Sabbatical art pilgrimage: All Saint's Tudeley

Hidden away at the end of a lane leading from Five Oaks Green Road, set among fields and Kentish Oast houses, is a pretty, compact country church which dates to the beginning of the seventh century, although most of what can be seen today is from the 18th century.

The brick tower and marbled ceiling of All Saints’ Tudeley date from around 1765 while the North aisle was added in 1871. The interior was substantially re-ordered in 1966, creating a greater sense of space and light. It was what came next, however, that created a wow factor; something that is astonishing both in its physical impact and in the uniqueness of its nature.

On my sabbatical pilgrimage I’ve arrived at a church which is one of the UK’s finest examples of religious art and a moving example of the crucifixion as a conduit for a very personal tragedy. As I walk into Tudeley Parish Church I am immediately immersed in intense colours – ‘rich and deep marine blue, with blends of burgundy and bottle green’ – because, as James Crockford has described, every window in the church ‘from great big panes of light, to tiny peep holes’ was designed by the Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall’s designs swirl with emotive colour and evocative movement. This is stained-glass that shines and glows ‘with a glory that hits you’ through ‘the energy of light and life that bursts or glows through.’[i]

These windows were installed between 1967 and 1985; the east window being followed by the five north windows and two south ones dedicated in 1974 and then finally the four chancel windows installed in 1985. Chagall was initially reluctant to take on the commission, but was eventually persuaded, and when, in 1967, he arrived for the installation of the east window and saw the church, he said, 'It's magnificent. I will do them all.' Over the next 15 years, he designed all the remaining eleven windows, collaborating as usual with glassworker Charles Marq of Reims.

This sustained series of stained glass – inspiration sustained over 15 years and filling all 12 windows in the building - was inspired by Psalm 8, especially verses 4—8:

‘What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.’

There’s a dilemma on entering as the East window draws your attention but the surrounding windows lead up to it. That’s where the flocks and herds, beasts, birds and fish of creation from the Psalm are to be found, so do you begin with the culminating experience - the east window with its depiction of crucifixion and drowning – or the preparatory experience of the Psalm inspired windows? Wherever you begin sustained viewing of this series, which sets death in the context of creation while brightly bathing the building in vibrant colour, is to have an experience of profound spirituality.

The east window is a magnificent memorial tribute to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid who died aged just 21 in a sailing accident off Rye. Sarah was the daughter of Sir Henry and Lady d'Avigdor-Goldsmid; the family then lived at Somerhill, a Jacobean house situated nearby. As Sarah had shown an early interest in contemporary art and had, with her mother, seen Chagall’s designs for windows in the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem. Sir Henry and Lady d'Avigdor-Goldsmid commissioned Chagall to design the east window.

Crockford has reflected on what Chagall offers to us through sustained viewing of this visionary series: ‘What I think Chagall offers us so well is a vision that holds together the devastation of a painful tragedy with a vision of hope and renewal. He suggests the real possibility of the transformation of human loss, a loss that seems pretty integral to humanness; yet there is no glimmer of forgetting or diminishing the gravity and depth of that suffering. We see here an invitation to let our suffering be a sharing in his [Christ’s] sufferings, a way of becoming like him, just as, in suffering, he becomes like us. The stories of our lives are drawn up into the reality of Christ: that includes our death and our life, our fear and our freedom, our shame and our glory.’[ii]

Tudeley’s remoteness necessitates giving time to visit and Chagall’s art rewards slowing down to look and linger, to sustain our looking in order that we truly see.

[i] J. Crockford, ‘Chagall at Tudeley’, Sermon preached at University Church, Oxford, 7th April 2019 - https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/sermons/chagall-tudeley?fbclid=IwAR3hxj1Lah8A5Uq2yYjggxw1rafwJlxq-4V86olsvwSdpyoLAJ11kKNvKAc

[ii] J. Crockford, ‘Chagall at Tudeley’, Sermon preached at University Church, Oxford, 7th April 2019 - https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/sermons/chagall-tudeley?fbclid=IwAR3hxj1Lah8A5Uq2yYjggxw1rafwJlxq-4V86olsvwSdpyoLAJ11kKNvKAc

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Webb Sisters - If It Be Your Will.

Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage: Latest ArtWay report

My latest Church of the Month report for ArtWay focuses on Metz Cathedral:

'Nicknamed “God’s Lantern,” Metz Cathedral in Lorraine, France, is renowned for its vast expanse of stained glass—covering 6,496 square meters, i.e. over twice as much as Rouen and three times as much as Chartres. The amount is impressive, but so too is its variety. It dates from the thirteenth century all the way through to the 1960s ...

