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Copists

at 56 KM
Metz Métropole
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• exhibition

In exceptional collaboration with the Louvre, from June 14, 2025 to January 12, 2026, the Centre Pompidou-Metz dedicates an unprecedented exhibition of copyists' creation. Copying is at the heart of the classical tradition: copying from the masters, learning techniques, canons, stories from them, absorbing their expertise, making their mastery our own, it's a path to knowledge and creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.

Several artists have received an invitation from the two associate curators formulated as follows: "From the work of your choice preserved among the collections of the Louvre, imagine its copy."

In the form of an open journey, whose scenography reconnects with museum presentation forms, all eras are mixed - from Antiquity to the 19th century - manifesting the coexistence of all Louvre times.

Even though many masters, from Matisse to Picasso, have copied, modern art seems to have preferred an ethic where the model of copying is downgraded, replacing continuity with rupture, figuration with abstraction, painting and freehand sketches with the multiplication of possible forms.

Today, however, the issue of copying seems to be able to be raised again. Firstly, contemporary painting returns to figuration and many painters, among the youngest, take up figures from ancient works to give them a new life. Then, the very question of copying is rearranged through the digital world: the multiplication of images, their abstraction, their lack of support, their availability makes them as many matrices for copying.

Finally, the multiplication of available creation methods seems now to represent as many extensions of what copying can mean: from 3D scanning used in sculpture for the most accurate copy, to video games, to copying existence in the digital world. In this centuries-old history of copying, which is also a history of art in the modern era (from the 15th century), the museum and its collections play an essential role.

"Great book in which we learn to read," in Paul Cézanne's words, but also the last museum to hold a copyists' bureau, existing since the institution's opening in 1793, it has been and remains at the heart of copying arrangements in France and the West. For its two hundred years, the museum thus organized a famous exhibition, entitled "Copy-Create", which intended to highlight the role of copying at a time when it was ideologically questioned.

Copists arises from a different time, constituting an altogether different project: it is now about inviting various creation figures to come and copy at the Louvre, like so many of their famous and unknown predecessors. Among the invited painters and draftsmen who accomplish this decryption, investigation, and understanding gesture, but also among the sculptors, video artists, designers, and writers who lend themselves to the exercise through ancient and new forms, there are so many ways to copy and think of copying, the status of the works that exhibit, in a tension between original and duplication.

This exhibition therefore showcases in an unprecedented way this state of creation and heritage that have now become intertwined: the latest creation does not necessarily seek to break with history but, on the contrary, to draw from it, to replenish, understand and understand oneself. This project, at once inscribed in the continuity of history – with the very form of the copy – and radically new – by the conceived works – is also a meditation on the current state of existence, as well as creation, in this "inseparable" world, where the power of works must contend with the power of images.

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