Brian Clarke

Brian Clarke (born 2 July 1953) is a British architectural artist, painter and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, abstract and symbolist canvases, and collaborations with major figures in Modern and contemporary architecture.
Born to a working-class family in the north of England, and a full-time art student on scholarship at 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of ecclesiastical stained glass, and by the early 1980s had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular known for his architectonic art, prolific output in various media, friendships with celebrities and key cultural figures, and polemical lectures and interviews.
His practice in architectural and autonomous stained glass, often on a monumental scale, has led to successive innovation and invention in the development of the medium, including the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism', and the creation of sculptural stained glass works, analogous to collage, made primarily or entirely of lead. The latter two advances are described as having taken stained glass as an artform to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency, and, conversely, complete opacity.
A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, his architectural collaborations include work with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Oscar Niemeyer, I. M. Pei, César Pelli and Renzo Piano. He served a 7-year term as chairman of The Architecture Foundation, and served on the Design Review Committee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. His artistic collaborations have included work with David Bailey, Hugh Hudson, Malcolm McLaren, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney and Ivor Abrahams.
Biography.
Early life.
Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke (née Whitehead), a cotton spinner. Raised in a family familiar with spiritualism, his maternal grandmother a notable local medium, Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum through his childhood and, considered a ‘sensitive’, gained a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'. In 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as the last intake of an education scheme existing in the North of England to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was awarded a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts. In place of a standard curriculum, he principally studied the arts and design, learning drawing, heraldry, pictorial composition, colour theory, pigment mixing and calligraphy among other subjects. Considered a prodigy, by the age of 16 Clarke had mastered the orthodoxies of academic life drawing. In 1968 he and his family moved to Burnley and, too young at 15 to gain entrance to Burnley College of Art, he lied about his age and was accepted on the strength of his previous work.
1970s.
In 1970 Clarke enrolled in the Architectural Stained Glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, from which he graduated two years later with a first class distinction in their Diploma in Design. In 1971, aged 17, he received his first commission, for a series of windows in the Grade II* listed Southcott Barton, a 17th-century residential home, and the following year received his first ecclesiastical commission, for a memorial window in Preston Minster. In August 1972, he married his fellow art student Liz Finch, the daughter of a local vicar, opened a stained glass studio in Preston, and began to take on work including painting restoring, designing lamps, repairing damaged ecclesiastical glass, as well as working independently as a painter. This was followed by a commission for a new window for Coppull Church, Lancashire, in 1973, and further secular stained glass commissions, for which he painted, fired, leaded, assembled and installed the windows and panels himself, transporting them on a local bus. Further local ecclesiastical commissions followed.
In 1974 Clarke was awarded the Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study medieval and contemporary stained glass in Italy, France and West Germany. That same year he received a commission for a suite of 20 windows for the Church of St Lawrence, Longridge, considered to be his first mature work, and in 1975 was awarded the Churchill Extension Fellowship to study art in architecture in the United States. Later in 1975 Clarke moved to Birchover, Derbyshire, renting a vicarage as home and studio from the local church authorities – he later designed and gifted a suite of windows to the parish church, St Michael and All Angels. A travelling exhibition of secular, autonomous stained glass panels inspired in part by Oriental landscape painting, "Glass Art One", was shown at venues in Derbyshire and Lancashire, including Derby Cathedral and Manchester Cathedral. An internationally notable commission from the University of Nottingham to produce 45 paintings, vestments, and a series of stained glass windows followed for a multi-faith chapel in the Queen's Medical Centre. As one of the largest public art commissions of the decade, the process of design and installation was filmed by the BBC as material for a documentary. The research from the two Churchill Trust Fellowships led to the Arts Council of Great Britain-funded exhibition of stained glass "GLASS/LIGHT", co-curated by Clarke, British war artist John Piper and art historian Martin Harrison, with the collaboration of Marc Chagall, and produced the book "Architectural Stained Glass". "GLASS/LIGHT", part of the Festival of the City of London, was the most extensive exhibition of stained glass of the 20th century.