The cathedral offers visitors a simple but effective leaflet, Parcours spiritual, that identifies a prayerful route around the cathedral, highlighting sixteen of its most important aspects, including its modern glass. At each of these points in the cathedral, information and a prayer can be found, encouraging visitors to be not simply tourists but worshipers as well. Some argue that this approach, like the information provided on wall cards in museum exhibitions, might direct viewers to see the artwork from one perspective alone. However, this does not have to be the case, as viewers often take that perspective as a starting point for then seeing others. Curators have found that providing no way into an artwork can leave viewers unable to begin to engage with the artwork at all.'

This Church of the Month report follows on from others about Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Churches in Little Walsingham, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Eton College Chapel, Lumen, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St. Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, St Mary the Virgin, Downe, and St Paul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

Other of writings for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Church Times can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Westies - Everything Is All I Want For You.

Paintings which seek to dream an ideal of fraternity and love

Here is the talk which I gave to the Walbrook Art Group last Wednesday. This was on the theme of 'My Favourite Art, My Faith.' The other talks in this series are on Wednesday 2 and 9 December at St Stephen Walbrook (1.00pm) and there will be two speakers on each occasion.

Last year I was fortunate, through my sabbatical visits and the Tour of the Holy Land organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum, to see a wide variety of artwork in churches and synagogues by the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall is one of my favourite artists and the artist, more than any other, who really fired my interest in the visual arts. As well as last year’s visits, I have also visited the National Marc Chagall museum in Nice which houses a collection of 17 large format paintings inspired by the Bible that Chagall gifted to the French state to found the Museum and which form his Message Biblique.

These paintings were originally intended for a Calvary Chapel at Vence and were painted between 1958 and 1966. Chagall spoke of the museum as a house in his inauguration speech saying, ‘I wanted to leave [the paintings] in this House so that men can try to find some peace, a certain spirituality, a religiosity, a meaning in life.’

Meditations on religious art had been part of Chagall’s oeuvre from the off due to the place of religion in his Hasidic upbringing in Vitebsk (Russia). His later commissions for churches, no doubt, also built on discussions about the relations between Judaism and Christianity held when he regularly attended, during his early period in Paris, the Thomist study circle organised by Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at his home in Meuden.

Chagall conceived the idea for the cycle of paintings which became the Message Biblique while working on his first church commission in Assy (a church I also visited during my sabbatical), although many of the images he used in the paintings were based on gouaches he had originally created as maquettes for a series of Bible etchings commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard. He described the Bible as a great, universal book and so eventually decided not to hang the paintings in a building associated with one religion, such as the chapel at Vence. Initially, as a Jew, he had had concerns regarding undertaking commissions for Christian churches, to the extent that he insisted on the phrase, ‘In the Name of the Liberty of All Religions’ on the baptistery mural Le Passage de la Mer Rouge, which was his first church commission.

On entering the rooms of the Message Biblique - first, the room of Genesis and Exodus, then the Song of Songs - one is struck first by the colours of the works before their content. For each of the Genesis and Exodus paintings Chagall chose a bold, saturated colour suited to his subject - a luminous green for Paradise, deep red for Abraham and the Three Angels, bright yellow for Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law - and worked in pinks and reds for each of the Songs of Songs paintings. Chagall viewed painting as the reflection of his inner self and therefore colour contained his character and message. In his museum inauguration speech he said, ‘If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.’ These are paintings which seek to dream, by their colours and lines, an ideal of fraternity and love.

Chagall wrote of ‘seeing life’s happenings, as well as works of art, through the wisdom of the Bible’ and of trying to express this sense in works ‘shot through with its spirit and harmony.’ So, while the Biblical scene illustrated dominates each of these huge canvases, in the margins, and completing the overall composition, are images of other Biblical scenes and characters, including often the crucified Christ, together with images suggesting the later suffering of the Jewish people. Chagall’s art is one that connects and reconciles disparate images of Bible, experience, history, memory and myth on the canvas through colour and composition.

This sense of Chagall drawing disparate images and styles together and reconciling them on his canvases was a key part of my initial interest in his work so, to be surrounded by these massive statements demonstrating - through content and construction - the potential of religion for reconciliation, was a wonderful and moving experience.

In his work Chagall links up different, unusual and unlikely images in a way that makes visual and emotional sense; in a way that communicates his love of his home, his world, his people, its sights, sounds and smells. He succeeds, as Walther and Metzger write, in "achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality". He reconciles emotions, thoughts, reminiscences with lines, colours and shapes to create harmonious, meaningful paintings. Walther and Metzger have suggested that "no other twentieth century artist had Chagall's gift for harmonising what were thought to be irreconcilable opposites".

