Inspired patronage: art commissioned by English churches in the past fifty years has usually been dire, so any attempt to preserve the notable exceptions should be encouraged

Apollo, March, 2005 by Gavin Stamp

St Elizabeth's, Eastbourne, was consecrated by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, in 1938. Designed by the local architects Peter D. Stonham, Son & A.R.G. Fenning and sited in a suburb of the Sussex seaside town, it is a large, gaunt brick gothic building in that tradition of urban Anglican churches which Charles Booth once called the 'bare style'. Typical of its period is the way the upper parts of the walls step back above the buttresses before reaching a straight parapet. Unfortunately, this feature, together with poor detailing to the windows and the use of ferrous rods as wall ties, has led to structural problems due to water penetration. These are not insuperable, and the architect Nicholas Hills has proposed an ingenious solution that involves adding a new roof with generous overhanging eaves to throw the rain water off the walls. But this will be expensive: is it really worth doing?

St Elizabeth's may be a fine building, but it is not as distinguished as contemporary churches by, say, Giles Gilbert Scott or Edward Maufe. Oddly enough, what most merits preservation is in the crypt, where there are murals by the German-Jewish refugee artist Hans Feibusch (Fig. 1). These were painted in 1944 and represent the second commission he received from Bishop Bell (the first being in St Wilfrid's, Brighton--a magnificent building by Harry Goodhart-Rendel since mutilated by being converted into fiats). Feibusch, who died in 1998 just before his 100th birthday and who had served the Kaiser on the Eastern Front during World War I, had gained notice as a painter before he was forced to leave his native land in 1933. Later he achieved the distinction of being represented in the Nazi exhibition of 'Degenerate Art' in Munich in 1937. In England, his skill and sympathy as a muralist led to a remarkable number of church commissions. In London, for example, there is the Trinity in Glory on the huge east wall of St Alban's, Holborn, and the triptych in St Etheldreda's, Bishopsgate (damaged but not destroyed by the IRA bomb).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In an admirable Otter Memorial Paper, Feibusch Murals: Chichester and Beyond (edited by Paul Foster and published by University College, Chichester), Alan Powers writes that he was 'an artist who represents many things which have been left out of conventional art history.' Hence, perhaps, Nikolaus Pevsner's dismissal of his mural in Chichester Cathedral: 'What is to be said? More modern in style than most English paintings of this date [1951] and position, yet nowhere near a truly C20 religious expression.' But what is a truly twentieth-century expression? Certainly Feibusch was an Expressionist in German terms, and his work can be an acquired taste--especially because of his colouring. But he was a superb draughtsman and he knew how to work with architecture. His murals not only deserve respect, they can be powerful and moving. In the crypt at Eastbourne his subject was Pilgrim's Progress and he painted it as a thanksgiving for the welcome he had received in England.

Those murals deserve preservation as fine works by an underrated artist whose life in exile says so much about the terrible history of the last century. They might also be regarded as a memorial to Bishop Bell (1883-1958), who asked to meet Feibusch in 1940. Bell's ashes were discreetly interred in Chichester Cathedral, so perhaps a memorial elsewhere might be appropriate --modest though Bell was. After all, he was perhaps the most impressive and saintly prelate produced by the Church of England in the twentieth century, committed to ecumenism, reconciliation and social justice, and consistent in condemning tyranny. His principled and courageous stand against the saturation bombing of German cities and the refusal of the British government to distinguish between the German people and the Nazi enemy remains a redeeming bright light in a dark period (his speech on the subject in the House of Lords in 1944 is said to have cost him the chance of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury). This great, compassionate man was also remarkable as a patron of the arts, asking, for instance, T.S. Eliot to write Murder in the Cathedral as well as commissioning artists such as Feibusch.

Coincidentally, Bell's time at Chichester overlapped with that of another remarkably imaginative clerical patron of the arts, Walter Hussey (1909-85). Before he went to Chichester as Dean in 1955, he had been vicar of St Matthew's, Northampton, for whose fiftieth anniversary he commissioned Benjamin Britten to write the cantata Rejoice in the Lamb. That was in 1943 and in the same year he secured the famous Northampton Madonna from Henry Moore. This sits in the north transept of the big, comfortable gothic church designed by Matthew Holding. A few years later, this was joined by Graham Sutherland's searing Crucifixion in the opposite, south transept. Pevsner had no problem with these works, as they were unimpeachably avant-garde, remarking that 'The Moore is as peaceful as the Sutherland is violent.' But Hussey had the support of his congregation in installing them. As Giles Watson remarks, in his essay in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'It was not a coincidence that this occurred amid 1940s austerity; Hussey's sacramental aesthetic, like that of Bishop Bell of Chichester, was nourished by a conviction that the vision of the artist, in conjunction with that of the church, was a weapon in the spiritual arsenal of "Christian civilization", essential for combating the cultural influence of totalitarianism.'