Sir Brian Clarke, stained-glass artist whose punk ‘crazy days' livened up 1970s London

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08-07-2025

​Sir Brian Clarke, who has died the day before his 72nd birthday, was once described in The Daily Telegraph as the 'rock star of stained glass', a tribute to his role as a leading light of the modern reinvention of the centuries-old art as well as a reference to what he called his 'crazy days' of the late 1970s, when he was ubiquitous on the London party scene and a darling of the gossips.
At that time he was a member of the Uncommitted, a 'punk' band which advertised gigs but never actually played a note of music, although, according to Clarke's website, they 'did discuss the possibility from time to time in 1977'. And just as he could never be described as a musician, Clarke, who was also active in painting, sculpture, mosaics, tapestry and even stage design (he did the sets for Sir Paul McCartney on two world tours), resisted being pigeon-holed as a stained-glass artist.
Yet by pushing the boundaries of the medium, both in terms of technology and its artistic potential, and collaborating with prominent architects on hundreds of projects around the world, he became a global star.
Clarke's shimmering windows, featuring figurative and abstract designs – or combinations of both – can be found in churches across Europe. But he was determined to go beyond the traditional. 'When I started working in stained glass, it was a dying art,' he told The Independent in 2010. 'I knew from a very early age that the future of the medium would only be assured if it had an application in public buildings and was not limited to ecclesiastical architecture.'
Clarke became famous for spectacular projects, including the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan, the Pfizer building in New York, the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Darmstadt (unveiled on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988), the royal mosque at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, incorporating 360 windows, and Concordia, a colossal work 34 metres wide and 17 metres high, that was unveiled at Bahrain International Airport by Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa in April this year.
Clarke was always on the hunt for new ways to develop his medium. For the Pfizer building he pioneered a way to reproduce watercolour designs depicting medical and scientific imagery in molten glass. And he developed a technique involving the bonding of glazed colours to architectural 'float glass', often in multiple layers, to allow colour to be applied to large areas of glass without the traditional dividing lead-work.
Wherever he worked, Clarke was sensitive to site and historical context. When working on the refurbished Queen Victoria Street Arcade in Leeds he nodded to local traditions in tiling and glass. For the cladding of the Hotel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille, he selected deep Mediterranean ultramarine tones. At the 13th-century Linköping Cathedral in Sweden he incorporated photographs reinterpreting Christian iconography, but adapted them to fit the cathedral's diamond-patterned 1850s windows.
'What could be more modern than a medium that has a celluloid quality,'' Clarke asked, 'a cinematic drama that changes constantly?'
Brian Clarke was born on July 2 1953 in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Clarke, a miner, and Lilian, née Whitehead, a cotton-mill worker. His maternal grandmother, who lived with the family, made a living as a medium, helping local people communicate with the dead. 'We had to get used to her chatting away to spirits and passing messages on to the neighbours,' Clarke recalled. As a child Brian himself was reportedly considered a 'sensitive'.
But he felt a very different calling when, aged 12, he was taken on a school trip to York Minster: 'I remember seeing not the glass itself, but the illuminated pool of colour on that remarkable warm stone so characteristic of northern Gothic architecture. And that, combined with the music of a rehearsing choir, had such a powerful impact on me that I thought it was kind of a vocation. I thought I must have a calling to be a priest, to be a monk – and later on, I just found out it was art.'
The same year he won a scholarship to Oldham School of Arts and Crafts, from which he moved to Burnley School of Art and North Devon College of Art and Design. A Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 1974 allowed him to visit important stained-glass sites in France, Germany and Italy.
Clarke made his first stained glass, a heraldic eagle design, at 16, and won his first commission aged 17 for stained glass windows in a Grade II-listed property. Before long he found himself in demand for church work, in which he was influenced by the artist John Piper and inspired by his wife Liz's father, a Lancashire vicar. This was his real beginning: he recalled transporting the glass for one church on his bike.
By his early 20s he had been the subject of a BBC arts documentary, was living in an old vicarage in Derbyshire and had developed a reputation as both a painter and stained-glass designer – though he preferred the term artist as 'I'm interested in rendering the commonplace sublime.' In the late 1970s he moved to London, feeling that he could never fully realise his ambitions for stained glass in the provinces.
