Heard and Seen

Extract

The monumental tradition of stained glass has so closely tied its creator to the architect that as an art of its own, with a unique territory for the imagination to explore, it is as yet scarcely known. But things are changing, and the Arts Council’s travelling exhibition of modern stained glass (which will visit most of the principal cities of England and Wales during 1961) is an encouraging sign of the emergence of an independent art, freed from the near-monopoly of the commercial firms who up to now alone had the resources for its complex and expensive manufacture. And the recent exhibition at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London of the work of Patrick Reyntiens revealed an artist who combines a superb mastery of the technical problems of this most exacting of crafts with a rich and original imagination.

The stained glass artist can rarely know the freedom the painter or the sculptor enjoys. His work is almost always commissioned, usually by clergy, and he is often expected to conform to structural patterns as well as to conventions of design. His failures are the most permanent of all, as a glance at almost any church built during the last hundred years or so will clearly prove. So vigorous a discipline is not necessarily a limitation, and the windows of Chartres or Fairford are there to declare it. Since the war, intelligent commissions (not, alas, from any Catholic source) have enabled artists such as John Piper to design windows on the heroic scale—as in the baptistery of Coventry Cathedral and in the chapel of Eton College.