Faith and Building – Ecclesiastical Architecture in Germany

On August 25th, 2007 an impressively solemn Mass was held to dedicate the new window of the southern transept of the Cologne Cathedral. Once again one could see the power of ritual.

New Window

The Catholic Church possesses the art of celebrating a special occasion with special splendour. Especially for this occasion, the cathedral choirmaster and the cathedral organist wrote and premiered musical compositions. In the presence of hundreds of guests-of-honour, one felt the pride and relief at having succeeded in bringing to a happy end the difficult task of a contemporary redesign of the Cathedral window.

It was five years ago that the architect in charge of the Cologne Cathedral, Barbara Schock-Werner, asked the artist Gerhard Richter whether he would like to undertake the design of the southern window of the transept. He immediately agreed to do it. He then began experimenting with abstract designs. Actually, the people at the Cathedral had hoped for a figurative treatment of the theme ‘Saints of the Twentieth Century’. Richter was not drawn to the idea. He didn’t want to create a ‘narrative window’ in the manner of past centuries. Instead he proposed for the gigantic 120-sqm window an abstract work, a juxtaposition of thousands of tiny coloured surfaces.

Here went back to an idea from the 1970s. He had named one of his pictures 4096 Farben (i.e., 4096 Colours), in which he had merely rendered the colour palette of a printing ink producer. At this time he used to evade the painted picture and restricted himself rather to the material of colour as a condition for the possibility of a picture. The colours were, so to say, the substitute for the refused or impossible picture.

Chance and calculation

Now Richter has gone back to the theme of playing with the colour palette. From more than eight hundred possible glass colours he chose to begin with nearly 100. In an act of testing with tables of patterns, he further reduced the number to seventy-two remaining colours, after many had proven to be too bright for glass. Then he had to find the right proportions that would fit into the Gothic tracery. The result was square glass plates of 9.6 cm. For the total surface this yielded about 11,250 glass plates, which Richter distributed in such a way that each of the colours appears equally often. The selection harmonises with the colour world of the Cathedral. Richter left the arrangement of colours on the surface of the picture to a random-generating computer programme.

Chaos and order

Within the whole of the picture, however, he works with the reflections of colour areas. In this way there emerges at first the impression of complete arbitrariness in the distribution of colour areas, until one notices in the small details that things correspond inversely and repeat themselves. Then one senses a hidden order behind the supposed chaos of elements and forms. This order is sensed rather than recognised. No sooner does the viewer believe himself to have discerned the principle than it again slips away. Richter contrives to combine chance and calculation.

Colour in the light

Richter’s work is indifferent to interpretations. It doesn’t operate with a higher meaning that can be read out of it, nor does it require this. It is what it is: colour and light. And it manages quite well with these fundamental elements. They suffice to produce a celebratory harmony. The coloured glass squares are only mediators between the sunlight of changing times of the day and the light yielded by the radiant power of the sun that passes through the coloured material. The sunlight manifests itself as coloured inside the church. And as the living natural light changes, so too does the colour tone of the affected light. Sometimes, on bright days, the yellow tones dominate; sometimes, on overcast days, the dark blue tones. The window lives from living light as the source of all life. ‘The light of the sun’, says the Dean of the Cathedral Dr. Feldhoff, ‘is refracted by the panes into the colours of the world’.

Seamless colour

Before the final design could be realised there were still numerous technical problems to be solved. In order to obtain the desired colour effect, Richter, together with the glass company Derix, developed his own procedure enabling him to work without the lead joints that are traditionally used to combine the glass components. The individual glass components are joined almost without jointing. The colours are not separated from each other but instead come together directly so that their radiance fuses, especially as the viewer sees them mainly from a distance of more than forty metres. There is no interfering network of lead that overlays the picture. There is only the effect of the vivid colour areas themselves. The light repeatedly creates anew the picture that the artist has joined together.

As already with the early design, the artist withdraws behind his picture. But this time not out of doubts about art, but rather as celebrator of the creative power of light and colour. The creative power of art here lies entirely in the material and in the light. The artist humbly indicates that he is not the creator, but that rather the artwork he has devised only shares in the Creation.

Cover

It is admirable how Richter has succeeded in introducing his work into the artistic whole of the Cathedral. Although the window is a ‘typical’ Richter, it fits smoothly into the magnificent architecture. On the day of its dedication, the window already gave the impression that nothing else had ever stood in its place. It is adornment in the interior of a cathedral that is full of exuberant adornment. It is art in the service of a higher, religious end.

For centuries, the Cologne Cathedral has been a perpetual construction site on which artists of different generations and different ages have worked together. With his monumental work, Richter enters the circle of those who, as artists, have dedicated their art to the praise of God. He has succeeded once again in continuing the long torn tradition of art and the Church in an entirely contemporary manner. That is a rare stroke of good fortune.

Gerhard Richter – Zufall. Das Kölner DOMFENSTER und 4900 FARBEN (The Cologne Cathedral Window, and 4900 Colours). Catalogue edited by the Museum Ludwig and the Metropolitankapitel der Hohen Domkirche. German and English; numerous illustrations. Verlag Kölner Dom // Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2007

The Museum Ludwig in Cologne will be showing an accompanying exhibition of the designs and current form of the window until January 13, 2008.