The Louvre Invited 100 Contemporary Artists to Copy—and Reinterpret—Its Masterpieces. Here’s What They Made

The results range from faithful reproductions to complete reinventions of renowned works by artists such as Delacroix, Goya and Vermeer

Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent

June 27, 2025

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One hundred contemporary artists received the same invitation: “Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre.”

The instructions were vague and open-ended, but that was the point. Should they accept, the artists would have to turn their imaginary copies into real artworks that took inspiration from one of the 35,000 objects exhibited in the Louvre, ranging from antiquity to the 19th century.

Of those 100 artists, all accepted the challenge, and no two took the instructions the same way. Their final products include paintings, sketches, audio recordings, sculptures and videos of some of the Louvre’s most iconic artworks, as well as some of its more obscure.

Their copies and reinterpretations have been assembled as part of “Copyists,” an exhibition at the Pompidou Center Metz in collaboration with the Louvre. It’s on view until February 2, 2026.

For Chiara Parisi, director of the Pompidou Center Metz, and Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at the Louvre, curating the exhibition began by selecting 100 artists who could run with the open-ended invitation in 100 different directions.

“We chose artists we admire, regardless of style, medium, generation or vision,” the curators explain in a statement. “In fact, the exhibition is called ‘Copyists,’ without the word ‘copy’ in its title. It’s not a thematic exhibition, more an invitation to individuals to express themselves.”

Copying is part of a long tradition in art history, especially at the Louvre, which has maintained a copyists’ bureau since its founding in 1793. To sit in front of a masterpiece hanging in one of the world’s great museums was to learn the master’s style, to absorb classical techniques, to build a foundation of skills on top of which new contributions to art could eventually be added.

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With time, however, copying and its implied reverence for the canon of the past fell out of vogue. “Modern art seems to have preferred an approach in which the copy was devalued and continuity was replaced by rupture, figuration by abstraction, freehand painting and sketching by an increase in the number of forms possible,” per the statement.

Whether this momentum towards the new ever escaped the influence of the old is a matter of debate. Some of history’s most innovative artists insisted on the value of following before blazing new paths. “Good artists copy,” Pablo Picasso once said. “Great artists steal.”

The tension between copying and theft, the curators argue, has new relevance today. New technology means the proliferation of media and images from machines and algorithms trained on databases of past works.

The 100 artists commissioned as part of “Copyists” were encouraged to explore the intersection of originality and duplication in their own unique, human ways. The results, Parisi tells the Art Newspaper’s Dale Berning Sawa, were “diabolical.”

“They were surprising in interpretation, in finesse, in the way they turned things on their head: Paintings becoming sculptures and vice versa,” she adds.

Some artists were more comfortable with copying masterpieces than others. “I’ve always copied,” the Algerian-born French photographer Mohamed Bourouissa explains in the statement. “I came to art through copying. I started by copying drawings in comics, like Strange Tales and the Marvel superheroes. Those were my first drawings.”

For the exhibition, he reinterpreted Study of Hands, a 1715 oil painting by Nicolas de Largillierre. Bourouissa’s work, Hands #9, recasts the painting in a new medium: a UV print on plexiglas, steel and aluminum.

Others found the demands of the prompt uncomfortable. Georges Adéagbo chose Eugène Delacroix, the 19th-century French Romantic painter known for depicting Oriental themes, as one of his subjects for Louvre Remix, a collage which also featured jewelry, masks and statues from his native Benin.

“Every artist has his own path and his own way of working,” Adéagbo explains in the statement. “Delacroix has his path, and myself—Georges Adéagbo—have my path. Since my person, Georges Adéagbo’s, path is not the path of the painter Delacroix, my person, Georges Adéagbo, doesn’t know how to copy the painter Delacroix.”

While Bourouissa and Adéagbo departed from their subject’s original medium, others stuck with it. In her version of The Turkish Bath (1862) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madeleine Roger-Lacan replaced Ingres’ eroticized female subjects with passive male characters. In contrast, Jean-Philippe Delhomme offered a faithful copy of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Marquise de la Solana (1795)—a more traditional take on the open-ended prompt.

At the exhibition in Metz, all of these works are presented in fluid succession, showcasing both the freewheeling contemporary ethos of the Pompidou Center Metz and the sprawling collections of the Louvre.

“The Louvre is the book from which we learn to read,” Paul Cézanne, who himself sat in the grand museum copying old paintings, wrote in a 1905 letter. “Yet we ought not be content with the fine formulas of our illustrious forebears. We must go out to study beautiful nature, we must try to free our minds, we must seek to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Thus time and reflection gradually modify vision, and finally we reach understanding.”

“Copyists” is on view at the Pompidou Center Metz in France through February 2, 2026.

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.