Chagall’s work can also be understood as exploring Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and his contemporary experience of exile as, through his Message Biblique and other similar paintings, he engages with his Jewish heritage from the Exodus through the Pogroms to the Holocaust thereby linking past and present together in experience and understanding. In Chagall’s work exodus and exile are the normal state of the Jewish people and the source of their joys, sorrows, inspirations and insights.

Surprisingly, his key symbol of faith in exile is that of the crucified Christ who features centrally or tangentially in many of his works. Always visually and accurately a Jewish Christ, nevertheless Chagall uses this image in ways that have real synergy with Christian theology. In The Sacrifice of Isaac, for example, the crucified Christ appears above Isaac as the future sacrificial son. Christ becomes the embodiment in Chagall’s work of Israel as the suffering servant; an understanding which culminates in the Exodus of 1952 - 1966 where the crucified Christ embraces both the Jews of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

For Chagall, ‘Christ ... always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.’ He depicted this perception most famously in White Crucifixion painted in 1938 in response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, including Kristallnacht. Central to this painting, among scenes of anti-Jewish violence which included the torching of a synagogue, is Jesus on the cross with a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, draped around him as a loin cloth. For Chagall, ‘Jesus on the cross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, and violently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world.’

Chagall came to stained glass relatively late in his career with the commissions for the baptistery at for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce du Plateau d’Assy completed in 1957. These derived from his friendship with a Dominican Friar, Pere Couturier, who was an artist and commissioner of sacred art. This commission included two small windows in grisaille of an angel holding a jug of holy water and an angel with candelabra and flowers.

Following this commission Chagall began working with Charles Marq, from the Atelier Simon Marq, and received many church commissions for stained glass with his ambulatory windows for Metz Cathedral, realized in 1960, being the first of these commissions. “Marq developed a special process of veneering pigment on glass, which allowed Chagall to use as many as three colours on a single uninterrupted pane, rather than being confined to the traditional technique of separating each colour by lead strips.”

As well as being inspired by the Bible, Chagall was also inspired by his visits to Israel. Accompanied by his wife Bella and his daughter Ida, Chagall went to Israel first in 1931. The main reason for this visit was a commission he had received from the Parisian art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, to do a series of illustrations to the Bible. He travelled a great deal, painting and drawing in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Safed. The country left a vivid impression on him, and back in Paris the light and landscape he had seen were echoed in many of the etchings for his work, The Bible. In 1951, the opening of large retrospective exhibitions of his works, in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, prompted Chagall's second visit, and in 1957, he was again in Israel following the publication of his illustrations to the Bible. Vollard had died shortly before World War II and Tériade published the commission that had finally been completed in 1956. A second book of Bible illustrations was published by Vervé, also in that year.

Chagall said that, “In the East, I found the Bible and part of my own being. The air of the Land of Israel makes one wise.” For him, the Bible was “pure poetry, human tragedy.” He said that it “filled him with visions about the faith of the world” and that it inspired him so that he saw life and art “through the wisdom of the bible.”

Chagall also made a link between stained glass which comes alive “through the light it receives” and the Bible which is “light already.” Stained glass, he suggests, “should make this obvious through grace and simplicity.” Jonathan Wilson has noted that “Chagall became fascinated with stained glass after he had moved to the south of France in 1950.” Chagall was undoubtedly “seduced by the endless Mediterranean unfolding of color-as-light and the possibility of capturing in glass the kind of spiritually charged, quasi-mystical, sometimes biblically inspired images to which he was increasingly drawn.” Indeed, Chagall spoke of light as being the material which creates stained glass. “The light is natural,” he suggested, “and all nature is religious.” Therefore, “every colour ought to stimulate prayer” and, "whether in cathedral or synagogue the phenomenon is the same: something mystical comes through the window.”

André Malraux summed this up when he wrote: “I cannot understand why stained glass, which lives and dies with the day, was ever abandoned. … Artists preferred the light. But the stained glass window, which is brought to life by the morning and snuffed out by the night, brought the Creation home to the worshipper in church. … Stained glass eventually surrendered to painting by incorporating shade, which killed it. It was six hundred and fifty years before someone found a way of shading off colors in glass: Chagall.”

It has been suggested, rightly I think, that Chagall’s use of colour is mystical, with “the yellow of revelation flooding the Tablets of the Law,” “the white of faith surrounding the cross” and “the supremacy of blue in his work” indicating “the wisdom of overcoming bitterness and hatred.” Here we have the yellow of revelation flooding the Garden of Eden in Chagall’s 1963 Creation window for the triforium of the north transept while deep blues and reds characterise the combination of ecstasy and sorrow in the two ambulatory windows from 1960 which tell the story of the Jewish people in key episodes from Abraham to Jeremiah by way of Jacob, Moses and David. James Waller has written that here “Chagall is all curves and tonal flares,” his “modulation of tone, within the fabulously fragmented and flowing glass panes” lending “his colours a deeper, more smoldering dimension.”

