Visionaries Exhibition Brings Lost Women Sculptors Back to Paris

Google described on October 21 a ten-minute documentary film made with French artist Prune Nourry that uses the company's generative AI and image-editing models to recreate the lost studios of women sculptors. The film was produced with Google Arts & Culture and director Vincent Lorca to accompany the "Visionaries exhibition," Nourry's new commission at the Petit Palais in Paris, which opened on October 20 during Art Basel Paris week. According to Google, few historical photographs of the artists' actual workspaces survive, which is why the project turned to AI.

Lynn Cherny, creative technologist-in-residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, used Google's AI models to bring the studios of sculptors including Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet and Camille Claudel back to life. A custom tool built with Google Gemini created digital models from archival photographs and animated camera paths through them, letting viewers move through rooms that survive in no photograph. In one sequence, conceived by Nourry and Lorca, the women slowly fade from an archival photograph of Antoine Bourdelle's studio until only the men remain, a visual account of how these artists disappeared from history. The film plays in the museum's galleries, and a behind-the-scenes trailer is available on Google Arts & Culture.

The portraits taking over the Petit Palais

The museum has given Nourry a carte blanche that stretches across its permanent-collection galleries, its forecourt and its gardens. She sculpted 18 new plaster portraits of women sculptors who lived and worked between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, works that run from around two to eleven feet in height. The research behind them took a year, during which three art historians gathered the women's letters, journals and photographic portraits at the artist's request. The busts carry a recurring motif of white marble eyes with black pupils, set into the plaster faces and even into the pedestals of the museum's own works, setting up a comparison across eras. The show opens on the forecourt with Mothership, a hybrid figure suspended between a pregnant woman and the rusted hull of a ship. Templon, the gallery that represents the artist, says the portraits animate the memory of the sculptors they represent inside the North Pavilion's sculpture gallery.

Nourry began by spending time in the museum's collections with the exhibition's curator, Sixtine de Saint-Léger, and found that only four percent of the works had been made by women, while the women sculptors in the collection could be counted on one hand. That contrasted sharply with the many representations of women as models, especially nudes, filling the same rooms. She told Artsy she had asked herself whether "women artists really didn't exist" or whether it was simply a matter of how they were considered. A selection of her earlier works, drawn from the Holy Daughters and Venus series, is shown in dialogue with the permanent collection. Artsy reported that working from mostly stern official portraits, Nourry and the historians read the women's life stories through three themes: motherhood, social engagement and healing.

The sculptors the show honors

Some of the portraits honor artists who are barely known; others are famous for something else entirely. Hélène Bertaux, whose sculpture Nourry encountered in the Petit Palais collections, campaigned for women's right to public education and founded the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1881. Jane Poupelet, a fervent feminist, began her career under the male pseudonym Simon de la Vergne, made bronze female nudes celebrating bodies free of the corset, and created masks for Les Gueules Cassées, the disfigured veterans of the First World War. Sarah Bernhardt, remembered as an actress, also painted and practiced sculpture for twenty years, exhibiting accomplished marble works at the Paris Salon and in London.

Selma Hortense Burke, an African American sculptor added slightly outside the project's mostly nineteenth-century bracket, is known for her portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Roosevelt. Jingyuan Wang, a pioneering Chinese sculptor, was celebrated for nudes of both men and women, a controversial choice for a woman artist of her time; she studied in Lyon, won a scholarship to Paris, and later became a professor in Beijing. Letters found by the research team show Camille Claudel repeatedly asking her gallerists and her brother for financial help as her relationship with Auguste Rodin strained her career. Three hollow, concave portraits stand as allegories for groups of women from the period: art students, women committed to institutions, and the "legacy women" who dedicated their lives to their husbands' careers, represented by Cléopâtre Bourdelle Sévastos, a promising sculptor who set aside her own craft to run her husband's studio.

Why the AI reconstruction matters

The documentary exists because the archive has gaps that research alone cannot close. The studios where Prophet, Poupelet and Claudel worked were never systematically photographed, so the Gemini-built reconstructions are the closest anyone can come to standing inside them. Nourry, a New York-based French artist, has built her career on collaborations across disciplines. In 2024 she co-founded the Catharsis Arts Foundation with Claude Grunitzky, whose founding project made 108 terra-cotta portraits of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 together with Nigerian students. "Artists are to society what dreams are to the brain," she told Artsy, adding that they keep societies sane by translating messages through symbols. The Paris show runs through January 24, with the film playing in the galleries and the trailer online. Readers can follow the culture section for more stories from the art world, and the GenZ NewZ homepage carries the day's other headlines.