In 1978, Clarke controversially appeared on the cover of the journal "Architectural Review" with a work titled "Velarde is Not Mocked". Clarke had been commissioned to design and fabricate two windows for the notable 1930s Art Deco church of St Gabriel’s, Blackburn, by F. X. Velarde, which was to be restored; the windows, as part of the restoration, were designed to complement and respond to the architecture, making reference to elements of the original design of the building, considered a milestone in the development of English church architecture towards modernism. Significant changes were made by the restoring architect to the building, and the interior and exterior elements were unsympathetically altered. Clarke's public attack on the treatment of the architecture by the restoring firm, and his refusal to compromise with the Cathedrals Advisory Committee on their recommended changes to a design commissioned in 1976 for two windows in Derby Cathedral, marked the end of his working in the Church of England. In 1979 he undertook a polemical lecture tour of British universities on the subject of art and architecture; titled 'Rescuing Art from Artists', the first lecture, in Hull, was introduced by poet Philip Larkin. Between 1978–9, the BBC filmed footage of his studio practice and life for an hour-long BBC Omnibus documentary, "Brian Clarke: The Story So Far". At the time of broadcast the UK had only 3 television channels, and an audience of millions watched the documentary; the BBC recorded multiple viewer complaints, and both programme and subsequent press coverage, including his appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, footage of which appeared in the documentary, brought him to broader public attention. Later in 1979, Clarke became a presenter on the BBC2 arts programme "Mainstream", and the BBC Radio 4 programme Kaleidescope, conducting interviews with figures including Brassaï, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Elisabeth Lutyens, and giving Sheffield band The Human League, of whom he'd been an early supporter, their first television appearance.
1980s.
At the start of 1980, Clarke began to paint in oils again after a period of working primarily graphically and in acrylic, and created his first constructions, in wood and steel, and designs for furniture. Clarke accepted a proposal to design stage sets for Kraftwerk, and collaborated on unrealised projects with David Bailey, with Brian Eno, and with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood as designer of the aborted zine "Chicken", whose creation was funded by EMI and filmed by BBC's "Arena". Noticing the similarity between the reticular, Constructivist-derived symbols that dominated his work and the light-metering computergrams from the Olympus OM System cameras, he produced a series of technology-related paintings; "Time Lag Zero", commissioned for the headquarters of Olympus Optical (UK), was unveiled at Langan's Brasserie by Patrick Lichfield for the fifth anniversary of Olympus UK, and filmed by Granada Television as part of a documentary on Clarke and his work, released by ITV as "Time Lag Zero: Impressions of Brian Clarke". Later that year, a major commission for paintings, a wooden construction, and a suite of stained glass windows for the Olympus European Headquarters Building in Hamburg was executed, for which Clarke was given 'complete freedom of the design of the entrance hall for the new building', and, starring in a series of adverts for Olympus and for Polaroid, he became a household name in the UK and the United States. The complexity of the stained glass designs for Hamburg necessitated the development of special diamond cutting and sandblasting techniques to accommodate the graphic, non-structural role of the lead in places, and marked the start of Clarke's manufacturing his windows in Germany rather than England, a major break with tradition.
In 1981, Clarke was invited to teach as a visiting artist at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington, with Patrick Reyntiens and Dale Chihuly, for the summer education programme. Clarke introduced all-day life-drawing classes, intensively teaching academic drawing from the life in place of glass painting techniques with the aim of opening up 'new ways of looking at glass design'. Later that year, receiving a commission from the Government of Saudi Arabia for the Royal Mosque of King Khalid International Airport, Clarke studied Islamic ornament at the Quran schools in Fez. A portfolio of screenprints, dedicated to his friend C. P. Snow and titled '"The Two Cultures"' (after Lord Snow's influential 1959 Rede Lecture on the perceived gulf between the humanities and sciences of the same name) was published, and he became the first artist to have an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, with a solo show of paintings, constructions and prints, including the first appearance of his "Computergram" series of screenprints on canvas. That year, the first monograph on his work, "Brian Clarke" by Martin Harrison, was published, and the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a large-scale stained glass triptych, executed by him in 1979, and an oil painting titled "Trial and Error". The Royal Mosque, completed in 1982 and comprising 2,000 square metres of stained glass, was considered to be the largest and technically most advanced stained glass project of the modern period, requiring the full staff of 4 stained glass factories and 150 craftsmen, taking a year to fabricate. Urged by his art dealer Robert Fraser to leave Britain to avoid the gossip columns and paparazzi, and onm advice given by Snow, Clarke moved to live and work in Düsseldorf and Rome. 
