Margaret Traherne; stained glass artist & designer
Hyfler/Rosner
Tanya Harrod
18 July 2006
Margaret Traherne
Artist and designer best known for her stained glass at the
new Coventry and Liverpool cathedrals
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/manchester/local/TRA32628.html?ixsid=
http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/search/Object.asp?object_key=26933
Margaret Traherne's varied career as an artist encompassed
painting, the "new embroidery" of the 1950s and the creation
of remarkable abstract banners. But she is best known as a
stained-glass artist, responsible for major schemes of glass
at two modern cathedrals, St Michael's, Coventry, and the
Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King at Liverpool.
She was elegant, charming and extraordinarily modest. Her
creativity never faltered. Only a few weeks ago, in her 87th
year, she was exhibiting in a group exhibition in Newhaven
as part of the Brighton Festival. She was one of a group of
gifted, highly professional women who turned, in a
male-dominated fine art world, to the applied arts in the
post-war period.
Traherne was born Margaret Wilkes, but from the 1950s she
was professionally known as Margaret Traherne, a Welsh name
in her husband's family. In 1925 aged six she crossed the
Atlantic with her family in a steamer to North America,
where her father had a job with the Burroughs Adding Machine
Company. Until the age of 15 she lived on Long Island in New
York State but when the Depression took hold the family
returned to England.
In 1936 Traherne went to Croydon School of Art, where she
was taught by Ruskin Spear and met David Thomas, a nephew of
the poet Edward Thomas. They married in 1943 and he later
lectured at the Courtauld Institute of Art and worked for
the Arts Council.In the mid-1940s she battled with
tuberculosis, spending a year in an Isle of Wight
sanatorium, a grim, if character-forming, experience.
Towards the end of the Second World War she went to Kingston
School of Art, where she studied dress design with the
redoubtable textile artist Constance Howard. Howard prepared
Traherne for the Royal College of Art and she entered its
Design School in 1945, specialising in mural painting,
theatre design and stained glass. Her tutors were Lawrence
Lee and Martin Travers, the latter encouraging a growing
interest in stained glass that had been inspired by the work
of Evie Hone.
Graduating from the Royal College in 1948 Traherne went on
to run an embroidery course for trade machinists at the
College of Garment Trades in Shoreditch. She and her pupils
explored the artistic possibilities of machine embroidery
and she subsequently created a portfolio of designs for the
Needlework Development Scheme. She began to make embroidered
pictures. This is an art form that has dropped from view but
in the 1950s its mainly female practitioners explored all
the possibilities of collage and appliqué in the context of
expressive modernism. Embroidered pictures were popular with
enlightened education authorities, then buying significant
amounts of contemporary art for schools, and they were the
only examples of applied art included in the "Pictures for
Schools" scheme run from 1947 by the painter and
educationist Nan Youngman.
Traherne's use of appliqué felt and her bold machine
stitching were powerfully expressive but her Mother and
Child (bought by Peter Floud for the V&A in 1953) shows how
she also manipulated a modified sewing machine as a
sensitive graphic tool. Her cushion covers, sold at
Woollands and at Liberty, were little abstract works of art,
designed with strong grids and the occasional abstract
scribble. She designed woven fabrics for Alastair Morton's
Edinburgh Weavers that also drew on the effect of a thin
wiry, machine-stitched line.
In 1953-54 Traherne spent a year of experimentation in the
stained-glass department of the Central School of Arts and
Crafts, then run by John Baker and Tom Fairs, and she was
busy as a stained-glass artist throughout the late Fifties.
Nineteen panels were commissioned by the inspired Director
of Education for Leicestershire Stewart Mason and his art
adviser Alec Clifton-Taylor and placed in Devotional Rooms
in newly built schools. One (St Guthlac) was included, to
great acclaim, in the 1999 exhibition "The Pleasures of
Peace" held at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of
East Anglia. The whole series would form a revelatory
retrospective exhibition.
