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

The Louvre invited 100 contemporary artists to create copies or reinterpretations of works from its collection, spanning antiquity to the 19th century. The resulting artworks—paintings, sculptures, audio recordings, and videos—are now on view in the exhibition "Copyists" at the Pompidou Center Metz, curated by Chiara Parisi and Donatien Grau, running until February 2, 2026. Artists were given an open-ended brief, leading to diverse outcomes from faithful reproductions to radical reinventions of masterpieces by Delacroix, Goya, and Vermeer.

This exhibition matters because it revives and recontextualizes the long tradition of copying at the Louvre, which maintained a copyists' bureau since 1793. By commissioning 100 artists to engage with historical works, the curators highlight contemporary tensions between originality and duplication, especially relevant in an age of AI-generated imagery and machine learning trained on past art. The show challenges the modernist devaluation of copying, suggesting that imitation remains a vital creative act.