In 1982, Clarke produced the cover painting for Paul McCartney's solo album Tug of War, designing the cover together with Linda McCartney. In 1983 the Tate acquired an edition of "The Two Cultures" and Fraser, a key figure of the Swinging Sixties who first brought to Europe the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, reopened his gallery on Cork Street in London with a show of Clarke's paintings and with the aid of funding from him. The opening night received significant press coverage, and public interest and celebrity attendance led to the opening party spilling out into the street, necessitating its closure by police cordon. Before its closure following Fraser's death in 1986, the gallery went on to exhibit and introduce to the British public the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ellsworth Kelly, both of whom Clarke exhibited with, and Keith Haring. In 1984, Clarke was commissioned to contribute to conservation architects Latham & Company's refurbishment of Henry Currey's Grade II listed Thermal Baths, adjacent to John Carr's Crescent in Buxton; The baths had closed in 1963 and were at risk of demolition; Clarke's scheme, designed in 1984 and completed in 1987, was for a landmark barrel-vaulted modern stained glass ceiling to enclose the Grade II-listed former baths, creating the Cavendish Arcade. In 1989 a second project with Derek Latham and Co, for the regeneration of an inner-Leeds district, saw the Leeds Victoria Quarter created through the pedestrianising and covering-over of Queen Victoria Street. Clarke's proposal was to cover the length of the street with stained glass; the design, installed in 1990, was at the time the largest stained glass work in the world.
In 1988, architect Arata Isozaki approached Clarke to collaborate with him on the Lake Sagami Building in Yamanishi. Clarke designed a composition of stained glass for the central lantern and a series of interrelated skylights that internally referenced elements of Isozaki’s building and early designs, for which Isozaki in turn designed a lighting system that turned the work and building into a beacon at night. The same year, Clarke and Norman Foster proposed a major stained glass artwork for the new terminal building of Stansted Airport, by Foster + Partners. The collaboration, the first time in the history of stained glass that computer-assisted design had been utilised in the creative process, would have seen the east and west walls of the High-tech building clad in two sequences of traditionally mouth-blown, leaded stained glass. For technical and security reasons, the original scheme, which Clarke considered to be his "magnum opus", couldn't be executed.
1990s.
In 1991, the British Airports Authority commissioned a second, smaller stained glass project from Clarke for Stansted Airport in place of his and Sir Norman Foster's original 1988 proposal. The artist designed two friezes and a 6-metre high tower of stained glass for a circulation area in the centre of the terminal which, in their composition, echoed elements of Foster's structure; by 1994 the tower had been removed to 'allow greater flow of traffic through the space', and later the friezes were likewise removed. In 1992, Clarke first collaborated with architect Will Alsop, on "Le Grand Bleu", the Hôtel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône (the county government office of Bouches-du-Rhône) in Marseille. The building, now considered a major work of late 20th century architecture and a Marseille landmark, developed its visual identity through the design process, with Clarke and Alsop's final version externally clad in Yves Klein blue glass, with one elevation formed of a 1,200 m2 artwork by Clarke in ceramic glaze, onto the facade. In 1994, Zaha Hadid and Clarke developed an unexecuted collaborative proposal for the Spittelau Viaducts Housing Project, a waterfront redevelopment in Vienna, that incorporated integral, interrelated mosaic and traditionally-leaded stained glass. Clarke developed a new type of mouth-blown glass for the scheme, which he christened 'Zaha-Glas'. The project, which experienced delays in construction, was completed in 2006, without the artwork. The newly-developed 'Zaha-Glas' was first used architecturally in Clarke's scheme for the ceiling of Pfizer World Headquarters in New York, a landmark architectural art project which connected 42nd and 43rd Street in Manhattan through the length of the site with a composition in stained glass and Venetian glass mosaic.
"Clarke (Executor of the Will of Francis Bacon) v Marlborough Fine Art".
Following the death of Clarke's friend Francis Bacon in 1992, in 1998 the English High Court severed all ties between Bacon's former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, and his estate, and Clarke was appointed sole executor of the Estate of Francis Bacon by the High Court, on behalf of Bacon's heir John Edwards. Clarke transferred representation of Francis Bacon to the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, where a major show was mounted of 17 previously unseen Bacon paintings recovered from his studio. A court case was brought against Marlborough, "Professor Brian Clarke (Executor of the Will of Francis Bacon) v Marlborough Fine Art (London)", alleging that the Gallery had underpaid Bacon for his work, asserted undue influence over him, and failed to account for up to 33 of his paintings, but following John Edwards' diagnosis with lung cancer in 2002 the litigation was settled out of court, with each side paying its own costs. During the legal process an undisclosed number of Bacon's paintings were recovered from Marlborough, and "vast quantities of correspondence and documents relating to the life of the artist were handed over by the gallery". In 1998, Edwards and Clarke donated the contents of Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The studio at 7 Reece Mews had remained largely untouched since Bacon's death in 1992, and the decision was taken to preserve it for posterity. A team of archaeologists, art historians, conservators and curators moved the studio, wholesale, to Dublin. The locations of over 7,000 items were mapped, survey drawings made, the items packed and catalogued, and the studio was rebuilt, including the original doors, floor, walls and ceiling. In 2001 the relocated studio was opened to the public, with a fully comprehensive database, the first computerised record of the entire contents of an artist's studio.
