Glass Art - November/December 1996
The Art of Johannes Schreiter
Two Impressions
Johannes Schreiter is one of the pre-eminent stained glass artists in the world today. His distinctive work is marked by poetic, almost minimalist designs that incorporate such diverse images as road signs, stock market reports, and partially burned documents. Schreiter’s art elicits both kudos and controversy - in the communities where his work has been installed, and in the larger world of stained glass.
In this article, Sarah Hall is joined by Art Historian Peter Larisey, SJ to provide their individual impressions of the work of this very significant artist.
Sarah Hall, Architectural Glass Artist
At a conference recently I was introduced to a fellow stained glass artist. When I mentioned that I had attended the Architectural Glass Department at Swansea College of Art he laughed and said "so you went all the way to Wales to study German glass". Although irritated at this superficial 'take' on the extensive and diverse program at Swansea, I must also acknowledge the important influence that German stained glass has had on me - not only through my studies at Swansea, but in my subsequent career.
At Swansea, we studied German glass, along with that of Great Britain, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and North America, and the department held several workshops with German masters. I think that anyone working in our medium is aware of the remarkable achievement in Germany over the past four decades. Whether one resists it, embraces it, or responds in some other way, it is impossible to ignore. German stained glass holds a unique visual energy and intensity.
Contemporary German glass has its origins in a unique combination of cultural, historical and economic factors. At the end of World War II, with its civic and religious buildings devastated, Germany was anxious for renewal: political, spiritual and physical. As the enormous task of rebuilding was initiated, contemporary artists were commissioned, with extraordinary results. Openness to change and perhaps a desire to make a break with history created an environment in which innovative work was welcomed.
While rebuilding was also taking place in the UK and France, the desire to hold onto history there was stronger, providing less opportunity for modern work. In Germany, the vast window walls of civic and church buildings coincided with a generation of remarkably talented and dedicated artists.
An undeniably important factor in Germany is that stained glass artists are generally educated with a fine arts background, rather than a crafts background. Thus there is a deeper connection between their glass art, and the contemporary work of painters and sculptors. The separation of artwork from studio manufacture plays an important role. Designers can devote themselves exclusively to the artwork, free from studio practices, and this inevitably leads to a more experimental approach.
In most countries, new stained glass windows are sponsored by a single donor or church congregation. In Germany, a public taxation system supports churches and clergy, and also supports the stained glass that is created for the churches. Windows are commissioned by a committee of professional advisors and congregation members, thereby providing broader input than is usually reflected in the decisions of individual donors or church committees.
In the years since my introduction to German glass at Swansea, I have seen and admired the work of many artists, including Georg Meistermann, Joachim Klos, Maria Katzgrau, Wilhelm Buschulte, and Ludwig Schaffrath. I appreciate and am inspired by these artists. Even so, the work of Johannes Schreiter holds a special place for me; it is deeply compelling.
Schreiter is well known for his pioneering work with acrylics; for vigorous lead lines that have been liberated from a structural role; and subtle, glowing colour fields. These have established him as one of the greatest innovators in stained glass art. Beyond this, his work holds a conceptually brilliant and spiritually demanding quality that transcends technique and design. There is both extraordinary tension and sublime serenity in his windows. They are never complacent, decorative, ornamental, soft-headed or descriptive of the mundane world; rather, they provide a graphic distillation of an interior journey. This is a quality that comes through imperfectly in photographs. The only way to gain the full experience of these windows is to visit them. They envelop the visitor, and the experience is both breathtaking and cathartic.
Schreiter's symbolic language is intensely idiosyncratic, and through its departure from traditional symbols, it creates ongoing controversies. Schreiter himself says:
Through the withholding of familiar vistas...the observer is...confronted with unfamiliar symbols. Suddenly, he is called upon for interpretation, and at precisely this point, he begins to feel his discomfort, because deciphering new messages means engaging one's spiritual core. This, however, lies in the throes of death within many of us. Yes, the interpretation of art challenges our spiritual core.
A prime example is the "Physics" window at Holy Ghost Church, Heidelberg, which is the first and only work in planned cycle of windows to be installed. The Physics window contains two New Testament texts (Peter 3:10 and Isaiah 54:10), to which Schreiter has appended Einstein's formula, “e=mc2”, and the date of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Some of the church authorities at Holy Ghost Church have attempted to block the installation of the remaining windows, and recently, the parish council voted to have the Physics window removed.
Of the confession room window (ceiling) in St. Francis, Bad Kreuznach (Figure 2), Schreiter says, "I am making even clearer, what is encompassed by the cancer of guilt. We must comprehend it as a central problem and expunge it from the vital circuits of our lives. Only exposure to light can crumble and kill its destructive influence".
The rose window of the monumental, gothic Marien-Church at Prenzlau is dedicated to a nuclear scientist, Professor Max Thuerkrauf, "who can actually see beyond the tip of his nose".
As an artist, I am deeply inspired by the visual qualities of Schreiter’s work - and even more so by the strength and integrity of the philosophy and spirituality that underlie his work. Schreiter is firm in his ideals, and uncompromising in his vision.
Inspiration is not necessarily emulation. I cannot imagine trying to copy Schreiter's work. His art and the art of his compatriots come out of a particular time, and a unique combination of historical, social, economic and artistic factors. Contemporary German glass formed a strong part of my education, and for me Schreiter’s work epitomizes 20th Century glass.
