Statue of Liberty Exhibit at Musée d’Orsay Honors Auguste Bartholdi
France’s magnificent gift to America and its creator comes with virtual reality headsets
Paris will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary this autumn when the city’s temple to 19th-century art hosts “Auguste Bartholdi Liberty Enlightening the World” in collaboration with the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar. The show, opening at the Musée d’Orsay on September 15, aims to put the sculptor back behind the monument that has largely eclipsed him, tracing the artistic, political, financial, and engineering decisions that transformed his idea into what was then the largest statue ever built.
Bartholdi and his supporters originally hoped to have the French gift ready for the American centennial in 1876. Instead, France’s proposed centennial gift took another decade to complete and was finally inaugurated in New York Harbor in 1886. Liberty’s copper skin was penny-colored at her dedication, but acquired her familiar light green patina over the next three decades.
Part of what makes the story good is how improbable the whole undertaking was. Bartholdi was creating a 151-foot-tall copper woman an ocean away from the site where she would ultimately stand, which required sculpture to become something close to industrial production. The show will include extraordinary and diverse items related to the Statue’s genesis, most importantly the 1889 nine-and-a-half-foot bronze model based on Bartholdi’s 1876 scale version, models and studies that show Lady Liberty evolving into her final form, and documentation of her dismantling in Paris, voyage, and reassembly in New York.
“Auguste Bartholdi Liberty Enlightening the World” is on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from September 15th, 2026 to January 31st, 2027.