2000s.
In 2004, Clarke collaborated with Norman Foster on the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a landmark building in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, built to house the triennial Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. Initial designs incorporated a stained glass ramp throughout the pyramidical structure; completed in 2006, the transparent upper portion is clad in 9700 square feet of stained glass, which forms the pyramid’s apex. In 2010, Clarke was commissioned to design stained glass for the new Papal Chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature to Great Britain, the diplomatic embassy of the Holy See, for Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom, the first state visit of a Pope to Britain. In 2020, it was announced that a new Blue Coat School, named the Brian Clarke Church of England Academy, would be built in Oldham to provide free school places to 1,200 pupils.
Work.
Paintings, stained glass, screenprints, collage, constructions, ceramics, mosaic, fresco, furniture, sculpture, tapestry, jewellery and ironmongery by Clarke can be found in architectural settings and private and public collections internationally, including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bavarian State Painting Collections at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York.
Major works include the five-story stained glass wall in the lobby of the Al Faisaliyah Center in Riyadh for the King Faisal Foundation, the largest stained glass work in the world between 2000 and 2017, and Stansted Airport; 21,528 sq ft of stained glass for the Royal Mosque at King Khalid International Airport); the mosaic and stained glass ceiling of Pfizer World Headquarters in New York, for which Clarke developed new techniques for the inclusion of two colours in a single sheet of opaque glass (in 1997), and a new stained glass facade (in 2001); stained glass, mosaic, ceramics, and turf-cut chalk drawing for Beaverbrook Coach House and Spa; the Stamford Cone in Connecticut; windows for Linköping Cathedral in Sweden; the world's largest stage sets (for Paul McCartney's 1993 World Tour) and both the largest stained glass work in Great Britain and Europe, and the largest in the world.
Other projects include ecclesiastical commissions in churches, mosques and synagogues across Europe, the US and the Middle East (including the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Darmstadt, built on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, the Heidelberg Synagogue, and the Sinai Temple, Chicago; stage sets for Wayne Eagling's Dutch National Ballet tribute to Clarke's friend Rudolf Nureyev, and sets for an opera of "The Crucible" ("Hexenjagd") directed by Hugh Hudson at Staatstheater Braunschweig; the stained glass and mosaic of Norte Shopping, Rio de Janeiro; the Spindles Shopping Mall, Oldham; the stained glass ceiling of the Victoria Quarter Arcade in Leeds, which replaced Buxton as the largest stained glass work in the world; windows for the 13th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont, Switzerland; collaborations in stained glass and cyanotypes with photographer Linda McCartney; the cover of Terence Davies’ book "Hallelujah Now", and EP and album covers for Paul McCartney, Jools Holland, Worldbackwards and EMI Classical.
Unexecuted projects.
Clarke's design of stained glass for the Great South Window of the grandstand at Royal Ascot Racecourse, as part of the £185 million 2004-2006 redevelopment funded by Allied Irish Bank and designed by Populous and Buro Happold, was to have been the world's largest work in the medium. The project received royal approval from Queen Elizabeth II, but problems arose during the redevelopment's construction that prevented the installation of the window, as redressing them would have necessitated a delay to reopening the racecourse, leading to the project being scrapped. Commissions for two roundel windows in Derby Cathedral (1976), and for the North Transept windows of Salisbury Cathedral (2014-2019), were not approved by the Church of England. Clarke worked on designs with Norman Foster for incorporating stained glass throughout Stansted Airport, and a glass tower for the Willis Faber and Dumas Building; Renzo Piano for a public sculpture for the Shard at London Bridge; Zaha Hadid on mosaic and stained glass for a building in Spittelau, Vienna, and KAPSARC, Saudi Arabia; with Will Alsop on mosaic and stained glass for Crossrail Paddington, and stained glass for Hungerford Bridge; and stained glass for Stratford International.
Recognition and roles.
Brian Clarke is former Visiting Professor of Architectural Art at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Hon. Doctor of Law (University of Huddersfield); Doctor of Humane Letters, (Virginia Theological Seminary); former trustee and Chairman of the Architecture Foundation; Governor of the Capital City Academy Trust; Fellow, Trustee and Council member of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust; Honorary Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass; and a Freeman of the City of London.