LOUVRE-LENS TRACES THE ART AND AESTHETICS OF CUTENESS
Cuteness gets the museum treatment at Louvre-Lens with So Cute! The Art of Happiness, an exhibition tracing how artists and cultures have produced — and occasionally weaponized — the feeling of ‘aww’ from antiquity to the present. Bringing together around 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, objects and installations, the show moves between animals, babies, the color pink, soft toys, glitter and kawaii culture to ask why certain shapes, gestures and materials trigger affection, comfort and the instinct to protect. In other words, the museum is taking cute seriously, without pretending it has always behaved itself.
Curated by Annabelle Ténèze, director of Louvre-Lens, and Émilie Girard, director of the Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, the exhibition places works from radically different periods into deliberately unlikely conversations. Egyptian cats and ancient babies meet Théodore Géricault, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussin, Jeff Koons and Philippe Katerine, while Cindy Sherman, Rosa Bonheur, Agnès Varda, William Wegman and Pierre et Gilles expand the story through portraits, pets and pop culture. Rather than defining cuteness as a fixed aesthetic, the exhibition treats it as something that shifts with time, geography and whoever happens to be doing the looking.
installation image So cute! The art of happiness, Musée du Louvre-Lens | image by Frédéric Iovino
FROM KAWAII AND PINK TO CUTENESS WITH A DARKER SIDE
One section follows kawaii back well beyond its contemporary overload of mascots and merchandise. The Japanese term emerged centuries ago before developing into the visual vocabulary of rounded forms, oversized heads, large eyes and soft colors now embedded in manga, fashion and advertising. Takashi Murakami appears among the artists extending that language into contemporary art, while an adjacent chapter looks at South Korea’s own culture of cuteness. Elsewhere, pink gets its historical due, alongside works by Cindy Sherman and Ettore Sottsass, whose Ultrafragola mirror makes a fairly convincing case that a color can be both sweet and spectacularly self-aware.
The sugar rush does not last uninterrupted. So Cute! also examines the relationship between adorableness, consumer culture, propaganda, war imagery and social critique, showing how supposedly innocent visual codes can comfort, persuade or unsettle depending on their context. Soft toys move from childhood companions to artistic tools for addressing memory and vulnerability, while the mischievous expressions of characters such as Labubu complicate the idea of the perfectly behaved plushie. The exhibition ends this line of thinking with Pascal Lièvre’s glitter-covered reinterpretations of Louvre icons, where sequins and drag aesthetics turn familiar masterpieces into something brighter, stranger and considerably less reverential.
Louis Léopold BOILLY (La Bassée 1761 – Paris, 1845), Louis Arnault as a child (1803-1885), son of the writer Antoine Vincent Arnault (1766-1834), 1800-1825, oil on canvas, Paris, Louvre Museum, Department of Paintings, bequest © GrandPalaisRmn (Louvre Museum) / Adrien Didierjean
MATHIS BOUCHER BUILDS A PINK, INTERACTIVE DREAMWORLD
Architect-scenographer Mathis Boucher translates the theme into an environment conceived somewhere between a story and a video game. Visitors pass through a rounded pink entrance into a sequence of dreamlike rooms linked by curves, soft edges and tactile materials including fur, mirrors, bouclé and carpet. Rabbit-shaped magnifying glasses and other ‘treasure objects’ are tucked into the route, while a chapter dedicated to cuteness’ darker side interrupts the fantasy before the exhibition heads towards what the museum describes as a happy ending in a puff of glitter. Argile developed a custom powder tone, dubbed Louvre-Lens Pink, specifically for the scenography.
The visitor is not expected to remain entirely passive in all this softness. A 2.7-meter-wide wheel of emotions greets the public before entry, while interactive labels, a kawaii guide character named Momo, a manga library and a multisensory ‘Symphony of Emotions’ room invite different ways of moving through the show. At the end, visitors can even vote for the work that affected them most. The cheerful scenography also hides a pragmatic layer: almost 90% of its display cases and 80% of its hanging system come from the museum’s reuse program. So Cute! The Art of Happiness runs at Louvre-Lens through January 18, 2027.
installation view, exhibition scenography | image by Frédéric Iovino
Will Cotton (born 1965), Out of the Woods, 2020, oil on linen canvas, courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York © ADAGP, Paris, 2026, photo © Will Cotton
works by Pascal Lièvre on view in the exhibition | image by Frédéric Iovino