Ateliers d'Art Sacré

The Ateliers d'Art Sacré (Studios of Sacred Art) were workshops and a school founded in Paris on 15 November 1919 by Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallières, part of a postwar movement to reconcile the Church with modern art. Their aim was to train artists and craftspeople to furnish churches - many ruined by the war - with religious works traditional in spirit yet modern in style, rejecting both academic artifice and avant-garde abstraction. Orders for major projects followed, above all the mural decoration of the church of the Saint-Esprit in Paris (1928-1935), painted by some forty artists, and the churches built for the exhibitions of 1925 and 1931. Church commissions never paid their way, and the Ateliers closed in 1947.

Defining characteristics

• Large collaborative mural and stained-glass programs for whole churches
• Modernized religious imagery: simplified, monumental figures
• Craft workshops - glass, sculpture, embroidery - run alongside painting
• Decorative harmony of architecture, image, and furnishings as one ensemble
• Muted, luminous color suited to liturgical space

Key figures

• Maurice Denis (1870-1943) — Nabi painter who co-founded the Ateliers and trained a generation
• Georges Desvallières (1861-1950) — Painter who co-founded the Ateliers after his son's death in the war
• Marie-Alain Couturier (1897-1954) — Dominican member who later argued for modern art in churches

Example works

• Mural decoration of the church of the Saint-Esprit — Ateliers d'Art Sacré (some 40 artists, incl. Denis & Desvallières) (1928-1935)
• Way of the Cross, Saint-Michel de Picpus — Ateliers d'Art Sacré, under Henri de Maistre (1934)
• Notre-Dame-des-Missions (Catholic Missions Pavilion, Colonial Exhibition) — Ateliers d'Art Sacré (1931)

Sources

• Ateliers d'Art Sacré - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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