TL;DR
A new exhibition by Prune Nourry opened at the Petit Palais in Paris on Oct. 20, 2026, alongside a 10-minute documentary made with Google Arts & Culture. The film uses generative AI and archival material to imagine studios of historical women sculptors, whose original workspaces are rarely documented.
Artist Prune Nourry’s “Visionaries” exhibition opened at the Petit Palais in Paris on Oct. 20, alongside a 10-minute documentary made with Google Arts & Culture that uses AI to recreate the studios of women sculptors who worked in the city. The project pairs Nourry’s monumental plaster portraits of 18 historical sculptors with digitally imagined workspaces, addressing gaps in the surviving record of women’s artistic lives.
The film was developed by Nourry and Google Arts & Culture with director Vincent Lorca. Google says the project followed a year of research by three art historians, who gathered letters, journals and photographic portraits connected to women sculptors who lived and worked in Paris. Few historical photographs of the artists’ actual studios are known to exist, the company said.
Lynn Cherny, a creative technologist-in-residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, used Google generative AI and image-editing models to create visual reconstructions of studios associated with artists including Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet and Camille Claudel. A custom tool built with Google Gemini was used to create 3D models from archival photographs and animate camera paths, allowing viewers to move virtually through the reconstructed spaces.
A separate sequence, conceived by Nourry and Lorca, edits an archival image of Antoine Bourdelle’s studio so that female students gradually disappear, leaving the men in the photograph. Google describes the sequence as a visual representation of how women’s contributions were erased from art history. The film installation is in the museum galleries, and a behind-the-scenes trailer is available online through Google Arts & Culture.
Restoring Women to the Studio Record
The project makes a historical absence visible: while many women sculptors worked in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, surviving images of their studios are scarce. By reconstructing those spaces from archival material, the film offers audiences a way to consider the conditions in which the artists worked, while the exhibition centers sculptors who were often left out of accounts of the period.
The reconstructions are AI-generated interpretations, not recovered photographs or verified replicas of studios. Their value lies partly in making that distinction clear: they can provide an immersive representation based on historical sources, but they cannot replace missing evidence. The exhibition and film also put that limitation alongside a broader question of how women artists’ work and professional identities were recorded and remembered.
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Paris Sculptors and Missing Studios
Google’s account places the artists in a period when women faced social restrictions and limited access to formal artistic training. Despite those constraints, women sculptors established careers in a field dominated by men. The company says women were often represented in art history as models or muses, while their work as artists received less attention.
The museum exhibition, which coincides with Art Basel Paris, presents Nourry’s plaster portraits of 18 historical women sculptors. It runs at the Petit Palais from Oct. 20, 2026, to Jan. 30, 2027. The documentary extends the exhibition’s focus by combining archival research with digital reconstructions rather than relying on studio photographs that, according to Google, are largely unavailable.
““Because few historical photos of their actual workspaces exist,” the team used generative AI and image-editing models to bring the studios to life.”
— Google Arts & Culture
What the Reconstructions Can Show
The source material does not specify which archival photographs, letters or other records informed each individual studio scene, or how the team checked the resulting layouts and details against historical evidence. It also does not describe the models’ limitations, the extent of human editing, or whether the reconstructed rooms correspond to confirmed studio plans.
As a result, viewers should distinguish the documented research materials from the AI-generated visual choices used to fill gaps. Google’s announcement presents the work as a way to imagine lost spaces; it does not claim that the film has recovered exact images of the studios. The company also does not provide a full list of all 18 sculptors represented in the exhibition in the supplied report.
Exhibition Runs Through January
“Visionaries” remains on view at the Petit Palais through Jan. 30, 2027, with the film installation shown in the museum galleries. Google Arts & Culture has also posted a behind-the-scenes trailer online. The announcement does not identify further screenings, events or additional research releases, so the next confirmed opportunity for visitors is the exhibition’s ongoing run in Paris.
Key Questions
What is “Visionaries”?
It is an exhibition by Prune Nourry at the Petit Palais in Paris, featuring monumental plaster portraits of 18 historical women sculptors. It opened on Oct. 20, 2026, and is scheduled to run through Jan. 30, 2027.
How does AI feature in the documentary?
Google Arts & Culture says its team used generative AI and image-editing models to create visual reconstructions of historical studios. A custom tool built with Google Gemini helped turn archival photographs into 3D models and animate camera movement through them.
Are the studio images historical photographs?
No. The studio scenes are AI-generated reconstructions based on archival material. Google says few photographs of the sculptors’ actual workspaces exist, and the supplied announcement does not claim that the reconstructed rooms are exact replicas.
Which sculptors appear in the project?
The film’s studio reconstructions include artists such as Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet and Camille Claudel. Nourry’s exhibition presents portraits of 18 historical women sculptors, though the source report does not list all of their names.
Where can people see the film?
The film installation is presented in the Petit Palais galleries alongside the exhibition. Google Arts & Culture has also made a behind-the-scenes trailer available online; the report does not say that the complete documentary is available to stream.
Source: rss
