iPetit Palais - Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de ParisChamps-Élysées
Prune Nourry sculpts portraits of eighteen forgotten women sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Before you reach the door, Mothership is waiting on the forecourt: a figure that is half pregnant woman, half rusty ship's hull. Inside, white marble eyes with black pupils stare out of plaster busts and out of the pedestals of the museum's own sculptures, and spotting them becomes a scavenger hunt.
In the North Pavilion's sculpture gallery, Nourry has made portraits of eighteen women sculptors from around 1900, among them Käthe Kollwitz, Hélène Bertaux and Sarah Bernhardt, from photographs three art historians spent a year finding. The busts run from 70 cm to 3.5 m tall. Some twenty older works from her Holy Daughters and Venus series sit among the permanent collection, where barely 4% of the works are by women. The biggest heads were sculpted in a studio at Saint-Denis Pleyel station, so the Grand Paris Express has at least delivered these.
It's free, like the rest of the collection, and a Bloomberg Connects audioguide reads the sculptors' own letters.
Mothership on the forecourt
The show starts outside: a hybrid figure that shifts between a pregnant woman and the rusty metal hull of a ship.
The marble eyes
Look for white marble eyes with black pupils, set in Nourry's busts and in the pedestals of the museum's older works alike.
Jane Poupelet
One of the largest new portraits, about 2.5 m tall, in cellular concrete with a matte white finish and Carrara marble eyes.
The eighteen busts in the North Pavilion
Front-on, unsmiling faces taken from 19th-century studio photographs, sized by the order Nourry made them, not by rank.
The museum runs clay workshops for ages 3 to 5 with their families and sculpture workshops and guided visits for ages 6 to 10 around the show.