After my day in Manchester and the talk about St Stephen Marc Chagall’s windows in Martin-Luther Kiche, I agreed to write a small article for their Gemeindebrief ( newsletter). It will be translated in German:
Manchester talk on 7th March about Marc Chagall’s windows of St Stephen Church in Mainz in Germany was of great interest for me as a professional artist and architectural glass designer/maker. Marc Chagall had said ” For me a church window represents the transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world” (p243 Marc Chagall by Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Taschen,2003). The light was also in his heart as a painter and he worked with ease with the light and colour to create paintings with glass and on glass. He had been taught the glass painting technique in his 60 s and worked for over 35 years at various stained glass commissions until his death in 1985.
Photos of the artworks for those windows are rarely presented in books about his work ( the Taschen book written by his friend Jacob Baal-Teshuva do not present those windows ). It was an other motivation to view a slide show of this artwork in the Martin-Luther-Kirche in Manchester and a pleasant surprise to see that Pastor Strobel also had the books about those windows written in German by Klaus Mayer. The windows were taller than any other stained glass windows Marc Chagall had done.
It was very interesting to view how he aesthetically dealt with it. His artwork as a painter has all the potentials for technically making stained glass windows. Colours are plain, one next to the other like two panes of two coloured glass red and blue bonded by lead lines ( one character dressed with one colour, an other one next to it dressed with an other colour).The colour scheme of primary or secondary colours or the vibration for each colour can be achieved with glass and by the use of etching flashed red or blue or green glass gain variations in tones and hues. His use of gold yellow is rendered by the use of silver stain on clear parts of the glass. All outer lines of his characters’ bodies or faces needed no alterations for painting on glass with traditional brown glass paintings. Not only the colours, but also the lead lines were not like breaking into patches his design, as his artwork as a painter has its own rhythm of lines and structure of divisions of the space behind and within the body of all characters.
Those windows are the achievement of his understanding of the bond between his artwork and light, stained glass techniques and aesthetic openness of that craft, more than any other of his stained glass artwork. His use of lead-line has an amazing visual lightness and as viewers, it is entirely taken as lines of the art piece as one.