Last year, I had an opportunity to visit a number of Schreiter’s works while I was in Germany. Seeing them, and feeling their full impact in their many different settings, I was reminded once again of Schreiter’s words: “Does what we hatch remain mere entertainment, that is, diversion and distraction, or does it convey meaning and redemption?" This question is one for all of us to consider as we create works for the coming century.
Peter Larisey, Art Historian
There is an arresting quality about Johannes Schreiter’s art. His now famous windows for Holy Ghost Church in Heidelberg, Germany, confront the powerful 14th century gothic building with original modern forms at least as strong as the monumental architecture itself. In so doing, Schreiter set before the administrators and congregation of that parish - and any other group in Christianity - a depth and firmness of meaning, at once contemporary and religious. His windows seem to tunnel through complacencies and distractions, to meet the viewers at a level where a community or an individual is provoked to become conscious of their real beliefs and commitments and perhaps change.
With Schreiter’s windows, one tends to forget the aura conjured up by the traditions of stained glass windows, an aura of "churchiness", of conformity to revival architectures, of an attempt to escape into pre-modern ways of imagining and thinking. Looking at Schreiter’s paintings, drawings or windows, one realizes that here is a contemporary imagination. Like his prize-winning paintings and works on paper, Schreiter’s windows engage deeply in our times, challenging its blindness’, finding its strengths, pointing, like late post-modernism, toward restorative possibilities.
Schreiter’s imagination was not formed by the study of the long tradition of stained glass. His windows are a new beginning, born of an immersion in the art and culture of our time. Schreiter himself saw the light of day in Buchholz, Erzgebirge in Germany in 1930 and so was a slightly younger contemporary of his countryman Joseph Beuys. Although he shares with Beuys some drawing techniques - the nervous line expressive more of inner states than of descriptive intent - the most important thing they have in common is this: each penetrates to the core of their post-war German and European culture, identifies and faces its sickness critically within themselves. Each, in very different ways, imagines what to do about the culture at large and strives to persuade and involve others in the reforms of mind, heart and values that are needed. Beuys created compelling myths about himself and in his Aktions attempted to reanimate sacred rites of renewal from pagan as well as Christian sources.
On the other hand, Schreiter seems not to be interested in myth. He creates a system of forms and signs and colours which becomes a pathway to freshened levels of consciousness and meaning. He strives to tunnel through the complacent imagery of soft feelings and nostalgia that many use to mask recent Christian history.
It is not only church communities he wishes to call to their deeper realities, but civic life and service too. His work for the council chamber in the Rathaus in Wiesbaden, is a powerful example. The recently restored space is framed in a renaissance revival building from the late nineteenth century. The windows that are the focus of the council room are behind the president's chair, towards which the counsellors face. The windows are divided by heavy structural mullions and transoms. The city counsellors might well feel comfortable in this newly refurbished hall, wrapped in history and tradition, perhaps screened from the hardness of the present. But Schreiter will not let them rest. As the counsellors look through the thick mullions and transoms, they encounter another system, a grid constructed of space and light and glass in different yellows, the sensitive, restless lines (a Schreiter trademark) and the quotations from great thinkers of the past. This grid of light opens a context beyond the chamber and challenges the counsellors from a further horizon to be serious and free and useful in their deliberations.
We have been reflecting on truly monumental works, but there is nothing monumental about Johannes Schreiter himself. Interviewing this gentle, slender man was a pleasure: he tried to answer every question, and sometimes led us into his personal feelings and experiences. For instance, I asked him why the colour yellow, at a certain moment, started to appear in his work. He answered that he began to associate it with his deeper awareness of Christ in his life. He also said that he had in his life the experience of having moved from what he called the ”illusion of belief” to “the reality of belief”. Thus, it seems to me, he simply articulates the paradigm of experience that he tries, especially through his church windows, to bring about in his viewers.
I think I perceive a development in Schreiter’s work. Some of the later windows are also monumental in size but embody a delicacy of form and feeling. For instance, the large Gothic window for the choir of the Market Church in Goslar has many orderly street-sign-like indicators of prayer and upward openness. They are arranged in areas of yellow on blue and, higher up, blue on yellow. The particular blue is pale and shadowy and seems to be the perfect complement to the yellows. The effect of the whole window seems to be one of a welcoming consolation rather than a confrontation, as in the earlier Holy Ghost Church windows.
A gentleness and openness are evident in the very large north window in the Reconciliation Church in Plauen. Through these translucent and transparent planes of glass, trees, a field, and buildings are seen, reconciling interior and exterior, the people at worship and their land. In this instance, the artist seems to have curtailed his interventions to the minimum, his presence is discreet.
A piece of abstract art must not only get our attention, it must sustain our interest while colours, shapes and lines mediate significance. Schreiter’s Temptation Window from the Melanchthon Church in Mannheim (1990) is such a work. It has a precision and refinement that reminds me of some of Malevich’s supremacist works. My suspicion is that in paying attention to this work, in the context of its sister windows and the church, one would find feeling, insight and a growing content.
Schreiter does not consider his windows as a reaction, "in a political way", to the narrative styles popular when he began. He looks on his windows as an available alternative to the thousands of images a day which flood over and through us. In a gentle and more poetic phrase, revealing his understanding of our thirst for significance, he offers his imagery “as an oasis”.
