Feature : Creative arts very much alive

1

1.Notre-Dame de Salagon (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence) by Aurélie Nemours, Duchemin workshops (Paris). 2.Abraham, stained glass window by Gérard Garouste in Notre-Dame de Talant, Pierre-Alain Parot workshop (Aiserey). 3.Stained glass window by Olivier Debré, Lugagnac (Dordogne). 4.Conques abbey, stained glass windows by Pierre Soulages, Jean-Dominique Fleury workshop (Toulouse). 5.Notre-Dame des Sablons in Aigues-Mortes, by Claude Viallat, Bernard Dhonneur workshop (Marseille). 6.Digne cathedral, stained glass windows by David Rabinowitch, Duchemin workshops. 7.Nevers cathedral by Jean-Michel Alberola, Duchemin workshops.

In the course of twenty years, contemporary artists and master glaziers have revolutionized the art of stained glass in France.

Stimulated by two decades of public commissions from the Ministry of Culture, some fifty well known artists, supported by particularly innovative master glaziers, have shaken up the art of sculpting natural light, which had seemed immutable since the days of cathedrals.

Long mere decorative features, modern stained glass windows in religious buildings now obey more original rules, more effectively exploiting the creative potential of glass, the distinctive character of each designer and the design of the building.

Thus the replacement of the 360 m2 of glazing in Saint-Louis de Blois cathedral (Loir-et-Cher), blown out by the bombardments of 1944, was entrusted to Jan Dibbets, a Dutch artist who lives and works in Paris, and Jean Mauret, one of today’s greatest master glaziers.

Taking his inspiration from the very particular light of the nearby Loire, his stained glass windows form a line of brightly coloured symbols that stand out against the clarity of the background: the red letters of the words of the Agnus dei fall like drops of blood...

Nevers cathedral (Nièvre), itself, has, since 1992, been host to no fewer than four great designers of contemporary stained glass windows. The geometric curves of the windows designed by the conceptual artist Gottfried Honegger allow intense rays of purple to filter through in response to François Rouan’s windows, consisting of fragments of coloured glass inspired by Matisse’s works on paper. The ambulatory was entrusted to Jean-Michel Alberola, who combines abstraction, representation and conceptualism, and the chancel to Claude Viallat, founder of the Supports-Surfaces movement.

Some of these works are already considered to be masterpieces of a new religious art. With the support and assistance of master glazier Jean-Dominique Fleury, the painter Pierre Soulages has filled the one hundred and six windows of the abbey church in Conques (Aveyron) with opalescent glass streaked with parallel plumb lines, which, as they move, make the walls shimmer.

It took the artist four hundred attempts at CIRVA (the international glass research centre) then three hundred more at the Saint-Gobain Vitrages research centre to find the recipe for a new glass that would suit his work. White, translucent or opaque, it sublimates the Romanesque building by diffusing natural light in every variation of its chromatic scale.

Distinctive for his figurative and spiritual approach, Gérard Garouste has illustrated the subject of the nativity at Notre-Dame de Talant (Côte-d’Or) by juxtaposing two types of glass - one modern, the other, from the mediaeval tradition. A blown crown glass, it produces a wonderful low-angled light. To make these fragile disks of glass to order, master glazier Pierre-Alain Parot had to set up a workshop in the building itself. The result is breathtaking - adorned with its forty-five figurative stained glass windows, the 12th century church becomes an arch of light, dazzling with emotion.