On his arrival he threw himself into the punk movement, becoming friends with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and producing a series of slashed punk paintings called Dangerous Visions (1977), fixed with large safety pins. John McEwen, writing in The Spectator, described Clarke as ''the most Sixties character to have emerged in the London art scene since the Sixties'.
David Bailey became a friend, as did Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and the McCartneys, Paul and Linda. Clarke became a familiar figure at Langan's and in loucher establishments in Soho, his drinking companions including Francis Bacon, Bacon's companion John Edwards, and Robert Fraser, the Old Etonian aesthete and gallerist known to his friends as 'Groovy Bob', to whom Clarke was introduced by McLaren. 'Everywhere I went it was 'pop', I'm in the gossip columns again,' he recalled.
His friendship with Bacon survived an occasion when Clarke asked the artist whether he had ever thought of doing something in stained glass, to which Bacon replied, 'No, dear. And I've never thought of doing something in macramé either.' Clarke agreed to be an executor of Bacon's estate (he later became sole executor acting on behalf of John Edwards), a role which meant that 'a lot of people in the art world are very, very keen to be my friend,' but also embroiled him, after Bacon's death, in a long and bruising legal battle with Bacon's old gallery, the Marlborough, which was only settled in 2002.
Meanwhile, Fraser became Clarke's art dealer and in 1983, when Fraser opened a new gallery in Cork Street, Clarke was the first artist he showed. According to a 1988 report in The Times, in the early 1980s, in an effort to get Clarke to concentrate on his work, Fraser had dispatched him to Rome, then New York, though his efforts as a reformer were half-hearted at best.
Clarke, who eventually went teetotal though he continued to enjoy the occasional spliff, recalled that the first time he attended Alcoholics Anonymous, Fraser 'was waiting outside in a taxi to meet me – with a bottle of wine and plastic cups'.
Yet throughout his 'crazy years' Clarke retained an earnest commitment to his art. In 1978, with John Piper and Marc Chagall, he co-curated Glass/Light, a seminal exhibition exploring the history and possibilities of stained glass. The following year he published Architectural Stained Glass, a polemic which called for the integration of art and architecture.
He also established a close friendship with the architect Norman Foster, with whom he would work extensively in later years. 'There is a thousand-year precedent for what I do,'' he told The New York Times in 1990. 'What's new is that I've nailed my colours to the post by working openly in an architectural context.'
Clarke collaborated with Linda McCartney on her stained-glass photography projects, and after her death he created The Glass Wall, a mammoth eight-panel work dedicated to her memory. His set design for Paul McCartney's 1992 world tour, Let It Be, consisted of a projected collage of historical stained-glass pictures, including Matisse's windows from St Paul de Vence. He also designed the stained-glass stage sets for The Ruins of Time, a ballet by Wayne Eagling in tribute to Rudolf Nureyev.
British projects included a stained-glass window for the papal chapel at the Apostolic Nunciature in Wimbledon, which was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI on his state visit to the UK in 2010, and a series of large-scale stained-glass windows for the Brian Clarke Church of England Academy, a co-educational secondary school in Oldham which is named after him.
Much of Clarke's glass was made in a studio in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and it was there in the mid-1980s that a delegation from Darmstadt came to ask him to do the stained glass for the city's new Holocaust Memorial Synagogue, designed by Alfred Jacoby. They wanted a non-Jewish non-German to interpret both the past and the future, and after considering about a dozen artists, had lighted on Clarke.
At first he demurred, but as he recalled, 'When they explained to me what it meant to them, and that this was a symbol for Jewry the world over, paid for by Ger​mans, built on the site of Gestapo headquarters and opening on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, I was so moved… that when they left I wanted that commission at any price.'
He regarded his Darmstadt windows, with a red-themed side symbolising destruction, and opposite a blue-themed side signalling hope, as the most important commission of his career.
Clarke, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, was knighted in 2024.
In 1972 he married Liz Finch, with whom he had a son. The marriage was dissolved in 1996 but they remarried in 2013.
Sir Brian Clarke, born July 2 1953, died July 1 2025​
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