Not On Display

An entertaining satire of nudity in the Louvre, Not on Display is a deeply serious, award-winning graphic novel examining the history of the female body in art and our society.  

When one of the greatest museums in the world gave the illustrator Zelba free rein to make a graphic novel about great art, she knew exactly what she would do: address a double standard. She’d seen the Louvre’s halls filled with sexualized female bodies, ogled at by crowds and sometimes even groped, and wanted to turn the tables. What if, she dreamed, those naked bodies refused to be the objects of our gaze? What if the female nudes in the Louvre went on strike? 

The result, a co-edition with Editions Louvre, is a critique of great artists and great museums. Awarded the prestigious Prix Sceneario and the Prix Artemisia in France, the pages are filled with unforgettable characters, such as a heroic cleaner who can speak to statues and a museum director who secretly offloads his work onto his sister. Featuring well-known masterpieces, this entertaining romp displays one of the world’s greatest art collections in a whole new light.

Wiebke Petersen, aka Zelba, was born in West Germany in 1973. Before becoming an illustrator, she was world junior rowing champion. In 2019, she published her first book, Dans le même bateau, an autobiographical account of her experience as a top sportswoman in East Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two years later, she returned with another autobiographical story, Mes mauvaises filles, about the right to die with dignity. With Not on Display (originally published in French as Le Grand Incident) she offers us a “fantasticomic” tale of the sexualization of the female body in art. 

Alice Yang is a PhD student in French at Yale University. Her translation of Abounding Freedom, a collection of prose poetry by Julien Gracq, was published by World Poetry Books in 2024. She divides her time between New Haven, Connecticut, and Lyon, France.