The beginnings of modern stained glass in France, Elizabeth Morris writes in
Stained and Decorative Glass, came between the wars when "stained glass artists banded together in craft workshops to concentrate on the restoration of ... damaged glass and to exchange ideas on new glass, of which perhaps the best known was the Atelier D'Art Sacré, founded in 1919" by
Maurice Denis and
Georges Desvallières.
In 1919, Denis wrote that “we hardly see any contemporary work in visual arts that matches the vision of a
Léon Bloy, a
Paul Claudel, a
Péguy or a
Sertillanges.” He questioned then whether there was “any religious art that endorses the prestige of Catholicism with as much strength and freshness” as these writers but by 1933 was able to say that “Catholicism is in the vanguard of the modern movement” with “its place in the forefront of the arts and sciences alike” and with the characteristics of the new religious ar being “freedom and sincerity.”
In part, this change resulted from Denis' international influence. In Switzerland, for example, through decoration of the Saint-Paul Church in Geneva, Denis developed a fruitful companionship with
Alexandre Cingria and
Georges de Traz who jointly founded the
Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice to “develop religious art.”
It was in Switzerland that Denis discovered the work of the Polish artist,
Joseph Mehoffer. Writing in 1916 in his journal, Denis said
"This is a kind of stained glass all made new. It is newer and more beautiful than we make in France." Mehoffer won a competition in 1895 for new windows in the
Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, Fribourg and his 21 windows were installed between 1906 and 1935.
Bartosz Stachowiak writes that "In 1900, during the World Exhibition, he won a gold medal for one of the Freiburg stained glasses entitled “Martyrs”."
Stachowiak continues:
"After coming back to his home country, Mehoffer focused mostly on polychrome and stained glasses. Some of his crafts are: painting decorations for the Wawel Cathedral vault, polychromes and stained glasses in the chapel of Szafrańce and in the transept of the aforementioned cathedral. During the World Exhibition in St. Luis, he won a gold medal for his painting “Vocalist”, and a silver medal for his stained glass “Vita somnium breve”. His other stained glasses for Świętokrzyski chapel on Wawel were honoured during Grand Prix at the International Exhibition of Decorating Art in Paris.
The artist also realized his other projects in places such as: St. Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariański) in Krakow, St. John’s Cathedral in Lwów, Morawy Abbey, the local church of St. Elizabeth in Jutrosin, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Włocławek, the Holly Heart of Jesus Christ’s Church in Turek, and the local church in Lubień."
Under the influence of Mehoffer's Fribourg windows, Cingria also began to create decorative art. Producing windows
"whose brilliance dispersed the shadows cast by trite religious rubbish," he and his brother, Charles Albert, wrote criticism of the current ecclesiastical art such as
La Décadence de l'art sacré. Cingria eventually became known as "the Tintoretto of stained glass." In 1916, Cingria, Maurice Denis and
Marcel Poncet collaborated on the decoration of Saint Paul's Church in Geneva. Cingria became the leader of a group of young artists who called themselves the Society of Saint Luke and engineered a rebirth of Catholic arts by founding, building, restoring and decorating more than 70 churches in Switzerland during the interwar years.
Jacques Maritain suggested that Cingria visit
Gino Severini and encourage him to enter a competition for the decoration of a Church in the Fribourg Canton of Switzerland. Severini did so, won the competition and went on to work on several Swiss churches over the latter period of his career. So much so, that Denis spoke of him as "the most famous decorator of Swiss churches."
Also worthy of acclaim are Swiss artists Augusto Giacometti who was a brilliant colourist and Louis Rivier whose work was reminiscent of the art nouveau style. Giacometti "received his first public commissions in Switzerland in 1914: a mosaic for a fountain at the University of Zurich and a tempera canvas portraying the Resurrection of Christ for the church of San Pietro in Coltura. During the same period he began to produce a series of pastels with total freedom of form, including the Astrazione da un quadro di Fra Angelico." In 1915 Rivier completed the decoration of the church of St. John of Court in Lausanne. From 1923 to 1940, he worked on the decoration of the Greek Orthodox church of Lausanne and created 106 windows in 35 other churches, including 17 for the Cathedral of Lausanne.