The light that emanates from twelve stained glass windows by Marc Chagall bathes the Abbell Synagogue at the Hadassah University Medical Center in a special glow. 'The synagogue's Jerusalem stone floor and walls absorb this beauty and reflect it.' 'The Bible was again Chagall's main inspiration, particularly Genesis 49, where Jacob blesses his 12 sons, and Deuteronomy 33, where Moses blesses the Twelve Tribes. The dominant colors used in each window are inspired by those blessings as well as by the description of the breastplate of the High Priest in Exodus 28:15, which was described as gold, blue, purple and scarlet, and contained 12 distinct gems. Each gem was dedicated to a tribe with the tribe's name engraved on it.'

'To fully understand the significance of the Windows they must be viewed against Chagall's deep sense of identification with the whole of the Jewish history, its tragedies and victories, as well as his own personal background in the shtetl of Vitebsk, where he was born and grew up. "All the time I was working," he said, "I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago."' After our visit I spoke to our group about Chagall's background and work highlighting the fact that these windows inspired commissions for stained glass in the UK at Tudeley Parish Church and at Chichester Cathedral.

Tudeley Parish church is one of the UK’s finest examples of religious art and a moving example of the crucifixion as a 'conduit' for a very personal tragedy. The church in Tudeley is renowned internationally as the only church to have all its windows decorated by Chagall which fulfilled a long term ambition of the artist. The windows were commissioned by the family of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid as a commemoration of her tragic and untimely death.

Canon Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, provided Chagall with a brief for his stained glass window at the Cathedral based on Psalm 150. Hussey believed that ‘True artists of all sorts, as creators of some of the most worthwhile of man’s work, are well adapted to express man’s worship of God.’ When this is done consciously, he suggested, ‘the beauty and strength of their work can draw others to share to some extent their vision.’ This thought underpinned his brief to Chagall for the window based on Psalm 150 and titled The Arts to the Glory of God which takes as its theme ‘O praise God in his holiness … Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.’

Charles Marq, Chagall’s collaborator on his windows, wrote: ‘The triumphal quality of this chant is expressed by the dominance in the composition of the colour red (red on white, on green, on yellow), broken by a certain number of green, blue and yellow blobs. This is the first time that Marc Chagall has conceived a subject composed entirely of small figures; it is the people in festive mood glorifying the Lord, exalting his greatness and his creation.’ The work, he suggests, communicates a ‘message of glory and praise.’ (Chagall Glass at Chichester and Tudeley, Ed. By Paul Foster, Otter Memorial Paper No. 14)

Chagall spoke of colouring life ‘with our colours of love and hope.’ He wrote of ‘seeing life’s happenings, as well as works of art, through the wisdom of the Bible’ and of trying to express this sense in works ‘shot through with its spirit and harmony.’ The light which creates stained glass ‘is natural,’ he noted, ‘and all nature is religious.’ Therefore, ‘every colour ought to stimulate prayer’ and, whether in cathedral or synagogue, ‘the phenomenon is the same: something mystical comes through the window.’

It was Chagall’s hope that a visit to the Musée Chagall, where this talk began, would be an experience akin to pilgrimage rather than simply being a tourist destination to be visited: "Perhaps the young and the less young will come to this House to seek an ideal of fraternity and love such as it has been dreamed by my colours and my lines."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Young Disciples - Freedom Suite.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Chichester Cathedral

‘… it has been the great enthusiasm of my life and work to commission for the Church the very best artists I could, in painting, in sculpture, in music and in literature.’

This was the concluding sentence of the rationale that Canon Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, provided for Marc Chagall as a brief for his stained glass window at the Cathedral based on Psalm 150. This window was the conclusion to the remarkable series of commissions by Hussey; firstly at St Matthews Northampton and then at Chichester Cathedral.

Bishop George Bell strongly supported the appointment of Walter Hussey as Dean of Chichester Cathedral to take forward the commissioning programme he had initiated there as part of his wider programme to reinvigorate the Church’s patronage of the Arts. Other Anglican clergy such as Vincent McKenna, Moelwyn Merchant and Bernard Walke played their part in this work of reinvigoration but it is Hussey’s commissions of William Albright, W.H. Auden, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Chagall, Cecil Collins, Gerald Finzi, Henry Moore, Norman Nicholson, John Piper, Ceri Richards, John Skelton, Graham Sutherland, Michael Tippett and William Walton which stand out, in the fields of literature, music and the visual arts, as truly significant in their own right and for the reinvigoration of the Church’s patronage of the Arts. For his commissions at St Matthews and Chichester Cathedral, Kenneth Clark memorably described him as 'the last great patron of art in the Church of England.'

