A monumental stainless steel sculpture donated to the city of Paris by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has been permanently installed in Martin Luther King Park, in the city’s 17th arrondissement. Open Book, by the London-based Scottish artist Diane Maclean, was given to the city a year ago, during the Queen’s three-day state visit to France for the D-Day 70th anniversary celebrations. Standing nearly three meters high, it represents, as the name implies, an open book, with a “cover” in silvery brushed steel and gently curved “pages” in highly polished bronze-coloured metal. Maclean has described it as a tribute to her husband’s grandfather, the scholar Donald Maclean, who devoted his life to collecting Gaelic texts to save the language from extinction. An engraved plaque on the sculpture bears the inscription: “Un livre ouvert que nous ecrivons ensemble: An open book we are writing together.”
