The door didn’t close, rain dripped from the ceiling, a brazier served as a heater and the water she fetched from the café next door froze in a glass. Those who knew Claire Tabouret in the early 2010s recall a frigid studio in Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris. There, amid towering canvases of untouched faces, the young woman with her calm voice and decisive brushstrokes would explain, in front of the worn-out sofa where visitors took their seat, why she needed to be there. And why they did too.
Laurent Dumas was one of those early collectors who frequented the sofa: “It all told the story of how invested and inhabited she was by her work,” said the still enchanted president of the Emerige real estate group, which is planning a major cultural hub with a contemporary art center on the Ile Seguin in Boulogne-Billancourt, a wealthy Parisian suburb. “The first thing she did in the morning, before launching into these large formats, was a self-portrait. I saw it as a form of introspection, a way of marking the trace of her days.”
At the time, Tabouret was not yet 30. Just over a decade later, it was this mezzo voce, this ethereal way of claiming one’s place without demanding it, of affirming without proclaiming, of painting without imposing, that led the jury, gathered around Bernard Blistène, the former head of the Centre Pompidou, to entrust her with creating the six contemporary stained glass windows for the chapels along the south aisle of the nave of Notre-Dame de Paris. It’s quite an honor to be part of a history that goes back a thousand years. And an immense responsibility to carry out this €4 million project, wanted by the government and clergy, but fiercely contested by heritage defenders who see the replacement of Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th-century geometric stained glass as nothing short of blasphemy. What was meant to be an artistic endeavor has become a media-political storm.
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