104 NORMANDIE IMPRESSIONISTE
THE NAME OF CAEN is inextricably linked to tripe, anemones and William the Conqueror. It means ‘battlefield’ in Celtic – however, on this ancient battlefield, history repeated itself with a devastating vengeance only 80 years ago. Caen suffered to save the Western world. In 1944, the battle for the city lasted two months. Tree- quarters of the buildings were knocked flat. At least 10,000 people died. Te scars still show, but they have been turned to good effect. Today, Caen deserves time. Tere are hidden rewards. It would be easy to write an excoriation of some of the ersatz and egregious buildings that arose in the wake of the destructive bombing that shattered Caen’s medieval heart, so gruesome is some of the architecture. With hindsight, the bombing came to be regarded as one of the most futile air attacks of the war, accomplishing nothing but the levelling of a great Norman city. However, a new district, the Presqu’île de Caen, is focused on the future and boasts one of the finest libraries in France, the large Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville designed by OMA, while part of the fine heart of the city was, remarkably, preserved and contains some gems.
Te Musée des Beaux-Arts and the Musée de Normandie are both tucked within the citadel that William the Conqueror held in 1060. Before the World War 2 bombardment Caen was the ‘cité de cent clochers’, the town of a hundred belfries. Few survive. During the bombing people slept, cooked and washed inside the churches as the shells rained down. Tere is the ornate St-Pierre, the austere Romanesque pair of the Abbaye aux Hommes, and the Abbaye aux Dames, plus some of the smaller churches have survived and hold real interest. Inspired by the Benedictine monastic tradition, the 11th-century Saint-Nicolas was one of the first churches to be deconsecrated after the Revolution. It was classified as a historic monument in 1913. Te stained glass is particularly interesting. Te façade was never finished and only one of the two planned towers ever built; the Bourg-l’Abbé ran out of money. Today, there is a bird sanctuary in its ‘sleeping cemetery’, and the church has been used as stables, an army depot, a venue for concerts and, very occasionally, exhibitions. Tis is no ordinary exhibition space. Many artists have had a lifelong
fascination with the idea of bringing architecture and art together. In particular, sculpture. Unfortunately, the two seldom hit it off. Sean Scully, however, does bring it off, and has done so on numerous occasions: at the Monastery of Santa Cecilia in Montserrat in 2015; in 2019, Picasso’s Château de Boisgeloup in Upper Normandy, Villa Panza in Varese and Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore; at Houghton Hall in Norfolk in 2023; and now in Caen, another sacred space, this one brought to the artist’s attention by Joachim Pissarro (the art historian, curator, great-grandson of Camille Pissarro, and president of Normandie Impressionniste), who asked Scully to make this intervention. Montserrat is the only permanent intervention, but just as there he
donated paintings on canvas, aluminium and copper, replaced windows with stained glass, designed candlesticks and painted frescoes on the wall, curating the whole project and advising on the restoration of the interior, so in Caen Scully has paid for the transportation and installation of another wide range of work, and achieved dominion over the church. Te first thing anyone has to do when looking at a painting is to decide where to stand. It can be an important decision. Here, the paintings envelop the spectators. Stand close and their sheer scale overwhelms you; move around and the combined effect makes the audience participants in the artist’s
imagination. Eduardo Paolozzi once said that the artist tries to arrest flux and to perpetuate a single moment, just as Joshua prayed that God should stop the sun’s course. Scully both stops you in your tracks and perpetuates a continuous running series of moments. Te work itself retains much more than a memory of experienced architecture – there is something wonderfully invigorating about the measured density with which the paint brings them into the world of prayer. What confounds some is that the image must be of ‘something’, whereas here the images are a combination of emotion and technique, as tantalisingly elusive as ever, enigmatic to some, but rather
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