Seeing the Light

The Spring 2017 edition of Tate Etc, Tate Gallery's magazine, has a short article on contemporary stained glass by Jonathan Koestlè-Cate, one of the trustees of Art and Sacred Places. You can find the full text below.

To see stained glass requires a pilgrimage of sorts, for photographs will never do justice to a medium so utterly reliant upon architectural space and the changing conditions of light. On a visit to Cologne, nothing quite prepared me for my first impression of Gerhard Richter's monumental stained glass window for the cathedral. Even on a dull January morning it had a remarkably luminous presence, but when the sun briefly emerged from behind grey clouds the effect was startling, illuminating the cathedral's gloomy interior with resplendent colour. Despite the many secular examples one could cite, stained glass is a medium synonymous with sacred spaces, and indeed the church has been the recipient of some of the most interesting projects to date, created by artists of the highest calibre. However, few of these commissions are to be found in Britain. Rather, it is in France and Germany that a renaissance of experimental stained glass production has been taking place, especially since the 1980s, Richter's window for Cologne Cathedral only the most conspicuous example.

In the post-war years a sentiment of renewal and reconstruction provided the impetus for many new building works. Rebuilding, repairing and conserving the nation's churches, abbeys and cathedrals became part of the national recovery, the restitution of a historical and architectural heritage or, in Germany's case, part of a post-war cultural rehabilitation. In France, of 8,000 buildings registered as historical monuments (many of which were ecclesiastical), 1,270 were partially damaged, 569 gravely damaged and 68 completely destroyed in the Second World War. Add to these figures the extant ruinous effects of the First World War and one gets an idea of the scale of the situation.

Three broad alternatives presented themselves to the decision-makers: leave historic monuments in their damaged state, restore them to resemble their former state, or put out a call to artists and architects to create something new from what remained. All three of these options were used regarding the buildings themselves, but glass presented a particular problem.

Although in France 50,000 sq. metres of glass had been set aside for safe keeping in the early days of the war almost as much again had been utterly destroyed. Replacing that glass has been a long and complex process, but one sustained by the particular conditions that exist in France. Crucially, whilst in Germany and Britain artistic patronage of this sort remains the province of the church, in France it falls under the patrimony of the state as a consequence, paradoxically, of the legal separation of church and state enacted in 1905. All such projects are public commissions using public budgets, the secular state effectively becoming the principal source and funding for sacred art.

The result has been a remarkable catalogue of works from national and international artists in some of France's most venerable religious buildings: Pierre Soulages's deceptively simple monochrome windows for the Romanesque abbey of Conques, Imi Knoebel's splinters of iridescent glass for Reims, the ambitious experiment to employ a corps of artists to fill 1052 sq. metres of glass for the Cathedral of Nevers, as well as works by Aurelie Nemours, David Rabinowitch, Robert Morris, Christopher Wool and David Tremlett, among many others.

Of course, we might wonder why so many contemporary artists have accepted these commissions when they had previously appeared indifferent to the church as an environment for their work. Wool was only persuaded by the fact that the chapel he was assigned was no longer in use as a liturgical space. For Soulages, on the other hand, the invitation to create windows for Conques was all the motivation he needed. Ever since the age of 12, when a school visit to the abbey had convinced him of his artistic vocation, it has been a source of inspiration in his creative development. Others are undoubtedly prompted by civic duty. At Reims the great symbolic weight attached to France's premier cathedral, not least for its wartime "martyrdom" by German bombardment, helped to convince the initially reluctant Knoebel. As someone who had witnessed the firebombing of Dresden as a child, he was well placed to undertake a commission that doubled as an emblem of Franco-German reconciliation.

Although many of these artists would describe themselves as atheists, they demonstrate a marked respect for the religious demands of the site above and beyond its aesthetic possibilities, responding to its unique genius loci. As one might expect this is not without its challenges. Any artist choosing to work in an ecclesiastical site encounters material constraints that would not trouble them in a gallery. A degree of control must also be relinquished, all such commissions demanding the artist's close collaboration with a workshop able to turn their visual ideas into reality. This is no place for the auteur. Of greatest concern perhaps is that the work cannot be conceptually isolated from its religious context, inevitably finding itself beholden to some larger framework of meaning.

Admittedly, few artists are able to resist the lure, as Richter said of his window for Cologne, of so thrilling, if intimidating, a commission. It presents artists with an extraordinary opportunity, rarely offered by a gallery or museum, to inscribe their visual language onto an enduring and imposing concrete reality. Even so, a surprising but common feature of contemporary stained glass commissions is that artists are sought who have no history of working in glass, a policy presumably aimed at forestalling formulaic solutions. As one master glazier put it, "it's better when artists don't know anything. Then they have no limits. It's our job to find the solutions!" So, if modern stained glass sometimes benefits from a return to older, neglected medieval techniques, more typically it inspires innovative approaches to the material. From the advanced technology of thermocollage to create an opaque yet translucent white glass, to glass moulded into a kind of sculptural bas-relief; from the elimination of the supporting framework of cames and saddle bars, to the use of leading as a compositional device, exploiting its pliability to expressive effect.