than the original by a fifth. Applicants come from all over the world.

Copying no longer means what it did in the 18th century. That makes the bureau a piece of living heritage, but not a gimmick. Rather, it serves to highlight the continuity and exchange between the past and the present.

Parisi studied art history in Italy, “where modern art is deemed to start at the end of the 15th century”, Grau points out. “Neither of us adheres to the notion of a strict division between heritage and creation.” Their principles, he says, are “the greatest freedom and the most knowledge possible”. Copyists, they hope, will be a kind of metaverse, an alternative Louvre invented collectively by 100 living minds.

• Copyists, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, 14 June-2 February 2026