Copying The Most Famous Works In The Louvre, Contemporary Artists Are Keeping Them Up-To-Date

At the Paris Salon of 1796, Hubert Robert exhibited two views of the Louvre. One painting presented his vision for a Grande Galerie filled with statues and paintings naturally illuminated under enormous glass skylights. The second showed the same space in ruins, broken statues littering the floors, trees growing through the collapsed ceiling. For all their extreme differences, the scenes had one constant: Robert depicted artists making copies of the museum’s masterpieces.

As an accomplished landscape painter, Robert had ample experience copying great works from the past. As one of the Louvre’s curators, he ensured that the national collection was accessible to contemporary artists, who had the galleries to themselves five days a week so that their easels wouldn’t be disturbed by the public. His pictures of the Grande Galerie intact and in ruins make the case that even an institution as venerable as the Louvre was less enduring – and less important – than the eternal act of copying.

Although this view lasted through the 19^th century, and the Louvre still maintains a copyists’ office for visiting artists, times have changed. Under the influence of movements such as Dada and Cubism, copying was nearly routed by the Modernist cult of originality. (“Good artists copy,” according to Picasso. “Great artists steal.”) A new exhibition at the Pompidou Metz seeks to restore the dignity of copying, and to show that copies can be as avant-garde as Picasso’s grand larceny.

Organized in collaboration with the Louvre, the exhibition originated with an invitation to dozens of contemporary artists to choose one work from the Louvre’s collection and to create a new work based upon it. The list of invitees includes major names such as Jeff Koons, who recreated the ancient Sleeping Hermaphrodite in plaster, surrounding the figure with glass gazing balls. The curators also sought artists who are as practiced at copying as the Old Masters, such as Christiana Soulou, who repeatedly redrew sketches by great artists such as Hieronymus Bosch. Even the ruins of Hubert Robert have been resurrected in a copy by Laurent Grasso, whose painting situates the scene at dusk, illuminated by mysterious flames.

The most impressive contributions to the Pompidou exhibition combine the conceptual pluck of Koons with the technical skill of Soulou, reanimating familiar works in ways that would have been unfathomable when they were made. Working in acrylic and mixed media on sheet metal, Fabienne Verdier has reduced Rogier van der Weyden’s medieval Annunciation to calligraphic gestures and color fields that sublimate the gallery’s ambient light, evoking the numinous glow of the Virgin Mary’s bedroom when she was visited by the angel Gabriel. Using more traditional oil on canvas, Michaël Borremans copies the backgrounds of still lifes by Jean Siméon Chardin, repurposing the 18^th century master’s enigmatic ambiance as source material for minimalist compositions nearly as spare as the late paintings of Mark Rothko.

Simultaneously devotional and irreverent, the works of both Verdier and Borremans exemplify the artistic potential of imaginative copying. Most of the works in Copyists are more cursory. Some pieces suffer from overcommitment to the originals, as diligent as Soulou’s drawings but wanting her ability to transcend technique through meditative repetition. More often, the work is as conceptually overdetermined as Koons’ narcissistic Hermaphrodite. For instance, Humberto Campana has fabricated the Victory of Samothrace in charcoal, depicting pyrrhic victory with a literalness befitting a magazine illustration. And Madeleine Roger-Lacan has repainted the Turkish Bath of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with a harem of men, making a feminist statement that conceptually recapitulates Sylvia Sleigh’s 1973 appropriation of Ingres but without Sleigh’s streak of independence. The imitative quality of Roger-Lacan’s painting situates it in the realm of satire, methodologically equivalent to another 1970s tour-de-force – Larry Rivers’ recreation of Édouard Manet’s Olympia with the races of the two figures inverted. But compared to Rivers’ conceptually multifaceted sculpture, Roger-Lacan’s painting is both literally and figuratively two-dimensional.

As the works of Rivers and Sleigh suggest, the art of copying never completely vanished, not even within the avant-garde. On the contrary, the avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s deployed copying to outflank the avant-gardes that preceded it. Copying was an essential trope in Pop Art, from Warhol’s silkscreened reproductions of the Mona Lisa to Elaine Sturtevant’s silkscreen imitations of Warhol. Other ideas about copying emerged with movements such as the Pictures Generation.

The curators of the Pompidou Metz exhibition don’t deny this history, and figures such as Rivers and Sleigh are duly cited in the exhibition catalogue. (So is Peter Saul, who had the larcenous audacity to satirize Picasso’s Guernica.) Even so, the exhibition fails to address (or even acknowledge) its own lack of vitality. I suspect this may be a consequence of the invitational approach. Spontaneity is lacking. For an exhibition that is positioned to redeem the tradition of copying, it’s ironic that so much of the art has the dutiful quality of a school assignment.

More than ironic, it’s vexing because copying has so much to offer. Like great art forgers, great copyists open up the possibility space. To create an artwork that is aesthetically and conceptually coherent, an artist makes decisions that foreclose other options. Some of those options might be equally compelling, and there might be other possibilities that the artist never even considers. Copyists are poised to explore those permutations, which can be produced ad infinitum.

Moreover, by copying works in times after they were created, often after the artist is dead, copyists can relate them to circumstances the artist never experienced, or introduce formal and technical innovations beyond the artists’ ken. Fabienne Verdier’s Annunciation is not better than Rogier van der Weyden’s. Larry Rivers did not improve upon Manet. Nor, for that matter did Manet’s Olympia improve upon Titian’s Venus of Urbino (nor did Titian improve upon Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus). Manet broke new ground by replacing a goddess with a prostitute, and rendering her matter-of-factly in a painting as flat as his canvas. Rivers broke new ground by darkening her skin and giving her a white servant, and transforming Manet’s painting into a three-dimensional mess of flesh. Variations are not instances of progress, but neither are they mere acts of imitation. The world is better for them.

In the View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins, Hubert Robert dramatized a process of renewal that looks more shocking today than it would to his contemporaries, who would likely have viewed his depiction of a young man sketching the ancient Apollo Belvedere as a perfectly sensible response to whatever misfortune befell the building in which they were standing. (They might also have exulted that the bronze Apollo in the fantastical gallery was the lost Greek original of Leochares, known only through the marble Roman copy in the Vatican.) With its scenic decadence, Robert’s painting now looks antiquarian. But his vision remains firmly fixed on the future.