Hans Stocker and Otto Staiger were both members of the group Rot-Blau (red-blue) which flourished from 1926 to 1932 and shared the same goals of revitalizing sacred art. They undertook the windows in Saint Anthonius church in Basel. For a long time, massive criticism threatened the execution of these works of art; conservative parishioners and priests talked of bolshevization. The last of the eleven windows, Staigers' representation of the Eucharist, had to wait until 1930 before it could be fitted into place.
On the right of the nave are scenes from the life of Jesus: the blessing of the children, Jesus preaching by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus and the poor, the Last Supper, and the Pietà. The left-hand side tells the story of St Antony: his vision of the Babe, his sermon to the fishes, the bread of the poor, the Eucharist, and the saints death. The work of the two friends is related, yet different. Staigers' windows are harsher and simpler while Stocker's are more dramatic and turbulent. These windows gave "an enriching, stimulating new impulse to western stained-glass art" and St Antonius is now "one of Switzerlands protected monuments as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a perfect synthesis of both secular and ecclesiastic art."
Theologian, Hans Urs von Balthazar claimed Stocker "as representative of a 'new Catholic art in German Switzerland'. Aidan Nichols notes in Redeeming Beauty that "Stocker was well prepared for the tasks of specifically sacred art because even in paintings of landscapes, waterscapes, and domestic interiors, the world for him has religious depth," so for Stocker "the transition to painting for the Church was simple" as he "saw the spiritual universe of salvation history by analogy with cosmic nature." In other words, Nichols notes, "he was wondrously overwhelmed by its chiaroscuro." In this way, Balthasar considered "that Stocker's art satisfied the conditions he had laid down in his essay in Mysterium Salutis: a right aesthetic reading of the 'form of revelation' can only be achieved in obedience to ecclesiastical interpretation."
Louis Barillet and Jacques Le Chevallier founded L'Arch et les Artisans de l'Autel, (The Arc and the Artisans of the Altar). Barillet began his career as a medal carver and painter. His meeting in 1920 with Jacques Le Chevalier engraver and illustrator pointed him towards the monumental. The two men quickly began collaborating and their first stained glass windows were dated 1920. Barillet became the theorist of modern stained glass windows in France as he renewed the approach to religious and civil stained glass windows from as much an aesthetic as an iconographic point of view. In 1948, Le Chevallier organized the Centre d’Art sacré in collaboration with Maurice Rocher and was a lecturer in stained glass windows at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
In 1937 the influential Dominican Father Marie-Alain Couturier, who was co-author of the Journal Art Sacré, "invited a number of well-known modern artists, including Georges Rouault, to make designs for the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grace at Assy in Haute-Savoie." The result, Morris suggests, "was a startling, if controversial, new interpretation of religious stained glass, though not entirely successful because of the differing styles." Nevertheless, Morris notes that "the experiment at Assy was the beginning of abstract art in religious stained glass" and the starting point for the new phenomenon in France (and to a lesser extent in England) of distinguished artists 'painting in glass' with the help of craftsmen "who, working closely with them, translated their designs into glass, paint and lead, thereby producing some of the most beautiful stained glass of the postwar years." The relationship of artist and craftsman, Morris suggests, "was strongest in France with Georges Braque and Paul Bony, Chagall and the Marcqs, Henri Matisse and again Bony, and Fernand Léger and Barillet. In England, it flourished with the work of John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens."
Alfred Manessier, who having first been introduced to the technique by Georges Rouault, "promoted the modern concept of stained glass architecture, rather than isolated stained glass windows." Manessier left his mark in stained glass in many beautiful churches in France and beyond, such as Saint-Pierre de Trinquetaille in Arles (1953), Notre-Dame de la Paix (Le Pouldu, Brittany, 1958), the Saint- Die cathedral (Vosges), and the convent of the Sisters of the Assumption, Rue Violet, Paris (1968-69), together with commissions in Basle, Fribourg, Essen, Cologne, Bremen and elsewhere.
