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440 - Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today |
Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today
IN THE LATE 1960s, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on a Gothic revival architect who designed a number of Episcopal churches in the northeastern United States. He was a high church Anglican who emigrated from England a century ago bringing a richly decorated Tractarianism to these Puritan shores. He was the first architect of Washington National Cathedral and had Anglicized the image of the Episcopal parish church in New England. Yet, he and his followers had been forgotten, and their monuments had not always been treated with the respect they deserved. Unsympathetic alterations or improper maintenance was not simply the result of redundancy, as is so often the case with English churches. Rather, the mutilation or destruction of the past reflected shifting tastes abetted by trendy vicars who demonstrated their "relevance" by ripping altars from east walls, painting over murals, and substituting spot lighting for the mellow glow of Victorian glass.
The practice of modernizing--or Georgianizing or colonializing or homogenizing--our ecclesiastical treasures seems to be a national melanoma. Almost every issue of Faith & Form, the journal of the American Institute of Architect's Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture, shows once attractive churches whose beauty has been exorcised by Vatican II whitewash. Or, perhaps the altar has been transfigured as a sort of Julia Child cooking demonstration table, or some other updating intended to make houses of worship more meaningful for today's more modern seekers of God.
The cover of the Spring 1988 number of Faith & Form features the new" chancel of St. Anne's-in-the- Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln, Mass. The architects, Crissman & Solomon, are also represented in the same issue by a contextually appropriate white frame addition to the 1814 Unitarian-Universalist church in Wayland. But to "facilitate the delivery of the liturgy" at the 1874 St. Anne's, "the existing altar became free-standing and the reredos (by Ralph Adams Cram) was relocated one bay." The oak retable by America's greatest ecclesiastical architect is marooned in a sea of white paint that is closer in spirit to a hospital operating room than to the timber-framed country church that once reminded its communicants of their English roots.
Unfortunately, much of this cultural vandalism is perpetrated by
William Morgan is Professor of Fine Arts, the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. He is here commenting on two recent books: Louis Grodecki and Catherine Brisac, Gothic Stained Glass 1200-1300 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Margaret Stavridi, Master of Glass, Charles Eamer Kempe 1837-1907 (Hatfield: John Taylor for the Kempe Society, 1988).
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441 - Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today |
well-meaning but visually illiterate clerics. It is unfair to send forth ministers and expect them to make critical aesthetic decisions without requiring some study of the church as art. In addition to the congregation, almost every pastor or priest is in charge of one of the more visible (and usually most historic) buildings in the community. During their tenure, these spiritual leaders will invariably be called upon to oversee tearing down an old church, erecting a new one, constructing an addition, enlarging a sanctuary, or redecorating a chancel. These physical changes may be as upsetting to a congregation as, say, the introduction of a new prayer book, the banishment of Latin, or the death of an old friend.
Maybe it is asking too much to expect ministers to be guardians of our architectural legacy. Prepared or not, they will still have to make decisions that will affect our built environment. One way to bridge this education gap is by reviews and essays that can at least alert us to helpful literature. Two recent offerings on stained glass are a case in point.
Stained glass was one of the artistic glories of the Middle Ageswhen it was seen as the actual embodiment of the dictum that God is Light, and was one of the ecclesiastical arts revived in the nineteenth century's attempt to recapture the spirit of a supposedly golden medieval past. Aside from the opalescent window given by the local mill owner that is reputed to be by Tiffany or the brilliant blue fields of Boston glazier, Charles Connick, most clergy, even most art historians don't know a great deal about glass. Louis Grodecki and Catherine Brisac's Gothic Stained Glass 1200-1300 focuses on the classic age of colored window making and would be a good place to start a visual exploration of the field.
A translation of Le Vitrail gothicque au XIIIe siècle (itself a sequel to Le Vitrail roman), Gothic Stained Glass is a serious art historical study of the development of glass in thirteenth-century France. The pilgrim willing to journey through the dense text will be rewarded by lots of facts, although the wooden translation is a further impediment. Overall, the text is pretty joyless and ought to be set aside for reference.
The photographs in Gothic Stained Glass are far more effective than the writing. Even though this is a scholarly treatise masquerading as a coffee-table ornament, the Christian symbolism of the Heavenly Jerusalem depicted in walls of light has a force and clarity that rarely needs explanation. Since there were few images physically close enough to be read by worshippers, the cathedral glass was hardly "a catechism for illiterates," but the iconography is readily revealed in the book's 300 illustrations. The text tells the reader how glass was made, how one school influenced another, how little we know of the artists, but the self-image of the period reveals itself dramatically in the faces-like "An Old Man Named Nicholas" at Auxerre or "Saint Peter having his feet washed" in the Passion window at Dol-de-Bretagne. The increas
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442 - Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today |
-from "Life of Saint John the Evangelist" window at Chartres (c. 1205), detail, in Gothic Stained Glass
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443 - Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today |
ingly daring walls of glass that literally challenged the masonry of the French cathedrals contributed a powerful spiritual atmosphere rarely equalled since.
