Reyntiens and Piper first met in about 1952 when Reyntiens, recently graduated from Edinburgh School of Art, was serving an apprenticeship with JE Nuttgens, a former student of the Arts and Crafts stained-glass artist Christopher Whall. Patrick Reyntiens painting panels at Dale Chihuly’s glass school in Seattle in the US in 2011 Reyntiens’ reading of the last stanzas of Dante’s Paradiso led Piper to conceive the Trinity in bursts of blue, yellow and red light, abstracted further by Reyntiens’ strategic configuration of glazing bars. Reyntiens’ team worked at speed using the then fashionable technique of dalle de verre, in which the glass is set in structural mortar. Trust was also needed when the pair embarked on a commission for the lantern tower of Frederick Gibberd’s Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool, constructed in the mid-60s. Piper acknowledged Reyntiens’ creative intelligence: “He took contemporary painting – and this meant Pollock and Guston – as his immediate influence, my cartoon as his pattern for operation and what he had learned about stained glass as his means of action.” It was Reyntiens who pushed the Coventry designs in the direction of pure abstraction, a Bernini-inspired “explosion” of colour that would overcome the limitations of the stone mullions that broke Piper’s design into 198 lights. Both men were impressed by the abstract expressionist section of the 1956 show Modern Art in the United States at the Tate Gallery. The multiplicity of ecclesiastical commissions, mostly funded by the government’s War Damage Commission, shaped the life of the young Reyntiens, whose remarkable partnership with the artist John Piper resulted in some of the finest modern glass in the British Isles.Ĭomplete trust enabled Piper and Reyntiens to work together on the huge challenge presented by the monumental baptistery window at the new Coventry Cathedral rising from the bombed-out ruins in the 1950s. The period just after the second world war witnessed a stained-glass renaissance, after the genre’s apparent irrelevance in the 1930s. Recognition of his genius as a maker in this medium has been complicated by its almost invisible status within the history of modern art and by the fact that some of Reyntiens’ finest work was done in creative collaboration with other artists. Maqsoodi, an artist who grew up in a Muslim family.Patrick Reyntiens, who has died aged 95, occupied a singular position in the history of British stained glass.
But not only has the abbey installed a window whose Eastern flair and abstract design Cardinal Meisner may have considered better suited to a mosque, it also commissioned Ms.
RUGS WITH A STAINED GLASS DESIGN WINDOWS
Richter’s windows at Tholey Abbey resemble the design of a Persian rug.
With their recurring patterns and intense colors, Mr. “It has also made the cathedral a destination for people interested in contemporary art.” Schock-Werner said, adding that most visitors find it beautiful. “There was a big fuss at first, but then the reception was really enthusiastic,” Ms. She said in a recent interview that the comment by Cardinal Meisner, who died in 2017, had been “the best P.R. The Cologne window was commissioned by Barbara Schock-Werner, an art historian who was the cathedral’s custodian until her retirement in 2012. Cologne’s archbishop at the time, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, caused a furor when he said the abstract design with no direct reference to the Bible was “better suited to a mosque.” Richter’s first church windows, however.Ī stained-glass structure that he designed for Cologne Cathedral, containing 11,263 randomly arranged colored squares, was met with both criticism and admiration when it was inaugurated in 2007. Short of a miracle, “that’s it,” DPA reported him saying. Richter said the Tholey windows might be the last entry in the official catalog of his works, which begins with the 1962 painting “Table.” The windows will be No. But in brief comments reported by the German press agency DPA on Wednesday, Mr. Richter, 88, declined to be interviewed for this article his studio said he was not well enough. The artist replied to say that he would design the windows for free. Richter fetched about $45 million at Sotheby’s in London in 2015. Richter expressing concern that his fee might be too high. “Although - I would like to do it,” he added. I don’t think I can do it.” Then followed a 10-second pause. It all sounds wonderful, but I am too busy and simply too old. “It’s about the oldest monastery in Germany. “Gerhard Richter from Cologne here,” he said.