In Germany stained glass developed into a truly postwar movement. Jan Thorn Prikker was Dutch by birth, but worked and taught in Germany:
"His work in stained glass uses dynamic elements in simplified pictorial form ... Thorn Prikker's work created enormous interest in a new generation of German stained-glass artists who carried their work into the 1950s, principally Anton Wendling, Heinrich Camperdonk and Georg Meistermann. Like French craftsmen, Meistermann's work was veering away from figurative glass. His work was to reach its peak with his windows in the Church of St Maria-im-Kapital, where his use of paint was minimal and the composition of the windows displayed a great freedom of style ...
Anton Wendling made his home before the war in Aachen, where in 1949 he designed huge abstract windows to geometric patterns for the choir in Aachen Cathedral. His windows tend to comprise a repeating geometric pattern, often referred to as tiered coloured masonry. In 1947, when teaching at the University, he engaged as his assistant a young artist called Ludwig Schaffrath, who was to be one of the greatest postwar stained-glass artists in Europe ...
Another outstanding artist of the postwar years who, like Schaffrath, has dispensed almost completely with painted work - except occasional subtle shading, using the leads to delineate lines - is Johannes Schreiter. His blue opalescent glass at the Johannesbund Chapel at Leutesdorf is an essay in windows which are a part of, rather than in, the architecture ...
A contemporary of Schaffrath and Schreiter is Jochem Poensgen, whose development of simplified form and line to integrate with the architecture of the church can be seen at Christ Kerk Dinslaken and St Jacob in Reuthe/Vorarlberg. The work of these, and other German postwar ecclesiastical artists, has proved prolific and international."
George Seddon notes in Stained Glass that while the "revival of stained glass in France and Germany did not get under way until the middle of the century, but Ireland had a rich period during the first fifty years:"
"It was presided over by
Sarah Purser, the grand old lady of Irish stained glass, who ran her studio until she died at the age of ninety-three. The outstanding members of the Irish School were
Harry Clarke,
Michael Healy and
Evie Hone. Clarke combined tradition with a rare originality; his work in Ireland and in many parts of the world is distinguished by the warm brilliance of his colour. Evie Hone, deeply involved in abstract art in Paris, turned to stained glass in the 1930s, and the representational style she developed owes much Georges Rouault. But her late, great works (the best known is the window in the chapel of Eton College) are distinctively her own. Both Harry Clarke, who died in 1931, and Evie Hone, who died in 1955, strongly influenced younger Irish and English stained-glass artists."
Among the later English stained-glass artists have been
Alan Younger,
Mark Angus and
Thomas Denny. Peter Cormack writes that
Alan Younger was "one of the outstanding stained-glass artists of the post-war period" as he "consistently upheld an ideal of authentically contemporary expression combined with the best traditional craftsmanship." "His windows at Westminster Abbey, at Durham and St Albans Cathedrals and elsewhere embody much of his personality: their design is both lyrical and intellectual in its inspiration, and their meticulous technique proclaims his joy in the processes of making."
Mark Angus works in Great Britain and Germany where, since 1978, he has created more than 300 windows for churches, cathedrals as well as for other public spaces and private houses. Between abstraction and figurative depictions his windows challenge interpretation without abandoning mystery, wonder and also doubt. Morris writes that his "ecclesiastical windows are a fresh and sincere contribution to religious stained glass."
Thomas Denny has "pioneered a new and exciting technique of acid-etching, staining and painting on glass, which creates an astonishing movement of light and colour across the surface of the window."
The overall abstraction of his conception "is modified by the inclusion within that abstraction of "hidden" figurative elements which make his windows a source of personal pilgrimage for those encountering them for the first time." His is "an art form that uses landscape, human and animal references, and an emotionally intense use of colour to produce an image that is profoundly spiritual in its archetypal and mythical references."
For a wider summary of the history of stained glass see http://stainedglass.org/?page_id=169.
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Jay Jay Pistolet - Vintage Red Enterprise.
