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Claire Tabouret can draw a clear line between before and after Notre Dame. Before she was chosen from more than 100 artists to design six new stained-glass windows for the cathedral – reopened in 2024, five years after it almost burned to the ground – Tabouret had a select group of admirers (one of them the French tycoon and art collector François Pinault), but she was hardly a household name.
That has changed – for better and for worse. At the end of last month, the first major solo retrospective of her work opened at the Museum Voorlinden outside The Hague. In Paris, Tabouret’s window designs are on display at the Grand Palais, before being installed at Notre Dame later this year at an estimated cost of €4m (£3.3m). The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and Paris’s archbishop have been enthusiastic in their support, but the plan to integrate a modern artist into a historic landmark has also provoked protests, petitions and claims of cultural and spiritual vandalism.
Tabouret refuses to take the critics’ complaints personally. “These are people who hate the project, no matter what,” she says when we meet in the library at the Voorlinden, amid sweeping glass and 40,000 books ranged on wooden shelves. “They didn’t even really look at the designs. They go on their computers to spread hate, but you can see from the messages they write that they don’t really know what it’s about. And I’m also receiving a lot of love, which is very nice.”
The retrospective at the Voorlinden, Weaving waters, Weaving Gestures, is a testament to the versatility of her art, and an exploration of identity and human relationships with paintings on canvas, faux fur and Plexiglas, bronzes and ceramics, and works reproduced on tapestries and rugs. In almost every work, the colours are intense and overwhelmingly vibrant.
From the 50 or more diverse works on display at the museum, it is easy to see why Tabouret caught the Notre Dame jury’s attention.
Visitors enter to a series of self-portraits in which she depicts herself variously as a vampire with a blood-stained mouth, a Joan of Arc figure in armour, and casually wearing a hoodie. In reflecting herself, Tabouret says, she is also holding a mirror to the viewer. “The human face is like the surface of water, always in motion, always elusive, never still,” she says.
The centrepiece of one gallery is a bronze sculpture of swimmers, surrounded by paintings of larger groups of children in bathing suits; another features a series of Sèvres porcelain vases, each with the face of a weeping woman, called The Mourners. The technique of removing colour from the painted porcelain background while also adding new paint was one she later applied on Plexiglas to produce the images for the Notre Dame windows.
Tabouret did not immediately consider applying to design the Notre Dame windows after learning the competition was looking for a contemporary artist.
After the fire in April 2019, Macron promised the cathedral would be rebuilt within five years with a “contemporary gesture”, a suggestion that inspired all manner of madcap ideas: a glass spire; a 300ft carbon-fibre flame; a swimming pool on the roof; a covered garden. When it was announced, the notion of creating something new, which meant replacing the undamaged windows in six chapels on the medieval cathedral’s southern aisle, caused a furore.
The existing seven-metre high monochrome windows are often described as “original”; in fact, they were installed when the building underwent a renovation in the mid-19th century. Experts say their value is more historic than aesthetic, but a committee of the culture ministry opposed the plan to replace them, as did the influential Académie des Beaux-Arts. Activists have unsuccessfully appealed to the courts and to heritage authorities to prevent their removal.
“I was intrigued,” says Tabouret, who was living in the US at the time. “It’s not very French to change stuff so I thought that interesting as well as brave and fresh. They specifically wanted figurative painting, which also isn’t very French. France really loves abstract projects in public spaces so this was very different.” In the end, she submitted her application 15 minutes before the deadline.
After reaching a shortlist of eight artists, Tabouret flew to Paris to present her designs to a jury. The specified theme was the Pentecost, the biblical moment when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles in Jerusalem 50 days after Easter, marking the beginning of the church. “We were supposed to make six sketches … I did 60. I got obsessed. You couldn’t pull me out of this. I was deep-diving into the Pentecost and my studio was just Pentecost everywhere!” Tabouret recalls.
She adds: “I was not brought up with religion, but I come from a place of love and respect and interest for the Catholic church. When I read about the Pentecost I was arrested by the beauty and poetry of the text.”
In western ecclesiastical art, Pentecost is traditionally illustrated with the Virgin Mary seated among the disciples, whose crowns are topped with flames. The four principal symbols are fire, wind, a dove and the breath of God.
Tabouret’s designs do not break with this tradition. They trace the narrative with groups of people and vivid landscapes, including a turbulent sea and wind-lashed trees in a palette of vibrant blues, reds, greens and purples. “I think the jury wanted the images to be understood by everyone, which is absolutely how I paint. I’m not trying to create any traps or mysteries.”
Her windows are being made at the Atelier Simon-Marq, a nearly 400-year-old glass workshop founded in Reims that has previously worked with artists such as Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. Each window is made up of about 50 pieces of stained glass.
The Grand Palais exhibition D’un seul souffle (With one breath) follows the process of designing the full-scale models. This involved Tabouret painting the image in reverse on transparent Plexiglas, using stencils and then monotype to print each on thick paper. Other than being asked not to disturb the cathedral’s inner “white light”, she says she was given “complete artistic freedom” by the church authorities.
“When you live in a country with so much history, so much architecture and heritage you cannot just freeze time,” she says. “The question is, how do we create a harmonious dialogue between new layers in buildings like Notre Dame that are made of layers? If you stop those layers it makes no sense in my opinion.”
Tabouret, 44, left the US last year and moved back to France. She now lives 90 minutes south of Paris with her American husband, Nathan Thelen, who designs wooden furniture, their two- and three-year-old daughters – and a menagerie of chickens, rabbits and a dog.
While she is generous with her explanations and answers, there is a sense she would much rather be back in her studio. One of the exhibits features paint-spattered trousers, boots and a sweater, her workwear. “I’d rather be wearing these than what I’m in now,” she says.
Family legend has it that she decided to be a painter aged four when her parents, who are music teachers, took her to see Monet’s Water Lilies in Paris.
“I remember the moment and I know the feeling, because I still get it when I see the Water Lilies or a painting I love; I feel an urgency 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 paint right now’, it was that urgent.”
