St Jean de Montmartre

I was due to go on leave last week anyway, but any intentions at adding to this blog were rather stymied by a bout of food poisoning (or something like it) last weekend whose final weakening effects didn't disappear until the Thursday of our holiday. Although my first meal for several days was a very welcome one indeed, there was some irony in going all the way to Paris to eat beans on toast.

We steered clear of the main touristy sites, so no visits to Notre-Dame or the Sacre-Coeur, though we did get into the Sainte Chapelle, a church interior (if you can still so describe it) rendered somewhat less numinous by the very loud hoovering going on somewhere to the left of the sanctuary as well as the visitors milling around the space. Instead I was much more pleased that we decided to nip into St Jean de Montmartre, a late-19th-century church facing the Place des Abbesses. Formed from concrete and clad in red brick, this remarkable Art Nouveau building is a bold and confident attempt to do something different with the normal vocabulary of church art and architecture, while remaining within a recognisable tradition: what the New Liturgical Movement might refer to as 'The Other Modern'. My only regret is not taking more photographs!