Peter Webster notes that while ‘the period from the mid-1960s onwards’ in fact saw an ‘upsurge in commissioning activity’ and that, ‘emboldened by the examples of Chichester, and Coventry Cathedral, authorities in cathedrals and in newly built parish churches began to commission new works of art for those buildings,’ ‘it was also the case that the high-water mark of the Church’s engagement with the leaders in British art had in fact already been reached:’

‘Never again in the twentieth century was the Church to achieve the same contact with artists of the stature of Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, and indeed Hussey’s commissions as he neared retirement were of his own generation or older. The art world became more and more fragmented, with a bewildering variety of styles, each developing according to its own particular internal logic. The church continued to commission contemporary art, but now of certain styles amongst the many. Generally, commissions were confined to figurative art, since the task of interpreting abstract work in a Christian way presented considerable challenges. It had been the vision of men like Bell and Hussey that the church should position itself in the mainstream of the nation’s life, including its art. There had now ceased to be a clearly visible mainstream in which the church could position itself.’

This more difficult terrain to negotiate is, perhaps, indicated by the repeated refusal of permission from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England (CFCE) for the application made by the Chapter of Chichester Cathedral to commission Jaume Plensa's Together for installation in the Cathedral as the Hussey Memorial Commission. The grounds for rejection in this case are to do with the perception of significant change in the character of the space above the Arundel Bell Screen as a result of the installation.

New commissions in settings where there is existing artwork/architecture have to take into account issues of harmonisation or dissonance i.e. to what extent will the new commission be integrated with whatever is already there or by being dissonant raise questions about what is already there. Artworks integrated within the life and architecture of a church are not viewed in the same way as works within the white cube of a gallery space and this needs to be understood and handled with sensitivity during the commissioning process. The result can be a sense of overall integrity and harmony within a space which holds great variety and diversity and where this occurs the whole and its constituent parts image something of the Trinitarian belief – the one and the many - which is at the very heart of Christianity.

In my view the commissioning process at Chichester and the artist himself have fully taken these issues into account in their proposal and the CFCE’s decision is deeply disappointing for all involved with this commission. The impasse demonstrates that commissions for churches continue to have significant potential for controversy. Having visited on my sabbatical art pilgrimage several churches associated with commissions perceived to be controversial at the time of their installation, such as Albert Servaes’ Stations of the Cross, Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child and Germaine Richier’s Crucifix, it seems to me that controversies of modern art, whether the reception of the works themselves or that of their challenging content, are, with time, resolved as congregations live with the works and learn to value the challenge of what initially seemed to be scandalous.

Certainly, the mix of commissions here - from the ‘riot of colour and symbol’ in the Piper tapestry to the glow of Hans Feibusch’s tender Baptism or from the harmonious whole that is the Icon of Divine Light by Cecil Collins to the fractured energies of Ursula Benker-Schirmer’s tapestry for the Shrine of St Richard – genuinely ‘invigorate and beautify the cathedral’ while introducing variety and intrigue into the experience of visiting and worshipping here. Tourists are encouraged to do both during their visit by prayers on the hour and use of the leaflet ‘A Spiritual Tour of Chichester Cathedral’ which has been designed to help people pray as they walk around the Cathedral.

Hussey believed that ‘True artists of all sorts, as creators of some of the most worthwhile of man’s work, are well adapted to express man’s worship of God.’ When this is done consciously, he suggested, ‘the beauty and strength of their work can draw others to share to some extent their vision.’ This thought underpinned his brief to Chagall for the window based on Psalm 150 and titled The Arts to the Glory of God which takes as its theme ‘O praise God in his holiness … Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.’

Charles Marq, Chagall’s collaborator on his windows, wrote: ‘The triumphal quality of this chant is expressed by the dominance in the composition of the colour red (red on white, on green, on yellow), broken by a certain number of green, blue and yellow blobs. This is the first time that Marc Chagall has conceived a subject composed entirely of small figures; it is the people in festive mood glorifying the Lord, exalting his greatness and his creation.’ The work, he suggests, communicates a ‘message of glory and praise.’ (Chagall Glass at Chichester and Tudeley, Ed. By Paul Foster, Otter Memorial Paper No. 14)

Hussey, who had shown an interest in the arts, music, drama, painting and sculpture from his school and university years and who in his entry in Who's Who gave his sole recreation as ‘enjoying the arts,’  ‘acquired animportant and varied collection of his own’ which, on retirement, he offered to leave ‘to the city which he had done so much to promote as a centre of the arts:’

‘Like many others he was concerned about the neglect into which Pallant House, a fine example of eighteenth-century domestic architecture, had fallen and, as Dr KME Murray wrote 'his generous offer...was made deliberately as a means of securing the restoration of the house and its opening to the public'. In 1982 Hussey was present at the official opening of the house and saw his paintings and other works of art displayed in the same informal domestic setting as they had been at the deanery where he had taken so much pleasure in showing them to friends and strangers alike.’

