‘Changing things is not very French’: how Claire Taboret’s stained-glass windows shed new light on Notre-Dame | Notre Dame

CLear Tabouret can draw a clear line between before and after Notre Dame. Before she was chosen from among more than 100 artists to design six new stained-glass windows for the cathedral — which reopened in 2024, five years after it nearly burned down — Taboret had a select group of admirers (one of them the French businessman and art collector François Pinault), but she was not a household name.

That has changed – for better and for worse. At the end of last month, the first major solo exhibition of her work opened at the Vorlinden Museum outside The Hague. In Paris, Taborite window designs are on display in the Grand Palais, before being installed in Notre Dame later this year at an estimated cost of €4m (£3.3m). French President Emmanuel Macron and the Archbishop of Paris were enthusiastic in their support, but the plan to incorporate a modern artist into a historic landmark has also sparked protests, petitions and allegations of cultural and spiritual vandalism.

Taborit refuses to take critics’ complaints personally. “These are the people who hate the project, no matter what,” she says when we meet in the library in Vorlinden, amid the sweeping glass and 40,000 books lined up on wooden shelves. “They don’t even look at the designs. They use their computers to spread hate, but you can see from the messages they write that they don’t really know what it’s about. I’m also getting a lot of love, which is very nice.”

The retrospective exhibition in Vorlinden, Water Weaving, Textile Gestures, It is a testament to the diversity of her art, exploring identity and human relationships through paintings on canvas, faux fur, vitreous, bronze, ceramics, and reproduced works on tapestries and carpets. In almost every work, the colors are intense and quite vibrant.

Among the fifty or so diverse works on display at the museum, it is easy to see why Tabouret caught the attention of the Notre Dame jury.

Visitors enter a series of portraits in which she variously depicts herself as a vampire with a blood-stained mouth, an armour-clad Joan of Arc, and casually wearing a hoodie. When she reflects herself, Taborit says, she also holds a mirror up to the viewer. “The human face is like the surface of water, always in motion, always out of reach, never standing still,” she says.

The centerpiece of one exhibition is a bronze statue of swimmers, surrounded by paintings of larger groups of children in swimsuits. Another features a series of Sèvres porcelain vases, each with the face of a weeping woman called the Smiths. The technique of removing color from a painted ceramic background while adding new paint was also a technique that she later applied to plexiglass to produce images for the windows of Notre Dame.

Taborette did not immediately think about applying to design the windows of Notre Dame after learning that the competition was looking for a contemporary artist.

After the fire in April 2019, Macron promised to rebuild the cathedral within five years with a “contemporary gesture,” a proposal that inspired all sorts of crazy ideas: a glass tower; a 300-foot carbon fiber flame; Rooftop swimming pool; Covered garden. When it was announced, the idea of ​​creating something new, which would mean replacing intact windows in six chapels in the south aisle of the medieval cathedral, caused a sensation.

The seven-meter-high monochromatic windows are Often described as “authentic”; In fact, they were installed when the building underwent renovation in the mid-19th century. Experts say that its value is more historical than aesthetic, but a committee from the Ministry of Culture opposed the plan to replace it, as did the influential Academy of Fine Arts. Activists have unsuccessfully appealed to the courts and heritage authorities to prevent its removal.

“It intrigued me,” says Taborit, who was living in the United States at the time. “Changing things is not a very French thing, so I thought that was interesting and brave and new. They specifically wanted figurative painting, which is also not very French. France really likes abstract projects in public spaces, so it was very different.” In the end, she submitted her application 15 minutes before the deadline.

After reaching the shortlist of eight artists, Taborette traveled to Paris to present her designs to the jury. The specific theme was Pentecost, the biblical moment when the Holy Spirit descends on the apostles in Jerusalem 50 days after Easter, marking the beginning of the church. “We were supposed to do six drawings… I did 60 drawings. I became obsessed. You can’t get me out of this. I was deep into Pentecost and my studio was just Pentecost all over the place!” Taborit recalls.

She adds: “I was not raised in religion, but I came from a place that loves, respects, and cares for the Catholic Church. When I read about Pentecost, the beauty of the text and its poetry caught my attention.”

In Western church art, Pentecost is traditionally painted with the Virgin Mary seated among the disciples, her crowns surmounted by flames. The four main symbols are fire, wind, dove, and the breath of God.

Taborite designs do not contradict this tradition. They trace the narrative with groups of people and lively landscapes, including a turbulent sea and trees whipped by the wind in a palette of vibrant blues, reds, greens and purples. “I think the jury wanted the images to be understood by everyone, and that’s just the way I paint. I’m not trying to create any traps or mysteries.”

Its windows are manufactured at Atelier Simon-Marq, a nearly 400-year-old glass workshop founded in Reims that previously worked with artists such as Marc Chagall and Joan Miro. Each window consists of approximately 50 pieces of stained glass.

Grand Palace Exhibition D’un seul souffle (In One Breath) follows an extensive prototyping process. This involved drawing the image taborets in reverse onto clear plexiglass, using stencils and then monoprinting to print each one onto thick paper. Other than being asked not to disturb the cathedral’s inner “white light,” she says she was given “complete artistic freedom” by church authorities.

“When you live in a country that has a lot of history, a lot of architecture and heritage, you can’t just freeze time,” she says. “The question is, how do we create a harmonious dialogue between the new layers in buildings like Notre Dame that are made of layers? If you stop those layers, it makes no sense in my opinion.”

Taborette, 44, left the United States last year and returned to France. She now lives 90 minutes south of Paris with her American husband, Nathan Thielen, who designs wooden furniture, and their two daughters, aged two and three – and a menagerie of chickens, rabbits and dogs.

Although she was generous in her explanations and answers, there was a sense that she would rather be back in her studio. One exhibit features pants, boots and a paint-splattered jacket, her work attire. “I’d rather wear these clothes than what I’m wearing now,” she says.

Family legend has it that she decided to become a painter at the age of four when her parents, music teachers, took her to see Monet’s Water Lilies in Paris.

“I remember that moment and I know that feeling, because I still feel it when I see water lilies or a painting I love; I feel an urgent desire to paint,” she says. “I didn’t know the artist or his paintings, I just knew I wanted to paint. My mum tells people I went to see the person sitting in the gallery and said: ‘I need to paint now’. It was very urgent.”