Claire Tabouret’s Controversial Window Designs for Notre-Dame Go on View

In ordinary times, landing a show at Paris’s Grand Palais would be cause for unqualified celebration. But the focus of “Claire Tabouret: In a Single Breath” is no ordinary subject. In an upstairs gallery, the artist’s full-sized maquettes for Notre-Dame Cathedral’s controversial new stained glass windows tower overhead.

Reaching more than 20 feet in height, each of the six maquettes is composed of around 50 pieces that correspond to sections of the windows, ones Tabouret painted in reverse on plexiglass and then printed onto very thick paper. “I wanted to stay as close as possible to the designs created by the master glassmakers,” the artist said.

After the medieval church nearly burned to the ground in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a competition to replace the windows on its south aisle. They were the work of the 19th-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw Notre-Dame’s last major restoration in the 1840s, and were considered rather lackluster. Last December, Tabouret’s designs were chosen by a committee out of more than 100 submissions. Not everyone, however, was happy.

Although the roof’s melting and collapse meant the windows had to be carefully cleaned of lead powder, the panes themselves were undamaged and activists argued replacing them violated the 1964 Venice Charter, which offers guidelines on the preservation of historic buildings. The French architectural conservation group Sites and Monuments led the charge. First, it launched a petition that has received more than 328,000 signatures against “stamping Notre-Dame with the mark of the 21st century.” Next, it took a legal case to Paris’s administrative court arguing that France’s historic monuments legislation prohibited replacing the windows. The court didn’t agree and ruled in late November that installing new windows fell within the scope of the state’s authority.

Sites and Monuments has said it will appeal the decision, but time is running out. Tabouret’s designs are already with Atelier Simon-Marq, a nearly 400-year-old master glass workshop that has previously worked with the likes of Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. What does the artist make of the pushback? Tabouret, who recently returned to France after a decade in Los Angeles, has said publicly she is reminded of the noise that once surrounded Daniel Buren’s black-and-white columns in the Palais Royal or I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid. Both interventions are now seen as Paris icons.

As for the windows themselves, it’s not as though Tabouret had completely free artistic rein. They depict the theme designated by the Archbishop of Paris: Pentecost, the moment the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus’s disciples that marks the birth of the church. Tabouret was also required to balance the colors across her windows to ensure the church’s interior retains its harmonious “white light,” a process that required consultation with Notre-Dame. Accordingly, the blues, greens, and purples even out across the sweep of the window designs.

Still, they are expressionist and have a modern sensibility. In one, a circle of men hold hands, their heads bowed. In another, a diverse crowd in primary colored robes marches in an orderly procession. Two of the windows are of nature, depicting a lone tree bent by an unseen force and the deep purple of a brewing storm.

The windows do not completely do away with the designs of their predecessors and liberally deploy Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric patterns in the background. The influence of more contemporary artists who worked in glass is also evident, and Tabouret has acknowledged being inspired by Chagall’s “lightness” and Matisse’s use of color.

“I was swept away by the beauty and poetry of the Pentecost,” Tabouret said. “This idea of ​​harmony, of people managing to unite and understand each other despite the diversity of their languages, this wild hope, I wanted to be a part of it.”