The Language of Walls
Rubbings from China to Notre-Dame
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
- from 18 March to 28 June, 2026
- 107 rue de Rivoli, 75007 Paris
- madparis.fr
On the occasion of the Drawing Fair and the Asian Spring, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs presents “The Language of Walls: Rubbings from China to Notre-Dame”, the fourth focus of the Drawings, Wallpapers, and Photographs Department.
The exhibition brings together around a hundred works ancient and contemporary rubbings, drawings, and technical tools to illustrate the practice of rubbing through the museum’s Chinese and French collections.
The museum also invites Santiago Hardy, rope access specialist, and Delphine Syvilay, research engineer at the LRMH, to present for the first time the stonecutters’ marks and graffiti recorded during the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris.
An illustration of the practice of rubbing
The exhibition illustrates the practice of rubbing through a unique selection of Chinese and French collections from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. It also reveals the permanence and spread of this practice, as evidenced by the museum’s collections through examples made in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and throughout the 20th century.
On this occasion, the museum invites Santiago Hardy, a rope access technician, and Delphine Syvilay, then a research engineer at the Laboratoire de Recherche des Monuments Historiques (LRMH), to present the rubbings of stone inscriptions and graffiti they made during the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris.
Rope access technician Santiago Hardy
in the process of stamping one of the stone signs
on the walls of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris
Example of rubbing one of the lapidary signs of Notre-Dame de Paris
© Les Arts Décoratifs
Rubbing, from China to Notre-Dame
Originally from China, the rubbing technique allows the imprint of a pattern or text engraved or carved on a wall or object to be taken using paper and ink.
Moistened when applied, the sheet expands and can thus conform to the relief of the surface to be stamped. A stamp, made from a ball of inked fabric, is then used to blacken the reliefs, leaving the white of the paper in the hollows.
Chinese rubbings were brought back by travellers in the early 20th century. Of great graphic beauty, they attest both to the interest that travellers took in them and to the vitality of the practice in China. A partnership with the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO), as part of the seminar ‘The object in context: research in Asian art history and archaeology’, led by Lia Wei, senior lecturer at INALCO, offers a new perspective on this collection.
The rubbings of the stone inscriptions and graffiti in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris constitute a mural ‘golden book’. They are a precious testimony to a bygone era of the Cathedral and a true human adventure, which led to this unexpected revival of a centuries-old practice.
Example of rubbing one of the lapidary signs of Notre-Dame de Paris
© Les Arts Décoratifs
Rubbing in France in the 19th and 20th centuries
Rubbings of objects, both a formal memory for manufacturing and a source of inspiration in the creative process, broaden the perspective. For example, the designer Emile-Auguste Reiber (1826-1893) used the shapes and patterns of Chinese bronze objects from Henri Cernuschi’s collection in his creations and published them in his magazine ‘L’art pour tous’ (Art for All). For his part, poster artist Eugène Grasset (1845-1917) used the frottage technique to reproduce book bindings.
In the 1920s, rubbing was used in workshops, enabling La Maison Hugon to reproduce all its comb prototypes in model albums.
Finally, Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) demonstrated artists’ interest in rubbing. He used it as raw material for collages or transcribed it into several lithographs with facetious titles, which evoke walls when in fact they are the fruit of the artist’s many inventions.
Around the exhibition
26 March 2026, 6.30pm to 8pm.
Estampages à Notre-Dame de Paris : images frontières
Lecture by Santiago Hardy
Auditorium of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
The restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris has led to a number of unprecedented encounters and collaborations. One of these brought together Delphine Syvilay, then a research engineer, and Santiago Hardy, a rope access technician. On their own initiative, they carried out an exhaustive survey of the building’s stone inscriptions. In the course of this unprecedented undertaking, they discovered and adapted a Japanese stamping technique called ‘Taku-Hon’. Several hundred prints were made, unearthing the building’s little-known past. Stone inscriptions, graffiti, decorations and fossils were also recorded, forming a corpus of images that led to a different way of thinking about the building: the walls became carriers and supports of the building’s memory as well as witnesses to history. At the crossroads between a wall survey and a print, the images thus produced question our notion of memory while broadening our perception of reality.
Santiago Hardy: a rope access technician since 2013, he will be working on the cathedral for two years in 2020 as part of the safety and restoration project. He received support from the CNRS in 2021 to carry out a survey of the stone inscriptions in the building.
Rope access technician Santiago Hardy
in the process of stamping one of the stone signs on the walls of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris
27 March, from 9am to 1pm
Auditorium of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
Seminar in partnership with the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO), as part of the seminar ‘The object in context: research in Asian art history and archaeology’, led by Lia Wei, senior lecturer at INALCO. Study of Chinese stampings compared with the practice developed at Notre Dame, and presentation of students’ work.
With the support of the ANR, Altergraphy ‘When writing becomes calligraphy: medieval inscribed landscapes and their modern reception’.
Commissariat
- Béatrice Quette, curator, head of Asian and Islamic collections.
- Valentine Dubard de Gaillarbois, curator-restorer of graphic arts
- Cécile Huguet‑Broquet, curator-restorer of graphic arts
- Assisted by Louise Lartillot, conservation assistant, Japan Foundation scholarship
- Santiago Hardy, rope access technician on the Notre Dame de Paris construction site
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