On a latest go to to the Notre-Dame de Paris, the Twelfth-century cathedral was bustling with a gradual stream of tourists who had come contained in the Gothic monument from a wintery afternoon. It appeared extra packed than it had been earlier than its closure in 2019, after the collapse of its iconic spire and roof in a horrific blaze. However the line to get in moved shortly, and as soon as beneath its vaulted ceiling, the sheer dimension of the construction left room to linger. I had gone to see the stained-glass home windows designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc within the Nineteenth century, adorning six of the south-side chapels alongside the nave—earlier than they’re changed.
Viollet-le-Duc’s home windows, geometric and floral-patterned stained-glass grisailles, or gentle gray-scale panes accented with colourful sections, have been put in as a part of his main restoration of Notre-Dame between 1844 and 1864. In the meantime, earlier that week, I had gone to the Grand Palais, equally bustling, to see life-size fashions of the proposed substitutes, a figurative retelling of the Pentecost, by modern artist Claire Tabouret.
These two units of home windows are on the middle of a so-called “stained-glass quarrel,” because the French media repeatedly calls it, or the extra poetic “home windows of discord,” as Le Monde put it. In late 2023, following the 2019 blaze that just about engulfed all of Notre-Dame, French president Emmanuel Macron, in settlement with Laurent Ulrich, the Archbishop of Paris, introduced a undertaking to fee a brand new set of stained-glass home windows by a residing artist for six of the seven stained-glass home windows within the chapels alongside the southern aspect of the nave, as a “modern gesture” to breathe new life into the centuries-old construction.
From eight finalists, Tabouret’s six painted designs, which shall be translated into stained glass with grasp artisans on the Atelier Simon-Marq, have been in the end chosen in late 2024, for the fee of a lifetime—however the bother had already been brewing effectively earlier than then.
Claire Tabouret, surrounded by the life-size maquettes created for the six stained-glass home windows of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Photograph Bebel Matsumiya, 2025/©Claire Tabouret
On the crux of the controversy is the truth that Tabouret’s new home windows would push out Viollet-le-Duc’s undamaged ones. Advocates for the undertaking argue that because the home windows date to the Nineteenth century, as a substitute of the Center Ages, they’re honest recreation to get replaced in a monument that has traditionally built-in new creative components to its partitions over the centuries. The purpose is so as to add “that means” and “magnificence,” via the story of the Pentecost, whereas sustaining “coherence” on this a part of Notre-Dame with a close-by figurative window depicting the Tree of Jesse, in line with Philippe Jost, who has led the Notre Dame restoration because the hearth. (The Tree of Jesse window is the one figurative stained-glass one on the identical, ground-floor aspect of the nave as Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric ones.) One other dismissal of the Nineteenth-century home windows has to do with them being grisailles and due to this fact not as colourful as one may anticipate of a stained-glass window. Tabouret’s design, in contrast, is a riot of explosive shade.
However as a categorized UNESCO heritage website, and per tips set by the 1964 Venice Constitution, subtracting something as main as these towering, ornate home windows from the Notre-Dame isn’t fairly that easy.
A petition towards this “modern gesture” has garnered over 335,000 signatures, and main as much as the announcement of Tabouret’s profitable designs, the CNPA, the nation’s fee on structure and heritage, voted towards it in July 2024, whereas the Academie des Beaux-Arts issued a press release opposing it in December 2023. Many have additionally interpreted the undertaking as Macron’s try at leaving his cultural stamp on the cathedral and have referred to as out his over-spending of public funds.
A fireplace at Notre-Dame de Paris in 2019 triggered the collapse of its iconic spire and roof.
Eric Bouvet/Gamma-Rapho through Getty Photographs
However amid the discord can also be a great deal of confusion each in France and overseas. So far, it’s unclear whether or not the commissioned home windows designed by Tabouret, on view on the Grand Palais via Sunday, will ever make it into the Notre-Dame as deliberate.
“Haven’t you heard,” one red-vested Norte-Dame employee requested me as they directed vacationers. “They referred to as all of it off. It’s not taking place,” the employee mentioned, with a gleeful smile, after I requested the place the brand new home windows could be positioned. One other employee concurred. Even well-informed guests I overheard discussing fashionable stained-glass home windows put in on the second ground of the cathedral a century after Viollet-le Duc’s home windows, didn’t find out about Tabouret’s undertaking.
However that isn’t the total story. Sources inform ARTnews that Tabouret’s designs are in truth being interpreted into colourful glass panes. Bernard Blistène, former director of the Centre Pompidou, who presided over the choice committee for the window fee, mentioned Tabouret and the Atelier Simon Marq are “ardently working in Reims to provide the home windows,” which must be carried out and put in, as scheduled, by the top of 2026.
