Brian Clarke
Sir Brian Clarke was a British painter, architectural artist, designer and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, symbolist paintings, set designs, and collaborations with major figures in modern and contemporary architecture.
Born to a working-class family in Oldham, in the north of England, and a full-time art student on scholarship by age 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of stained glass. By 1980, he had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular. He was known for his architectonic art, prolific output in various media, friendships with 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. This includes the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism' in glass, as well as 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 art form to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency and 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 seven-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, and with Linda McCartney and Paul McCartney.
Background
Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke, a cotton spinner. Raised in a family familiar with Spiritualism – his maternal grandmother was a notable local medium – Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum throughout his childhood and was considered a 'sensitive', gaining a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'.Aged 12, he applied for a place in 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.
In 1970, Clarke enrolled in the Architectural Stained Glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, graduating from the Diploma in Design with a first class distinction. In 1974, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study religious art in Italy, France, and West Germany. He was inspired by the post-war German school of stained glass artists, and in particular the artist Johannes Schreiter. In 1976, Clarke received the Churchill Extension Fellowship to study art in architecture and contemporary painting in the United States, where he connected with the art of, and later befriended, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol.
Clarke died from cancer on 1 July 2025, one day before his 72nd birthday.
Work
In his career, Clarke advanced new approaches across a range of mediums including stained glass, mosaic, collage, painting and drawing.1970s
Clarke received his first architectural commission at the age of 17. However, his suite of 20 windows for the Church of St Lawrence, Longridge is considered his first mature work. Here, the use of transparent glass has a Pop Art sensibility; the 'see through’ panes embrace the everyday by letting the real world in. In 1976, Clarke received a large-scale commission from the University of Nottingham to produce 45 paintings, vestments, and a series of stained glass windows for a multi-faith chapel in the Queen's Medical Centre. 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.In the early years of his career, most of Clarke's work was for religious buildings. However, by 1978, his relationship with the Church of England came to a head over the restoration of St Gabriel's Church, Blackburn, which affected windows that he had designed for the building. The resulting end of this relationship freed Clarke to create stained glass for secular contexts and advance the medium as social art. Throughout this period, Clarke was active in bringing attention to stained glass and promoting it as a modern medium. In 1975, he organised the travelling exhibition Glass Art One, which featured secular, autonomous stained glass panels inspired in part by Japanese-landscape painting. Later, he co-curated GLASS/LIGHT, an extensive survey of 20th-century stained glass, with British war artist John Piper and art historian Martin Harrison, in collaboration with the artist Marc Chagall as part of the 1978 Festival of the City of London. Clarke also produced the book Architectural Stained Glass,a polemical collection of essays.
In his painting, Clarke developed a strictly abstract Constructivist language of geometric signs; often his work had an underlying grid structure made from repetitions and variations on the cross. In later years, he would disrupt the grid with free-flowing amorphic forms. In 1977, Punk hit the UK, which had a deep impact on Clarke. He connected with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and later collaborated as a designer on their aborted zine Chicken, whose creation was funded by EMI and filmed by BBC's Arena. He also expressed Punk's nihilistic energy in the series of paintings, ‘Dangerous Visions’.
Around the same time, Clarke became friends with the physical chemist Lord Snow. After Snow's death, he made a tributary portfolio of screenprints; their title, The Two Cultures, referenced Snow's influential 1959 Rede Lecture on the perceived gulf between the humanities and sciences. In 1983, the Tate acquired an edition of The Two Cultures.
Between 1978 and 1979, the BBC filmed Clarke's studio practice and life for an hour-long BBC Omnibus documentary, Brian Clarke: The Story So Far. Millions watched the documentary in the UK, and the BBC recorded multiple viewer complaints. The programme and subsequent press coverage, including Clarke's appearance on the cover of Vogue, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, 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. He also gave Sheffield band The Human League their first television appearance.
1980s
In the 1980s, Clarke was instrumental in bringing stained glass into the public sphere. He received his first international commission for paintings, a wooden construction, and a suite of stained glass windows for the Olympus European Headquarters Building in Hamburg, completed in 1981. Marking a major shift in his own practice and breaking with tradition, he had the windows made at a studio in Germany. The experience of their immersive colour prompted critics to describe them as the Colour Field of stained glass. Another development in this work is Clarke's liberation of the lead line from being a purely structural element: where the lead breaks free, it takes on an expressive quality. In the same 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. Following this, in 1984, the architectural practice Derek Latham and Co. asked Clarke to collaborate on the refurbishment of Henry Currey's Grade II listed Thermal Baths in Buxton. Satisfying his public ambitions for the medium, he enclosed the former Victorian spa in a barrel-vaulted skin of stained glass, bathing the space “in an immense blue light”. It is one of Clarke's earliest works to have been designed to have a deliberate nocturnal presence.In 1988, architect Arata Isozaki approached Clarke to collaborate 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 referenced elements of Isozaki's building. In the same period, Clarke collaborated with Norman Foster and his architectural practice Foster + Partners to design stained glass for Stansted Airport's new terminal building. For the first time in the history of stained glass, computer-assisted design was utilised in its visualisation and design. Partly for security reasons, the design could not be used. The final commission was for two friezes and a 6-metre high tower of stained glass. While their abstract, constructivist forms resonated with Foster's language, Clarke recently expressed how the medieval technology of lead and stained glass was at odds with the material qualities of High-tech architecture. An urge to resolve this conflict later spurred Clarke to embrace the most cutting-edge glass technology.
Equally experimental across other mediums, Clarke's painting practice was also inspired by technology. Noticing the similarity between the reticular, Constructivist-derived symbols that dominated his work and the light-metering computergrams from Olympus OM System cameras, he produced a series of technology-related paintings, including Time Lag Zero, for the headquarters of Olympus Optical. During this period, Clarke produced the cover painting for Paul McCartney's solo album Tug of War, designing the cover with Linda McCartney. He also created the stage designs for Paul McCartney's World Tour.