The Louvre invites artists to return. We went, here are our photos and our opinion:

Creating at the Louvre, the gesture is surprising, until you remember: the palace housed its artists for nearly two centuries, before Napoleon expelled them.

For its 230th anniversary, the Louvre is reconnecting with this history. Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton had their studios there for two years, the first guests of a unprecedented residency, and are exhibiting side by side in the Chapel Room: a film, a sculpture, and a political installation by Kader Attia, and intimate paintings and drawings by Elizabeth Peyton.

What can we take away from this visit? That the Louvre Museum is in motion? Yes. That it intends to be part of our modern world? Also. For while Kader Attia takes a distaste for the figure of Bugeaud, emphasizing his dominant presence among the sculptures on the Rivoli façade, and attempting to give form to the traumas linked to the massacres and suffocation he orchestrated in Algeria, Elizabeth Peyton, for her part, paints an intimate and historical portrait of the Other, cultivating the legendary images of the Louvre and then inviting, into this reenacted fresco of the world, unknowns, like Jules, and icons, like Jennifer Lawrence.

Ultimately, everyone has their place here. Kader Attia and his decolonial perspective, thanks to the free Sundays that, a few decades ago, allowed him to encounter the works, beyond the street names of his city. The loves of Elizabeth Peyton. We too, in a sense, alongside the Women of Algiers. And even Bugeaud has something to add. It is the primary mission of the museum that is evident here: to transmit, to preserve, to transmit again, and to mediate between the past and the future...

1

37/38 LOUVRE MUSEUM
40
From September 24 to December 14 2026
Chapel Room, Sully Wing
Place du Carrousel, 75001 - Metro: Palais-Royal – Musée du Louvre (1/7)
Open daily except Tuesdays, 9am-6pm, Wednesdays and Fridays until 9pm - Admission: €22 - Free for under 26s
[/compact]