A element of Tabouret’s maquette for the Notre-Dame stained-glass window design, which is an interpretation of the Feast of Pentecost.
Photograph Marten Elder, 2025/©Claire Tabouret
That’s, if a looming authorized battle doesn’t intervene. The Paris-based group Websites & Monuments says it plans to dam in courtroom any try to take away Viollet-le-Duc’s home windows. As quickly as a development allow to that finish is formally delivered—a step that’s broadly anticipated within the coming weeks or months, although it isn’t a assure—the group can have their probability to legally contest it. (The regional prefect tasked with granting a development allow, might additionally theoretically refuse it, although that’s unlikely; his workplace didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
“We are going to urgently seize a decide to droop the set up of the home windows, to permit the decide to research the case,” Julien Lacaze, president of Websites & Monuments, informed ARTnews. Lacaze’s group can also be interesting a November administrative courtroom resolution that shot down its argument claiming the physique in control of managing the Notre-Dame has no authority to fee a recent artwork set up.
Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric designs, which weren’t broken by the 2019, are presently put in at Notre-Dame. The stained-glass home windows within the Saint Clotilde Chapel are considered one of six slated to get replaced by Tabouret’s modern designs.
Photograph Devorah Lauter for ARTnews
Lacaze thinks his group has a case for a principal trial they goal to carry over the legality of the undertaking itself. “If we are able to show that the work of Viollet-le-Duc is of public curiosity, from an inventive or historic standpoint, together with your complete, categorized historic cathedral, we might annul the [expected] administrative resolution to grant a development allow,” mentioned Lacaze. (The cathedral’s present plan for the Viollet-le-Dec home windows is to maneuver them to a website close to Notre-Dame the place they could possibly be publicly displayed.)
Like many opponents to the undertaking, Lacaze mentioned he’s not towards modern artwork because it have been. “For us, including one thing isn’t an issue—we might add home windows within the cathedral belfries, as an illustration—however to subtract is one other concern,” he mentioned.
A element of Tabouret’s maquette for the Notre-Dame stained-glass window design, exhibiting the artist’s rendering of Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric home windows, which hers will change, within the background.
Photograph Claire Dorn, 2025/©Claire Tabouret
What’s in a Modern Gesture?
Having visited Tabouret’s Grand Palais exhibition forward of my go to to Notre-Dame, I used to be capable of simply spot the designated home windows awaiting alternative as a result of the artist has painted elements of Viollet-le-Duc’s nature-inspired home windows into her personal design as an homage to the creative predecessor to whose legacy she is going to now be without end tied.
Now 44, Tabouret has been a rising expertise of the Parisian and worldwide modern artwork scenes for a few decade. Identified for her color-rich, expressive and haunting figurative works, the artist, who can also be presently the topic of a retrospective on the Museum Voorlinden within the Netherlands, has been thrust into the worldwide highlight since being chosen, considerably unexpectedly, for the fee. On the opening of her Dutch exhibition, Tabouret informed the Guardian, “It’s not very French to alter stuff,” in reference to the Notre-Dame controversy. Concerning the fee’s critics, she added, “These are individuals who hate the undertaking, it doesn’t matter what.”
In an in-depth 2025 profile with Le Monde, Tabouret took a extra conciliatory tone in describing her resolution to tackle the thorny Notre-Dame undertaking. As a result of her mom is English, her father French, and so they come from differing social courses, she defined that she has felt a want since her youth “to carry individuals collectively, to say: ‘Wait, let me clarify what the opposite aspect is like.’ Discovering myself right now in a undertaking that sparks controversy and attempting to carry individuals collectively, with out vanity or certainty, I inform myself that maybe that is my future. That that is why I’m an artist: as a result of I can embrace doubt, human ambiguity, the actual fact of not understanding.”
Tabouret declined to remark additional for this story, referring again to her feedback to the Guardian and Le Monde.
However her feedback to Le Monde, additionally level to the center of her strategy to the fee.The works, which might attain excessive up into the cathedral’s Gothic arches, depict people of assorted backgrounds and ethnicities gathering collectively. One of many strongest of those is a frontal portrait of the Virgin Mary, who stands out as a transferring image of feminine energy.
A element of Tabouret’s maquette for the Notre-Dame stained-glass window design, exhibiting the Virgin Mary.
Photograph Marten Elder, 2025/©Claire Tabouret
They’ve additionally satisfied some preliminary skeptics. “I used to be swept away,” mentioned Louvre curator Nicolas Milovanovic, who admitted to having initially signed the petition towards the modern window undertaking. “To me, these stained-glass home windows seem like worthy of Notre-Dame,” he mentioned in a February YouTube video.