Margaret Stavridi's Master of Glass is a far more modest book, but it is useful for American clergy. Its subject, Charles Earner Kempe, designed a number of windows in this country and worked when many of our churches were built. Second only in importance to William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, Kempe was peripherally a part of the reform-minded Arts and Crafts movement. His firm's 5000 windows, reredoses, stencillings, and other fittings brought a new level of taste and refinement to British church design in the reign of Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, until now, Kempe's work has not enjoyed the favor of famous contemporaries like Morris or Charles Rennie Mackintosh. For Kempe, who died the year Picasso launched Cubism, "was never quite original." His style was influenced by the fifteenth and sixteenthcentury glass which he regarded as the apogee of the art ("what had been tried and done well in the past, could and probably should, be tried and done well again").
Kempe was a pupil of Dr. Arnold's at Rugby and then went to Oxford to study for the ministry. Thwarted by a speech impediment, he decided that if "it was not permitted for him to minister in the Sanctuary, he would devote his talents to the adornment of the Sanctuary." Whether religious art can only be created by religious people, as his heroes Ruskin and Pugin contended, Kempe's vocation of enriching churches with glass, tapestries, and vestments was decidedly sacramental. Believing that every design had to have a purpose and a symbolic meaning, he broke with the Morris circle when they repudiated Christianity.
Mrs. Stavridi, patron and founder of the Kempe Society and daughter of Kempe's chief draughtsman and confidant, John William Lisle, has set about to resurrect Kempe's memory and make him a less shadowy figure. She succeeds admirably, and her pleasant and often humorous style is peppered with personal recollections of the Kempe studio. Her review of the Oxford movement, and of High Victorian church art and architecture, as well as technical processes, is excellent and easily understood. She follows her subject's career from Sussex village through the office of architect George Frederick Bodley (who gave both Morris and Kempe their first ecclesiastical commissions) to royal patronage. His success allowed him to become a country squire and much of Kempe's life revolved around his Tudor homestead with its private oratory and 200 acres of garden.
Although the firm continued for twenty-seven years following Kempe's death, the final era was not altogther a happy one. Devoted artisans who had willingly worked anonymously for their original master were less than enthusiastic about Kempe's imperious cousin and legatee, Walter Tower. Also, the heyday of Victorian embellishment did not survive past the Great War memorials. The records of the firm were lost or scattered, and the few drawings, diaries, and papers that have
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444 - Stained Glass: Yesterday and Today |
-from "St. George" window at Church of St. Mary and St. Helen (1905), detail, in Master of Glass
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survived have come to light through the diligence of Mrs. Stavridi and the Society. The delicate English-school-boy St. George's and the Edwardian-country-weekend angels may not appeal to everyone's taste, but now we can better appreciate Kempe and more critically assess his artistic contribution. Unfortunately, the Kempe legacy has been diminished by church closings, the Luftwaffe, and the ravages of time. But Master of Glass has a listing of the major commissions, and the Society is nurturing a growing archive.
Tucked into the back of the volume is a thirteen-page booklet, "The Stained Glass in the USA by the Kempe Studio and C. E. Kempe & Co., Ltd.," an invaluable (and undoubtedly incomplete) guide to the wealth of Kempe windows and furnishings in this country. Not surprisingly, Kempe windows and furnishings adorn the outstanding monuments of American ecclesiology, like St. Mark's in Phildelphia, Boston's Church of the Advent, and Christ Church, New Haven. About ten years ago, the Postal Service's Christmas stamp (the "religious" one) featured John William Lisle's Virgin and Child at Washington Cathedral. Although the artist was unidentified, this Kempe window is just one of many done in collaboration with the Gothic Revival architect Henry Vaughan, who, like his glass-making friend, was also a protégé of Bodley. Wherever there are Vaughan churches-the apsidal chapels at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, dozens of parish churches in New England, the chapel of Groton School-they are invariably complemented with the muted greens and High Victorian elegance of Kempe glass.
Study of the artistic and architectural history of our churches ought to lead to greater appreciation of our ecclesiastical patrimony. And with the growing literature on the often unremembered artists that helped shape our religious visage, it will be harder for ministers and church building committees to feign ignorance of the treasures entrusted to them.