Artnet_ In the countdown to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, the Olympic torch relay’s Bastille Day leg made stops at the Louvre and the Center Pompidou. Among the torch bearers, who number 10,000 in total, was French artist JR, known for his politically engaged public art installations.

JR received the flame outside the museum from Sandra Laoura, a French moguls skier who won a bronze metal in the 2006 games. As he stepped inside the Louvre, he passed along the flame.

“Now the flame will go and continue through the whole museum,” JR said in a video on Instagram capturing the moment. “Pretty crazy. Merci!”

The artist has ties to both the games and the museum.

In 2016, he effectively made I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid disappear, covering it with a photograph of the Louvre courtyard behind it. And in 2019, he created the illusion that the pyramid was emerging out of a deep rock chasm.

And for the Rio Olympics, he installed two larger-than-life photographs of athletes in motion on construction scaffolding in the city.

“Walking the Olympic torch through the Louvre was a wild convergence of moments for me,” the artist told me. “The museum is such an iconic, precious monument in Paris.”

Once the torch was inside the Louvre, French dancer and choreographer Marie-Claude Pietragalla carried it past masterworks such as Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, dramatically posing to mirror the painting.