Her interest in French glass led to experiments with dalles
de verre (thick glass set in concrete) and a small
exhibition held in her flat in Cadogan Place attracted the
attention of Basil Spence, who in 1958 commissioned her to
design and make 10 windows for the Chapel of Unity in
Coventry Cathedral. These were 52ft high and treated by
Traherne as a chromatic abstraction.
Coventry was followed by a series of abstract windows and
screens remarkable for their bold use of graduated colour.
Major commissions in Bristol (St Mary's, Lockleaze, in 1961
and St Chad's, Church Patchway, 1964) used dalles de verre
and glass set in resin respectively. This last technique was
also used for her 1963 Manchester Airport screen to
commemorate the Parachute Training School; the effect was of
discrete paint marks, suggesting an abstracted landscape
viewed from the air.
Windows for Eric Lyons's Albion Primary School, Rotherhithe,
look like applied Pop Art, with playful coloured numerals,
letters and biomorphic shapes collaged with resin on to
clear glass. These new techniques presented conservation
problems and in 1966 Traherne reverted to traditional lead
calmes (lead strips) to create her magnificent Fire window
in the Manchester Regiment Chapel in Manchester Cathedral.
In 1996 she recreated this window after IRA bomb damage.
In 1953 Traherne and her husband commissioned a modernist
artists' house from the architect Stefan Buzas on land
adjoining Ham Common. In 1959 they were living on the Thames
at Deodar Road, Putney, then a site of Bohemian creativity.
Neighbours included a sympathetic if eccentric pioneer group
of older stained-glass artists (Margaret Aldrich Rope, Joan
Howson, Lady de Montmorency, David Woore), artists (Anthea
Alley and Sidney Nolan) and writers (Nell Dunn and Edna
O'Brien).
Despite her growing fame in the field of stained glass
Traherne felt a need to return to painting. In the mid-1960s
she attended classes held by Harry Thubron, first at Saffron
Walden and then at the famous summer school at Barry
organised by South Glamorgan Education Authority. Thubron
"taught destructively", if exhilaratingly, and had a marked
effect on Traherne's subsequent work. One of her subtlest
ensembles of windows, for the Lady Chapel in Frederick
Gibberd's Roman Catholic Cathedral at Liverpool (1967),
suggests a new colour sensibility, using amber glass in
three degrees of intensity, flashed with opalescent glass.
Traherne also experimented with light boxes in the spirit of
the kinetic art of the period, showing these at the AIA
Gallery in 1972. Through the collector and curator Monika
Kinley she was commissioned to create a 3-D group of banners
outside the Tate Gallery in 1972 to celebrate the Tate's
75th anniversary. These magnificent essays in painterly
abstraction appeared on the cover of Studio International.
They were followed by banners outside the Royal Academy to
mark the Jubilee exhibition "British Painting 1965-77" and a
further sequence in and outside the Tate to coincide with
the opening of new galleries in 1978.
Traherne remained busy and active throughout the 1980s and
into the 1990s with a major commission for all the windows
of the Royal Mosque at Riyadh (1986-87) and a figurative
50ft-high East Window for the Church of the Holy Innocents
(1985) at Orpington in Kent showing doves flying upwards
through areas of pure colour against a background of pale
opalescent glass.
Margaret Traherne understood all the varied possibilities of
architectural glass - painted and stained, flashed and
etched. Towards the end of her life she returned to, and
reached distinction in, her first love, painting. But it was
as an artist in glass that her sensitivity to colour and
form comes across most strongly.
It is an artistic genre that is hard to capture in
photographs. To get a full sense of Traherne's achievements
it is necessary to make a pilgrimage - starting perhaps at
her early neo-primitive St Kenelm window in the little
Norman church at Wootton Wawen, moving on to view her fine
early Mother and Child now in the Stained Glass Museum at
Ely Cathedral and ending with the sublime beauties of her
Lady Chapel in Liverpool.
Tanya Harrod
Hazel Margaret Wilkes (Margaret Traherne), artist: born
Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex 23 November 1919; married 1943 David
Thomas; died Brighton, East Sussex 30 June 2006.