Pallant House, which has been described as ‘a jewel of a gallery’ and as ‘one of the most important galleries for British modern art in the country,’ is now home to a Collection of British Modern art frequently described as one of the best in the UK. with important works by Gino Severini , Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Patrick Caulfield, Michael Andrews, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton.

Bell and Hussey also supported the development of a nationally significant collection of mid-20th century British art by the Otter Gallery which forms an integral and vital part of the University of Chichester. This gallery is home to an extensive collection of art that includes works across all disciplines. It offers a welcoming and accessible space for art to both its immediate community of staff and students and diverse audiences beyond. Core to the gallery's mission is its original intention to place art at the heart of people's lives. By 2020 the Gallery intends to be a stimulus for research and learning, exploring new perspectives and insights through practice, display interpretation and engagement.

The collection was started in 1947 when Eleanor Hipwell, head of art for the Bishop Otter College, acquired three paintings from an exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in order to display them in the University. Shortly afterwards, Miss K E Murray was appointed as a new Principal. Along with Eleanor Hipwell's successor, Sheila McCririck, Miss Murray pursued a determination to develop a collection of contemporary art that would inspire and inform the students of the University. The acquisition of quality work with inadequate monetary resources was a demonstration of Miss Murray's persuasive persistence. The support of Bell, who was Chairman of the Bishop Otter College Council, and Hussey was vital in helping to promote acceptance of an acquisitions policy that included controversial and challenging pieces such as Patrick Heron's Black and White.

I visited while a selection of the permanent collection was on display. Connected Collections enables visitors to explore and contemplate the various aesthetic, historical, stylistic and social juxtapositions between diverse yet inter-linked artworks and their makers, inviting further connections and new discoveries of their own. Among the ceramics on display, comparisons can be made between makers such as Alison Britton, Michael Cardew, Ewen Henderson, Bernard Leach, Eric James Mellon and Lucie Rie, while oil paintings, watercolours and prints by artists including Elizabeth Blackadder, Sandra Blow, Mary Fedden, Terry Frost, Graham Sutherland and Alfred Wallis serve to highlight just some of the connecting themes between two and three dimensional works.

On visiting I was surprised to discover that the collection also includes Jean Lurçat’s altarpiece tapestry The Creation in the College’s Chapel and Geoffrey Clarke’s aluminium sculpture of The Crucifixion above the Chapel’s entrance. Lurçat’s altarpiece here is a vast improvement on that at Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy which is entirely lacking in the menace required for a tapestry focused on apocalyptic imagery. This tapestry has been temporarily replaced by screenprint produced by students and inspired by the tapestry. In this work the accent is on beauty and wonder in a towering conception where seeds and birds soar in heightened colours.

Clarke’s sculpture, attached to the gable of the chapel immediately over the entrance door, ‘incorporates the figures of the two thieves who were crucified alongside Christ.’ The sculpture also ‘holds a nugget of glass, a symbol of the eye of God.’ Clarke has used words such as ‘illumination; inspiration; light; kindling of mind and spirit; vision’ to describe the work and was commissioned to create this piece after completing commissions for the Cathedral.

Also alongside the Chapel is John Skelton tau cross entitled Axis Mundi. Skelton created this work while in residence at Bishop Otter College. The vertical block represents life and the horizontal represents the after-life. Both sculptures feature on a sculpture trail around Chichester - http://www.publicsculpturesofsussex.co.uk/files/Chichester-Sculpture-trail.pdf.

While it is true that, Peter Webster notes, Hussey’s mode of patronage, which ‘depended on a discerning patron, authoritative critic and notable artist working in tandem, disseminating new art downwards to a grateful if uncomprehending public’ was a way of working which was, by the time of his retirement, ‘no longer fit for purpose,’ it had nevertheless accomplished significant achievements across a wider field than church commissions alone and had made a major contribution to reinvigorating the Church’s patronage of the Arts.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard Bernstein - Chichester Psalms.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Metz Cathedral

I didn't sleep that well in Metz (in common with other nights on the trip to this point). I had been fine during the day when I had my itinerary to keep to and the amazing art and architecture to see, but at night all the other factors about this trip would crowd in and cause me to worry. Similar to daily life then where often I wouldn't do what I do if it weren't for focusing on the next tasks in hand, rather than worrying about what might or might not happen.

