The founding of Les Ateliers d’Art Sacre in Paris in 1919 is an overlooked landmark in the history of contemporary sacred art. In the aftermath of World War I, French Artist Maurice Denis helped launch the Studios of Sacred Art with the bold mission of creating a new kind of religious art for peacetime Europe. Charles Plessard, the subject of a new profile in the Sacred Artists section, can, arguably, be considered the disciple most loyal to Denis and his vision of ecclesiastical art combining the best of traditional and modern styles. Plessard believed this refined aesthetic approach could serve as an effective vehicle in promoting Christian teachings and dogmas. He created a series of large-format gouache paintings in the 1930s, several of them now in the Collection, as studies for a cycle of instructive posters for Roman Catholic catechism classes. In Plessard’s all-encompassing vision of sacred art, everything from suites of stained glass to coloring books found their place. (John Kohan)