Marie-Alain Couturier - Life

Life

He was born Pierre-Charles-Marie Couturier at Montbrison, Loire, France, on 15 November 1897. Couturier served as a soldier during the First World War, in the course of which he was wounded in the foot. After the war, he became an art student at the Paris Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Starting in 1920, he spent five years working at the Studio of the Sacred Arts (French: Atelier des Sacrés Arts).

In 1925, he expressed an interest in religious life and began to seek an Order which he might join. He was accepted by the Dominican friars and entered their novitiate in Amiens on 22 September 1925, at which time he took the name under which he is now known.

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. He was then assigned for further studies in Rome, where his studies were frequently interrupted by illness. In 1935 he was assigned to the Saint-Honoré Priory in Paris.

He spent World War II overseas in the United States and Canada. Upon his return to Europe after the war, he become involved in a very practical way in some of the greatest artistic adventures of the 20th century: Henri Matisse and the Vence Chapel; Le Corbusier and the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut; the Notre-Dame de Toute Grace du Plateau d'Assy; and Audincourt.

He died of Myastenia gravis on 9 February 1954, aged 56, mourned by many of the great 20th-century artists.