Art: Cleveland’s New Windows

On Palm Sunday Cleveland’s Pastor Frank H. Ferris and his well-to-do Fairmount Presbyterian congregation celebrated their first services in a brand-new church. Most magnificent of all the new church’s handsome trappings was a set of 37 stained-glass windows picturing the life of Christ. Few U.S. churches could boast their equals, and none precisely like them had ever been seen in a U.S. church before. For the world’s makers of stained-glass windows they reopened an artistic question that most purists had settled a generation ago.

There are, fundamentally, two ways of making a stained-glass window. The first, or medieval method, is to fit small snippets of already-colored glass together in a huge mosaic, outlining the design with the intervening lines of lead. This method is the one responsible for such masterpieces of glazing as the windows of the Cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges. The second, or Renaissance method, dates from the 14th and 15th Centuries, when, instead of outlining their designs with lead, artists began to paint them boldly with pigment.

In Renaissance stained glass, made by painters rather than glaziers, the design may be drawn as freely as the artist desires. Because Renaissance-style stained glass was easier to handle, employed larger panes of glass and permitted far more freedom and subtlety of color and design, it completely supplanted, somewhere in the 17th Century, the earlier mosaic technique. Medieval glazing became temporarily a lost art.

But 19th-Century glassmakers, tired of the facile insipidity to which their art had gradually descended, began to look back with nostalgia at the simple dignity and pure color of medieval windows. They found not only that the medieval stained glass was more luminously splendid than that of the Renaissance, but that it was also more permanent. After much careful research, such famed U.S. glassmakers as Boston’s Charles Jay Connick and Philadelphia’s Nicola D’Ascenzo readopted the medieval method. The stained-glass makers of the “Gothic Revival” again worked entirely in medieval snippets.

Cleveland’s new windows last week offered impressive opposition to this trend. They were not only magnificent and intricate examples of the stained-glass worker’s art. They were Renaissance-style windows of the sort first-rate U.S. stained-glass makers had been studiously avoiding since the early 1900s. Moreover, the artist who had thus dared oppose the prevailing medieval style was the most famous of all present-day glass stainers: a stocky, bull-necked Hollander named Joep Nicolas, who arrived in the U.S. two years ago with a wife, two children and a load of glazier’s equipment, and set up shop in a large studio on Manhattan’s upper West Side. In Roermond (southern Holland), where he had left behind him a vast, factorylike workshop with 15 busy assistants, blue-eyed Joep (pronounced “Yoop”) Nicolas had engineered such towering feats of glasswork as the famed memorial windows for Queen Wilhelmina in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk.

Artist Nicolas draws and paints on his colored glass as freely as if he were making a mural. Starting with a small preliminary sketch, Nicolas elaborates it into a large cartoon drawn on paper, complete as a blueprint, with the shape and size of each colored pane and its surrounding line of lead carefully indicated. Artist Nicolas writes a number on each to tell his glazier assistants which of 500 shades of colored glass he wants in that particular place. The cartoon is then cut up like a picture puzzle. Assistants cut out pieces of glass from these patterns and trace on them the remaining lines of Nicolas’ drawing. Then the various colored pieces are reassembled and glued with liquid wax to a large, trans parent plate-glass pane.

Standing before it, and looking through it at the light, Artist Nicolas is then ready to do his painting. Covering the glass first with an opaque coat of copper-oxide pigment, he draws in the highlights and flowing lines of his figures by brushing away the pigment and letting the light shine through again. When he is through, the puzzle picture is carefully scrambled again, sent to bake in a kiln until each stroke of pigment left on the glass is melted permanently into the pane. The panes are then reassembled, fixed permanently in place with strips of lead and cement. Joep Nicolas’ big, glowing picture is then ready to be set up in its window frame.

The new Cleveland windows, like all of Joep Nicolas’ work, are massive, symbolic in meaning, but realistic and detailed in treatment—one of the biggest and most important jobs of fenestration U.S. churches have seen in many a year.