FOR OUR HOUSES

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 114, 16 May 1931, Page 22

FOR OUR HOUSES

Stained glass stands high on the artistic black list. The mere thought of modern stained glass is enough to make one shudder. But are these shudderings inevitable? ~ Is it necessary that modern stained 'glass should.be atrocious? Needit, cv.en, be religious? A year or two ago I should have answered these questions -in'1 a pessimistic affirmative. But-that was before I had seen the work of the young Dutch artist, Mr. aoep. Nicolas. His windows a.o the visiblo proof that all our sceptical questionings can be negatived (writes Aldous Huxley in the "Studio"). It is not: inevitable that modern stained glass should make us shudder. There is no need for it to be atrocious; on the contrary, it can be beautiful. Nor, finally, is there any necessity for it to be religious. Many of Mr. Nicolas's most successful windows were designed for private houses and places of business. He has secularised his medium, and has domesticated it-to modern needs, .just ag $V-,V glass

painters of the.later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries secularised the medic-, val church window and made it serve a decorative purpose in the private house .of the period. ' : ;

' There is1 as good reason for stained glass in a >modern' dwelling as thero was in the nouses of the sixteenth century. Indeed, there is even better reason. Modern cities are : uglier than ancient cities; not to see our surroundings is therefore- more necessary for us than for our" fathers.' Every modern city has thousands of bleak, northwardlooking windows, commanding a view of chimney-pots .and backyards. An artist in stained glass could convert these. dreadful windows into the niost charming of luminous pictures. TJ.'^rtunately the artists have been lacking. People have preferred the backyards and the chimney-pots to the jaundiced and sanguinary horrors that issue from the workshops of the commercial stained glass makers. Quite rightly. But, when an-artist finally doe's make his appearance the case is altered.