Five years after a fire destroyed most of the cathedral, the artist explains how her designs will give the landmark a modern makeover and the ‘contemporary gesture’ Emmanuel Macron promised
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laire 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.”
