by In later life, the artist Brian Clarke, who is 71 years old, remembered a revelation. As a child, he had Minster on a school trip from his native Oldham and when he showed his big east window, “stopped being aware of his friends, even the place because it had replaced something beyond the situation.” He passed out cold.
This experience, which he described on the online art platform Heni in 2023, connected him to what he described as a “unbroken line a wonderful, complex and majestic past”, which was represented by colored glass.
When the east window of the Minster had ended in the first decade of the 15th century, most people who saw it would have been farmers who lived in poverty. Clarkes awe was her awe.
Edward’s son, a coalmine, and Lilian (born Whitehead), a cotton spinner in a local mill, had a financially tough childhood. “I am on and through the work class from birth,” he said later. “My art is for the working class.”
Most of it was also made in colored glass. His family, who had an interest in spiritualism, was previously sent to a spiritual school at 13, won a scholarship at the Oldham School of Art and switched to Burnley College of Art two years later. At 17, he wrote down at the North Devon College of Art and Design with a diploma in design at the architectural glass course at the North Devon College of Art and Design.
At Devon Art School he had a fellow student, Liz Finch, whom he married in 1972. Like many art students of his time, Clarke was won by the biting pictures of pop artists like Peter Blake. When he sent his portfolio to traditional church glass manufacturers, he was returned with horror.
It wasn’t until 1975 that he found a patron saint who was ready to hire him. The resulting windows in the All Saints Church in Habergham Eaves, Lancashire told the history of creation in blocks of saturated color. This was later described by an art historian as “the great dissonant masterpiece of the English church stone glass of the 20th century”.
Nevertheless, the life of his manufacturer was hardly an Anglican decency. A photo by Clarke by John Swannell from 1983 in the National Portrait Gallery shows a weak Bowie-like artist in the middle of the middle. In the meantime he was the subject of a one-hour BBC Omnibus program called Brian Clarke: The Story Sowa (1978-79). This and a Vogue Homme cover by Robert Mapplethorpe drove him to the London Limelight. He was recorded by the gallery owner Robert Fraser, known as Groovy Bob, who presented him in the creative Beau Monde of the capital: Paul and Linda McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren and fateful Francis Bacon.
Bacon’s answer to the question that Clarke was asked at his first meeting indicated a problem in the future career of the younger artist. When Clarke Bacon asked if he would ever work in colorful glass, the painter mocked: “No, and I never did macrame, dear.” Although Clarke also made paintings and work on paper, his fame rested like today on his work as a creator of colored glass; And colored glass production was a craft, not art. This stigma would continue to follow him.
Nevertheless, he developed a technique that he was able to work directly on float glass – “You could not make a leading window for a skyscraper,” said Clarke at reasonable discretion – he became internationally successful, especially in architectural glass.
In 1980 he was commissioned to design a decorative program for the mosque at King Khalid Airport in Riad, Saudi Arabia, and to study the aniconic traditions of Islamic art at the Quran School for this purpose. This was followed by other top-class commissions, especially for the New York headquarters of the drug giant Pfizer (1995), and the architect wants Alsops Hôtel du Département of the Bouches du Rhône (1994), who is known locally as Le Grand Bleu for Clarkes Wrap-Age-Around and Blue Glass skin.
His non-Architectural glassworks were shown in the blue of Blue chip-commercial venues, including the Gagosian and Tempo galleries
He added Norman Foster’s design for Stansted Airport (1991) with backlighting and columns and worked with Zaha Hadid on an unrealized residential project in Austria. (Clarke called the material he had made for this zaha glass.) He converted the Queen Victoria Street in Leeds into a arcade by covering it with a glazed roof (1990). His non-Architectural glassworks were shown in the blue-moved commercial venues of blue chips, including the Gagosian and Pace Galleries in London, and most recently in the Newport Street Gallery von Damien Hirst in an exhibition to mark the artist’s 70th birthday.
And yet the art company looked largely away. Although the act has a number of Clarkes works on paper, it has none of them on glass. No large public gallery has ever given him a show; He was never made a royal academic.
In some cases, this was due to persistent snobism about what was considered a craft, even though there was also the feeling that the mass relationship of Clarkes work was simply too easy to be serious. “People didn’t always like my art,” he said in an interview at the time of his show in 2023. “In fact, people were almost rude. But it’s all I have ever done.”
His habit of falling out with museum directors did not help. “I always said that it doesn’t matter because they retire or die, then there will be a new generation of them,” said Clarke. “But now I also have lines with all the new. British museums have ignored my entire career.”
His ability to war was not limited to his own work. After Bacon’s death in 1992, his companion John Edwards Clarke made an executor of the artist’s estate. In 1998 he became his sole executor, who was a complaint against Bacon’s former gallery Marlborough due to violation of the painter, who was finally rejected, and an agreement except court on the unknown conditions. The story was repeated when Clarke became the chairman of Zaha Hadid Foundation after he was able to die the early death of the architect in 2016. A number of disputes between the foundation and Hadid’s architectural company followed, which were described as poisonous in the press.
Clarke was knighted in 2024. He and Liz were divorced in 1996 before getting married again in 2013. She and her son then survive him.
• Brian Clarke, artist, born on July 2, 1953; died on July 1, 2025
