Claire Tabouret to Design Contemporary Stained-Glass Windows for Notre-Dame
173Dec. 20, 2024
French figurative painterClaire Tabourethas been named the winner of a competition organized by the French Ministry of Culture to design contemporary stained-glass windows for six chapels in the storiedNotre-Damede Paris. The Gothic cathedral opened to the public earlier this month after being restored following a massive 2019 blaze that caused extensive damage to the historic structure and saw its nineteenth-century spire collapse.
French president Emmanuel Macron and Laurent Ulrich, the Archbishop of Paris, approved the choice of Tabouret, who was selected by a committee from an eight-person shortlist winnowed down from 110 entrants, with a mandate from the Catholic Church to choose a figurative artist. The forty-three-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, known for a practice that has a “feverish feel, something fervid roiling below the grave expressions of her composed subjects,”as Sarah Moroz wrote in 2021 onArtforum.com, has said she plans to depict people from a range of cultures celebrating the Pentecost.
Tabouret will work with the studio of Reims-based master glassmaker Simon-Marq, established in 1640, on realizing the windows. The glass workshop restored the windows of Notre-Dame de Reims after the cathedral was bombed in World War II; in the 1950s, it began working on stained-glass windows with contemporary artists including Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. Most recently, it collaborated with Imi Knoebel to produce windows for the Reims cathedral, and with Jean-Paul Agosti to make windows for the fire-damaged Sacred Heart Church of Geneva. Tabouret and Simon-Marq will spend six months researching the project and eighteen months producing the windows, which are expected to be completed and installed by year-end 2026.
The project faces challenges from those resistant to the idea of replacing the windows that were designed for Notre-Dame in the nineteenth century by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, which emerged from the inferno in serviceable shape, though in need of cleaning. The Art Newspaper reports that the organization Sites and Monuments is set to file a lawsuit to stop the change of windows, citing the principles of the Venice Charter regarding the restoration of historical buildings, while the members of the National Commission of Heritage and Architecture voted unanimously against the change. To date, a petition to halt the project has garnered 243,000 signatures.