David Hartt Turned the Met's Own Versailles Panorama Into a Meditation on Paris's Forgotten Edges

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened a new installation by the Canadian artist David Hartt that places contemporary film of Paris's outer edges inside the same circular gallery that houses John Vanderlyn's 1819 panorama of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, one of the largest surviving panoramic paintings in the United States. The exhibition, titled Peripheries, runs through 7 February 2027 and is detailed on the Met's own exhibition page, with background on the artist available via his Wikipedia entry.

A panorama built for a different Paris

Vanderlyn's panorama depicts Versailles at the height of its grandeur, a sweeping, immersive rendering of the palace and its gardens that was designed to surround viewers and place them inside a specific vision of French splendour and royal power. That painting has occupied its own purpose-built circular gallery at the Met for decades, giving Hartt an unusually literal architectural container to respond to rather than a conventional rectangular gallery wall.

What Hartt actually built inside it

For his site-specific commission, Hartt installed two Direct View LED screens that echo the shape and placement of imagery within Vanderlyn's original panorama, filling that historic room with moving images filmed not at Versailles's manicured core but along the Boulevard Peripherique, the ring road that circles Paris, and through the centre of the French capital itself. The footage draws visually on the language of French New Wave cinema and on photographs of the palace grounds taken by Eugene Atget, layering multiple historical eras of looking at Paris on top of one another inside a single room.

Why the periphery, specifically

Hartt's title points directly at his intent: pulling viewers' attention away from the established, celebrated centres of a city, in this case Versailles itself, toward the margins where alternative histories and populations are more often pushed and overlooked. By filming the Boulevard Peripherique, a road literally defined by circling the edge of Paris rather than passing through its monumental core, Hartt makes the geography of his subject match his thematic argument almost exactly.

A score built for the room

The installation is accompanied by an original score from composer and musician Jeff Parker, adding a sonic layer to a work that is already operating across painting, architecture and film, and helping to bind Hartt's contemporary footage to the historic room housing it rather than letting the two simply sit side by side. The combination of Vanderlyn's fixed 19th-century panorama and Hartt's moving, sound-accompanied response creates a dialogue between two very different eras' ways of representing a single city and its surrounding territory.

What visitors will actually encounter

The exhibition is free with general museum admission and occupies Gallery 735 at the Met's Fifth Avenue building, meaning visitors already at the museum for other collections can step into the circular room without a separate ticket or timed entry. Its run through early February 2027 gives it a substantially longer window than many temporary installations, positioning it as a fixture of the Met's contemporary programming for the coming months rather than a brief, easily missed event.