On the Tabouret exhibition, my inquiries to guests concerning the stained-glass debate once more led to surprising responses, however the tables had surprisingly turned. Nobody questioned whether or not the brand new home windows could be put in in Notre-Dame, and several other individuals mentioned that they had not identified (till I requested about it) that any trade-off with current home windows was deliberate. Whereas the Grand Palais present refers to Viollet-le-Duc’s authentic designs, it doesn’t spotlight the truth that they’re nonetheless hanging within the cathedral, or that they have been just lately restored.
“Do you imply the unique home windows weren’t broken?” requested an incredulous Vivianne Cousin. Her buddy Evelyne Roussel sarcastically quipped, “They will need to have give you this undertaking as a result of the French state has some huge cash.” (The whole undertaking was given an preliminary funds of €4 million, or about $4.6 million.)
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus, south elevation of Notre-Dame de Paris, competitors drawing, 1843.
Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, Charenton-le-Pont, F/1996/83/-1840
‘An Integral A part of the Imaginative and prescient’
The 2019 hearth at Notre-Dame impressed artwork historian Barry Bergdoll and architectural historian Martin Bressani to cocurate an exhibition on the Bard Graduate Heart Gallery on Viollet-le-Duc. (The bodily exhibition is on view in Manhattan till Could 24; it is also accompanied by an on-line model.)
Bergdoll mentioned the “aftermath of the hearth in Notre Dame appeared like a second to grasp the range and complexity of Viollet-le-Duc’s creation. It’s not put along with polemical intent.”
The exhibition explores Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural concept and the way it was knowledgeable by his many drawings, which offered the premise for his restoration of lots of France’s medieval monuments, which additionally included the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, and the medieval fortress-walls of Carcassonne.
To Bergdoll, Viollet-le-Duc’s Norte-Dame home windows, “are an integral a part of the imaginative and prescient, the ornament, and notably of the lighting and luminosity of the cathedral. The argument that they’re grisailles and that they don’t symbolize topics and due to this fact are expendable is totally absurd,” he mentioned.
The home windows’ gentle grey, non-figurative glass permits extra gentle to enter the cathedral, achieved through its distinction between gentle grays and colourful accents. The purpose was additionally to “create a homogeneous system that governs your complete cathedral,” Bressani mentioned. “That’s what Viollet-le-Duc was involved about: bringing an total coherence within the shade and lighting system of the cathedral.”
He added that the intense modern imagery of Tabouret’s designs would “destroy the general expertise of the Gothic cathedral.”
Blistène, the pinnacle of the jury that chosen Tabouret, bristled at this accusation. Certainly, the artist selected her colours in order that when mixed collectively, they might kind a white gentle, he mentioned. (The cathedral additionally requested her to keep up the inside’s total, current lighting.)
“Saying that Claire Tabouret’s proposal destroys the concord of the present home windows,” Blistène mentioned in an e mail, “is actually a case of not wanting to acknowledge that, quite the opposite, her proposal is extraordinarily respectful of the theme and its iconography, of the colours and the sunshine emanating from the constructing.”
A element of Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric designs for the Saint Denis Chapel at Notre-Dame.
Photograph Devorah Lauter for ARTnews
Marc Chauveau, a Dominican friar who additionally sat on the choice committee that selected Tabouret, identified that the partitions of the chapels in Notre-Dame have been stripped naked of the murals designed by Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration and that since that damaging occasion within the Sixties, they haven’t essentially cohered to his total imaginative and prescient.
Tabouret agreed, saying in her Le Monde interview that there’s a lack of coherence to the southern chapel decor, pointing to the figurative Tree of Jesse window. “[Y]ou can clearly see that the argument of a Viollet-le-Duc imaginative and prescient doesn’t maintain water,” she mentioned, “that it wasn’t his alternative, however relatively a call made by default—a query of funds?”
There may be additionally the view that the cathedral is an unfinished, work-in-progress, which benefited from centuries of what was then modern artwork over its 863-year historical past. “All through the centuries, the church at all times trusted the artists of the time,” mentioned Chauveau, noting that the strategy additionally had the liturgical function of reaching new generations through modern types of expression.
“The need for an training tailored to the minds, sensibilities and constraints of every period – has allowed Notre-Dame to be, through the years, a spot for expression of up to date artwork,” wrote Archbishop Laurent Ulrich within the catalog for the Grand Palais exhibition. “We needed [the cathedral] to stay trustworthy to her vocation, by adorning her with new artworks that talk to our time, that talk for our time.”
Bressani, the artwork historian, countered that such additions, notably beneath the path of Viollet-le-Duc, have been “set inside a shared, Gothic architectural language” that used altering creative tendencies in service of “restoring the cathedral to its correct kind,” as greatest and as creatively, as attainable. Tabouret’s proposed home windows actually steps away from any type of neo-Gothic interpretation, however whether or not or not they cohere to the centuries-old magnificence of Notre-Dame will doubtless solely be decided if they’re ever put in.