I woke to the sounds and songs of striking railway workers at their picket line and rose early to visit Metz Cathedral, arriving while the building was primarily open for worshippers rather than tourists like me. The sounds of hoovers echoed quietly in the background as the sound of plainsong also rose from the crypt. The routines of the Cathedral's cleaners are as regular and ubiquitous as the rituals of the services and in their own way as meaningful and sacred. This is, in large measure, how we deal with the anxieties and worries of constant change and what might be; by building for ourselves patterns of sameness, regular routines which bring a sense of security and solidity to what otherwise feels as though it will slip from our grasp and control by means of its fluidity and movement. This may be illusion but it is consoling and enables us to cope with change:

Our bodies age, our cells replace continually

without regard to our volition.

We are not who we were.

All is mutability, constant change.

We cannot bear so much reality -

being changed utterly - so build routines,

schedules, repeating patterns of sameness,

to mask our awareness of transition.

Metz Cathedral is nicknamed “God's Lantern” and is renowned for the vast expanse of its stained glass – 6,496 square metres over twice as much as Rouen and three times as much as Chartres. Within this incredible expanse is glass from the thirteenth century all the way through to windows installed in the 1960s by Marc Chagall, which are what have brought me to Metz. It is not simply the expanse of glass here which is impressive but also the range and variety that can be seen. Basil Cottle has noted that the glass here “is not stylistically co-ordinated; its assembly has been by slow growth, and many hands have participated, with many colours and iconographic schemes.” Yet, the “effect on entering the nave is dazzling: three tiers of windows, including the richly glazed triforium; extremely tall and acute-angling vaulting and apse windows, and a grove of slim clustered shafts receding eastwards into pools of colours” (B. Cottle, All The Cathedrals Of France, Unicorn Press, London, 2002)

The Cathedral has a simple but effective leaflet 'Parcours spirituel' which identifies a prayerful route around the Cathedral taking in 16 of its most important aspects, including its modern glass. At each of these points in the Cathedral information and a prayer can be found, encouraging all visitors not simply to be tourists but worshippers as well. I know from personal experience, having created a similar leaflet for St Margaret's Barking, how much such simple initiatives are appreciated by parishioners and visitors alike. An argument can be made that such approaches, like the information provided on wall cards in museum exhibitions, can direct viewers to see the artwork from one perspective alone. However, this does not have to be the case as viewers often take that perspective as a starting point for then seeing others. Additionally, providing no way in to perspectives on artwork, as curators have found, can leave viewers unable to begin to engage with the artwork at all.

Chagall came to stained glass relatively late in his career with the commissions for the baptistery at for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce du Plateau d’Assy completed in 1957. These derived from his friendship with Pere Couturier and included two small windows in grisaille of an angel holding a jug of holy water and an angel with candelabra and flowers. Chagall, as a Jew, had concerns regarding commissions for a Christian church to the extent that he insisted on the phrase, ‘In the Name of the Liberty of All Religions’ on the baptistery mural.

Following this commission, however, Chagall working with Charles Marq, from the Atelier Simon Marq, received many church commissions for stained glass with his ambulatory windows for Metz Cathedral, realized in 1960, being the first of these commissions. “Marq developed a special process of veneering pigment on glass, which allowed Chagall to use as many as three colours on a single uninterrupted pane, rather than being confined to the traditional technique of separating each colour by lead strips.”

Chagall was inspired both by the Bible and his visits to Israel. Accompanied by his wife Bella and his daughter Ida, Chagall went to Israel first in 1931. The main reason for this visit was a commission he had received from the Parisian art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, to do a series of illustrations to the Bible. He travelled a great deal, painting and drawing in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Safed. The country left a vivid impression on him, and back in Paris the light and landscape he had seen were echoed in many of the etchings for his work, The Bible. In 1951, the opening of large retrospective exhibitions of his works, in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, prompted Chagall's second visit, and in 1957, he was again in Israel following the publication of his illustrations to the Bible. Vollard had died shortly before World War II and Tériade published the commission that had finally been completed in 1956. A second book of Bible illustrations was published by Vervé, also in that year.

Chagall said that, “In the East, I found the Bible and part of my own being. The air of the Land of Israel makes one wise.” For him, the Bible was “pure poetry, human tragedy.” He said that it “filled him with visions about the faith of the world” and that it inspired him so that he saw life and art “through the wisdom of the bible.”

Chagall also made a link between stained glass which comes alive “through the light it receives” and the Bible which is “light already.” Stained glass, he suggests, “should make this obvious through grace and simplicity.” Jonathan Wilson has noted that “Chagall became fascinated with stained glass after he had moved to the south of France in 1950.” Chagall was undoubtedly “seduced by the endless Mediterranean unfolding of color-as-light and the possibility of capturing in glass the kind of spiritually charged, quasi-mystical, sometimes biblically inspired images to which he was increasingly drawn.” Indeed, Chagall spoke of light as being the material which creates stained glass. “The light is natural,” he suggested, “and all nature is religious.” Therefore, “every colour ought to stimulate prayer” and, "whether in cathedral or synagogue the phenomenon is the same: something mystical comes through the window.”

