Although biographical information on Catherine Menu remains scarce, her surviving ecclesiastical glass situates her within the post-war renewal of sacred art in France, a movement that sought to reconcile liturgical tradition with the visual language of modernism. Menu appears to have been active from the 1970s through the 1990s, producing windows for parish churches in the Loir-et-Cher and surrounding departments.

Her work demonstrates a confident synthesis of abstraction and theological symbolism, a hallmark of the generation that followed the great reforms of church art initiated in the mid-twentieth century by figures such as Fernand Léger, Jean Bazaine, Henri Guérin, and Jacques Le Chevallier. Like these artists, Menu treats light as both subject and medium: colour becomes gesture, form becomes revelation. The traditional iconographic themes of the Passion and Resurrection are rendered through intersecting fields of translucent glass, their contours suggesting rather than describing the sacred figure.

The windows at Église Saint-Pierre, Meusnes, are among the most eloquent examples of her approach. Here, the cross, the Lamb, and the triumphant Christ emerge through a rhythm of broken lines and luminous planes in gold, red, and indigo, the composition balancing austerity with lyricism. The result is an art of spiritual intensity expressed through visual economy — a contemplative abstraction that invites meditation rather than narrative reading.

These three narrow lancet windows by Catherine Menu form a unified abstract narrative of Christian redemption, integrating expressive colour, movement, and light in a distinctly contemporary idiom. Each window is composed of sweeping planes of amber, vermilion, blue, and grey that intersect like fractured shards of illumination, while subtle painted outlines evoke symbolic figures — the cross, the Lamb of God, and the risen Christ — emerging from fields of colour rather than depicted through traditional figuration.

The glass is treated not as surface ornament but as a medium of spiritual radiance. The dominant use of warm gold and red tones evokes the Eucharistic flame and divine presence, while the cooler blues at the base suggest the baptismal waters or the earth from which grace ascends. Menu’s compositional approach, combining rhythmic segmentation and luminous contrasts, recalls the aesthetic vocabulary of post-war French stained glass developed by artists such as Jean Le Moal and Henri Guérin — a style that sought to restore sacred light to modern architecture through abstraction rather than narrative illustration.

Catherine Menu’s work at Meusnes belongs to a generation of regional artists active during the late twentieth century, who were influenced by the renewal of ecclesiastical glass following World War II. Although little documented, her practice reveals a sensitive engagement with theological symbolism translated through the language of modern colour and line. The result is a meditative ensemble in which the ancient themes of sacrifice, resurrection, and grace are re-imagined in glass as a continuum of light and gesture.