Paris’s freshly renovated Notre-Dame Cathedral will soon get a distinctively 21st-century touch, having unveiled plans to install new stained glass windows by 43-year-old French artist Claire Tabouret.

The famous medieval church, which very nearly burned to the ground on April 16, 2019, reopened to the public this month. The monumental €846 million ($865 million) rebuilding effort was delayed in 2020 and concerns about lead contamination, but still took just five and a half years, very nearly matching President Emmanuel Macron’s originally promised timeline.

Tabouret was one of over 100 artists who submitted their designs to create six new windows for the chapels on the south side of the cathedral, which are the work of 19th-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. (In 1844, he oversaw the last major restoration of the church, which was built between 1163 and 1345.)

Her winning designs feature groups of people in prayer, and vibrant shades of turquoise, yellow, pink, and red. Tabouret will work with Atelier Simon-Marq, a master glass workshop founded in Reims, France, in 1640, to translate her vision into the medium. (The company has previously worked with artists such as Marc Chagall and Joan Miró.)

Claire Tabouret, sketches for her stained glass window designs for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Photo courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

“My work had been dedicated to figurative painting and personal subjects. I had reached a point in my life where I wanted to be of service to something bigger than me,” Tabouret told me in an email.

The artist, who lives in Los Angeles, is coming off a busy 2024 that saw her featured in the Vatican pavilion at the Venice Biennale; she also staged a solo show, “Forces Vives,” at the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, in Hauterives, France. She also has a show of new portraits opening at L.A.’s Night Gallery in February.

Claire Tabouret and Nathan Thelen, Altar (pink), 2023. Five of six works in the series, each priced at $45,000, sold from Los Angeles’s Night Gallery at FOG Art and Design in San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

Tabouret has worked in stained glass before, transferring her watercolors onto luminous glass panes in wall-mounted mahogany stands designed created by her husband, Nathan Thelen. The series, titled “Altar,” was a hit at the 2023 FOG Design and Art fair. But creating glass for Notre-Dame is on an entirely different level.

“At first, I questioned if I was worthy. There’s a great deal of audacity in this commission, which will take place in a beloved and historic building. But you have to trust contemporary artists,” she said. “In times like ours, marked by war, extreme division, and tension, this opportunity to use my art to promote unity through the theme of the Pentecost is a wonderful gesture of hope.”

Claire Tabouret, sketch for her stained glass window design featuring Saint Joseph for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Photo: Marten Elder, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

A committee headed by Bernard Blistène, former director of Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, selected proposals by Tabouret and six other finalists, including Jean-Michel Alberola, Yan Pei-Ming, Christine Safa, Gérard Traquandi, and Flavie Vincent-Petit.

The last finalist, Pascal Convert, withdrew his name from consideration after France’s National Commission for Heritage and Architecture announced its unanimous disapproval of new windows for the historic church. (He was replaced with Daniel Buren and Philippe Parreno.)

A person takes a photo with a telephone of Notre Dame De Paris cathedral before its reopening in Paris, France, on December 4, 2024. Photo by Bastien Ohier/Hans Lucas/Hans Lucas via Getty Images.

The €4 million ($4.2 million) plan to replace the 19th-century glass, announced by Macron last December, immediately sparked controversy in the French capital. For, you see, the cathedral’s windows were miraculously spared by the devastating blaze. (In total, Notre-Dame contains close to 1,100 square feet of stained glass.)

Because the lead roof melted and collapsed, the stained glass became coated in toxic lead powder, requiring an extensive—and careful—cleaning and conservation of the delicate panes. Replacing any of the existing glass, however, actually proved unnecessary.

That means that swapping the historic windows for contemporary designs is potentially in violation of the 1964 Venice Charter, which provides guidelines for preserving historic buildings. It states that “items of sculpture, painting or decoration, which form an integral part of a monument, may only be removed if this is the sole means of ensuring their preservation,” and that “the valid contributions of all periods to the building of a monument must be respected.”

Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. South rose window. Photo: Godong/UIG via Getty Images.

More than 240,000 people signed a petition opposing the plan to install contemporary stained glass—even though the plan leaves the cathedral’s famed rose window untouched. Viollet-le-Duc’s “grisaille” windows feature geometric designs on translucent glass. And according to the Art Newspaper, they are “widely considered to be somewhat lackluster in comparison with the more colorful Gothic or neo-Gothic examples in the cathedral.”

“I’ve read about the different opinions of people because I want to understand their arguments and also to take an approach that is open and two-way,” Tabouret said at a press conference unveiling her designs, as reported by Agence France Presse. “I find it a fascinating debate.”

The last time Notre Dame attempted to bring in windows by contemporary artists, in 1938, the glass was installed for just a year. Those windows, by 12 artists including André Rinuy and Jean Hébert-Stevens, are currently on view in “Notre-Dame de Paris: The Stained Glass Controversy” at the Stained Glass Center in Troyes, France, through January 5, 2025. (It took another 30 years to approve the replacement designs, by Jacques Le Chevallier.)

A photo taken on June 26, 2018 shows stained-glass windows at the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral in Paris. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images.

An op-ed in La Tribune de l’Art suggested an alternative plan to replace the clear window panes in the cathedral’s north tower, rather than those by Viollet-le-Duc. But despite the opposition, Macron is moving forward with the plan for the new windows. (Tabouret’s selection was approved by the president and Archbishop Laurent Ulrich.)

Macron did, however, abandon a similarly contentious idea to replace Viollet-le-Duc’s spire with a contemporary design chosen through an international competition. (He didn’t exactly have a choice, though, after a bill from the French Senate mandated a reconstruction faithful to the cathedral’s “last known visual state.”)

French architectural conservation group Sites et Monuments is still hoping to block the new windows, and plans to file a lawsuit, according to AFP. Should that legal effort fall short, Tabouret’s designs are slated to be installed in 2026. The existing windows would go on view at a museum.

Claire Tabouret’s next solo show will be on view at Night Gallery, 2050 Imperial Street, Los Angeles, February 15–March 29, 2025.