A show of French painter Claire Tabouret’s designs for six new stained-glass windows for the Notre-Dame cathedral will open to the public tomorrow, reports the Art Newspaper. The Los Angeles–based artist’s full-scale, ink-on-paper maquettes for the windows will be displayed at Paris’s Grand Palais museum through March 15.
The new windows will replace 19th-century lights installed by architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, who won a commission to restore the cathedral in 1844. The original windows, which feature simple geometric forms and a minimal palette, were not damaged in the 2019 fire that destroyed Notre Dame’s spire and roof, and the decision made by French president Emmanuel Macron and Paris’s archbishop Laurent Ulrich to replace them with the work of a contemporary artist faced significant opposition from preservationists. (A petition asking Macron to reconsider generated more than 147,000 signatures.)
Nevertheless, an international competition was held to choose a design for the replacement windows, with the caveat that it be figurative. Tabouret’s proposal, which will be translated into stained glass by the famed atelier Simon-Marq, was chosen from a slate of 110 submissions and depicts the Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples. While the foreground figures are executed in Tabouret’s own expressive style, the background of each window quotes from Viollet-le-Duc’s original design.
“Every time there is a new artistic intervention in a historic part of Paris, there is a controversy, and it’s interesting to be part of that history,” Tabouret told the Art Newspaper. “The Buren columns in the Palais-Royal, I. M. Pei’s Pyramid at the Louvre—they go on to become beloved parts of the city. Change should be made with caution, and this project is very cautious, very gentle, harmonious.”
