Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P., (15 November 1897 – 9 February 1954) was a French Dominican friar and Catholic priest, who gained fame as a designer of stained glass windows.
From 1926 onward he did his theological studies at the Dominican seminary in Le Saulchoir, Belgium, upon completion of which he was ordained a Catholic priest on 25 July 1930.
Father Couturier, who had received a thorough and practical training as an artisan glazier at the Ateliers, was then considering to bring "living" art into the scope of modern church building.
With Maurice Denis he was responsible for the first abstract stained glass windows in the church of Le Raincy, built by Auguste Perret in 1923.
[3] In the art of stained glass a distinction has to be made between the artisan master-glazier and the designer, the cartoneur, who makes the cardboard maquettes of the artwork.
(Special scissors are used on the cardboard that cut away strips corresponding to the soul of the leadstrip (H -came) in which the master-glazier assembles the colored glass fragments).
In 1925 Jean Hébert-Stevens and Pauline Paugniez opened a workshop where glaziers and painters shared projects, inspired by the Ateliers d'Art Sacré initiated by Maurice Denis (1919).
It was Marguerite Huré who signed for the execution of the glasswork designed by Maurice Denis and Pierre (Marie-Alain) Couturier for the church in Le Raincy in 1923.
(Danièle Doumont, 2003 -ref below) One seems to better understand the spiritual appeal of the artisans -of Father Couturiers message- when one concentrates on the symbolism of the cohesive function of the soul in multicolored illumination, a central feature in traditional artwork.