The Chapel of Light: Anthony Caro at Saint-Jean Baptiste, Bourbourg Karen Wilkin (bio) Guidebooks don’t recommend the small Northern French town of “Bourbourg”—that’s not a misprint for “Beaubourg”—as “worth a detour.” Located between Calais and Dunkerque, inland and due south of picturesque, seaside Gravelines, with its seventeenth-century fortifications by Louis XIV’s military architect and a pier where Seurat painted, Bourbourg is typical but not conspicuously endowed with tourist-attraction charm. Yet this undistinguished town is now a not-to-be-missed destination for anyone who cares about contemporary sculpture, thanks to the British sculptor Anthony Caro’s extraordinary Chapel of Light, a complex transformation of the choir of a thirteenth-century Gothic church that brings a former ruin back to vigorous life. During World War II, Bourbourg’s church of Saint-Jean Baptiste was badly damaged when a fighter plane crashed near it in 1940; the roof burned and some of the stonework was destroyed. Major repairs were undertaken after the war, making at least part of the church usable, but the choir remained untouched; the damaged choir was walled off and services were held in the nave. In 2000, the French government decided to complete the restoration by inviting “an established international artist to create a work that would restore the Gothic choir to a twenty-first spirit.” Caro was selected, in part because of his powerful, multipart sculpture installation, The Last Judgment, 1995–1999—nothing to do with the separation of the blessed and the damned but rather, a deeply moving meditation on the horrors of the past century—installed at the 1999 Bienale di Venezia. Caro was given [End Page 350] carte blanche, in his approach to the Bourbourg project, apart from a request from the bishop that whatever he proposed include a baptismal font and have something to do with water, because of the saint to whom the church is dedicated and the restored choir’s proposed use as a baptistery. In October 2008, after years of intense work, Caro’s Chapel of Light was inaugurated, the largest and most complex work of his long and distinguished career—he will be eighty-five in 2009 and has been a force in the world of contemporary sculpture for half a century. The chapel is a seamless integration of sculpture and architecture, abstraction and allusion, the sacred and the secular (Figure 1). Its inspired orchestration of multiple elements—a pair of towers, a baptismal font, benches, a door, and a series of reliefs, plus an altar and liturgical furnishings, as well as a threshold sculpture at the street entrance—simultaneously responds to the particular qualities of the choir and animates the space. A rich variety of forms, from the severely geometric to the voluptuously inflected, in an equally rich palette of materials, from industrial steel and exquisitely refined concrete to wood and stoneware, are combined so that each element has its own integrity but remains inextricable, in terms of abstract qualities and meaning, from the whole. The result both enriches Saint-Jean Baptiste and, in many ways, sums up the evolution of Caro’s sculpture over the past four decades. Abstraction remains Caro’s principal language, as it has since the late 1950s, when he abandoned the modeled expressionist figuration that had won him critical praise as one of the most promising British sculptors of his generation and began to construct abstractly in steel. Then, as a young sculptor searching for his own voice, he had decided that the figure “got in his way” and that his sculptures had to look like nothing but themselves—however provocative the associations they called up in the spectator—if they were to have the immediacy and intensity he sought. Caro’s reputation is still bound up with his internationally acclaimed steel constructions, which transformed conceptions [End Page 351] of what sculpture could be. Yet, in recent years, he has come to believe that abstraction no longer requires the vigilant defense that he felt necessary when he first began to work in steel. The result is a kind of “late style” adventurousness in which things that he once rigorously excluded from his sculpture now seem...