André Malraux summed this up when he wrote: “I cannot understand why stained glass, which lives and dies with the day, was ever abandoned. … Artists preferred the light. But the stained glass window, which is brought to life by the morning and snuffed out by the night, brought the Creation home to the worshipper in church. … Stained glass eventually surrendered to painting by incorporating shade, which killed it. It was six hundred and fifty years before someone found a way of shading off colors in glass: Chagall.”

It has been suggested, rightly I think, that Chagall’s use of colour is mystical, with “the yellow of revelation flooding the Tablets of the Law,” “the white of faith surrounding the cross” and “the supremacy of blue in his work” indicating “the wisdom of overcoming bitterness and hatred.” Here we have the yellow of revelation flooding the Garden of Eden in Chagall’s 1963 Creation window for the triforium of the north transept while deep blues and reds characterise the combination of ecstasy and sorrow in the two ambulatory windows from 1960 which tell the story of the Jewish people in key episodes from Abraham to Jeremiah by way of Jacob, Moses and David. James Waller has written that here “Chagall is all curves and tonal flares,” his “modulation of tone, within the fabulously fragmented and flowing glass panes” lending “his colours a deeper, more smoldering dimension.”

Waller contrasts Chagall’s curves with the “constructivist angles and flat-colour planes” of the windows by Jacques Villon, created for the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in 1957. Villon’s “highly expressive constructivism, divided into powerful sections of colour makes a startling impact within the medieval interior” and “flare brilliantly, even on an overcast day, drawing all eyes towards them.” In the early morning light, his “stained-glass compositions of the Crucifixion (centre), the Jewish Passover and Last Supper (left), and the Wedding Feast of Cana (right)”, blaze in a stunning conflagration of light.

Jacques Villon was born Gaston Emile Duchamp, the oldest of six children. Three of his younger siblings also achieved fame as artists: Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp. He and his brothers became friendly with leading cubists including Albert Gleizes. This circle of artists attempted to extend the innovations of Cubism into the realm of life through architecture and the decorative arts. Along with Gleizes, Villon was one of the few French artists who explored abstraction during the early 1920s while during the early 1930s, again prodded by Gleizes, he took part in the activities of Abstraction–création. As with Gleizes’ own work, these pictures are carefully governed by systems of mathematical proportion; his emphasis on planar construction was played off against free linear motifs to produce the most lyrical abstract paintings of his entire career. Villon saw painting as “a method of prospecting, a manner of expression. With colour as bait …”

From 1957 onwards Brigitte Simon and her husband Charles Marq began to create stained glass with the greatest contemporary painters beginning with Jacques Villon. Hayley Wood writes that:

“The studio technique used on the windows by Villon and Chagall is acid etching on flashed glass, which is clear glass with a veneer of colored glass. The etching process for glass is basically the same as the process used for metal plates in printmaking: an acid-resistant ground is applied to the glass, and a design is carved, drawn with a tool that will scrape away the resist. This is then placed in an acid bath, and the acid eats away at the exposed carved areas. Subtle tonality—color fields representing the spectrum of transparent color between the color of the veneer and the clear base glass--can be achieved with extremely skilled and careful monitoring of the process. Black enamel paint is used on the Chagall and Villon windows for the detailed work (a technique of monochromatic painting called grisaille).”

The final modern windows at Metz are two entirely modernist abstract compositions: small window sections by Roger Bissière from 1960, the glass segments of which look like mosaic tiles miraculously transported into lead cames and stone portals. Bissière made stained glass windows for the churches of Cornol and Develier (Swiss Jura) in 1958, as well as for the north and south transepts here in collaboration with Charles Marq.

Bissière was the forerunner of the new non-figurative generation which began after the war in France. From 1925-1938 he was Professor of fresco painting at the Académie Ranson where he was particularly appreciated for his simplicity and natural kindness. He taught Alfred Manessier, Vieira da Silva, Jean Le Moal and many other young non-figurative painters for whom he was considered the ‘father’ of their style. Through its inner radiance and poetic qualities his work has spiritual resonance. “Painting is not a job,” he said, “we only paint when Grace falls upon us.”

Finally, from this visit it is worth noting that Metz Cathedral has an ongoing arts programme centred on music and the visual arts. Exhibitions are hung within the body of the Cathedral with the exhibition at the time I visited by Eban being abstract works based on these words from Georges Rouault:

“Shape, color, harmony

Oasis or mirage

For the eyes, the heart or the mind.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Norah Jones - The Sun Doesn't Like You.