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Complicated stained glass design1/3/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. Patrick Reyntiens, who has died aged 95, occupied a singular position in the history of British stained glass. ![]()
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