cathedrals

Posts on the history, worship and music of the cathedrals of England.

In praise of the edited collection

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[A post first published at On History, the blog of the Institute of Historical Research.]

As a publishing format, the edited collection of essays has had a bad press. Collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It’s often claimed that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure and funding also share this opinion. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format, before even a word is read.

But is this a fair assessment?

In my new book, The Edited Collection: pasts, present and futures (Cambridge University Press, £9.99), I attempt a defence of the format. I explore the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. I then examine each component part of the critique, showing either that they’re largely unfounded or (if they are of real substance) that they may be resolved.

Though suspicion of the edited collection is found across the disciplines, it’s most trenchantly expressed from within the hard sciences in which both book chapters and indeed monographs figure little. (In 2014, 99.5% of submissions to REF Main Panel A — for medicine and biological sciences — were journal articles, leaving almost no space for alternative formats such as essays or monographs.)

In the arts and humanities, however, the picture is quite different. Here freestanding edited collections remain a far more significant publishing format, and one — moreover — that’s holding its own in relation to the alternatives.

Data from the Bibliography of British and Irish History shows that, as the scale of history publishing has grown, the relative proportions of monographs, journal articles and book chapters remained all but unchanged between 1996 and 2015. In the 2014 REF, for History, one book chapter was submitted for every 1.7 journal articles. As well as individual chapters, editors also submitted whole edited volumes for assessment as a unit; in the same REF one in five of the books submitted to Main Panel D was an edited volume.

But for historians, as for many across the humanities and social sciences, it’s not just a question of numbers.

In my book I adopt a case study approach to demonstrate the creative potential of the edited collection. The studies I explore show a rich interplay in such volumes, as scholars are brought together to add to—and to assess the state of—an issue, or indeed the current state and purpose of a discipline. On occasions this conversation has been confined within the academy; at other times it’s engaged other professionals outside with particular stakes in the matter under investigation. It has proved a natural vehicle for interdisciplinary enquiry. Such collections may either be the natural outgrowth of an existing group of scholars or the creation by an editor or publisher, sometimes bringing together those with opposing views. What emerges overall, however, is a profoundly communal and conversational endeavour.

One of my case studies is of a form of edited collection that is peculiar to history: the institutional history, and within this the histories of cathedrals in particular.

Several of the English cathedral churches date their foundation, or at least the building of their current structures, to the Anglo-Norman period. Consequently, as the end of the twentieth century approached, there was a series of cathedral histories, some of them tied to nine-hundredth or other anniversary commemorations. First off the mark was York Minster, with a volume of essays published in 1977 by the Clarendon Press. The initiative had come from the dean and chapter (the governing body of the minster), against a background of growing interest in its archaeology and its monuments.

An initial editorial committee included Owen Chadwick, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge (and also a priest and person of some influence within the Church of England), who also contributed a chapter. But the volume was also a local affair—edited by Gerald Aylmer, the first professor of history in the still young University of York, and Reginald Cant, canon chancellor of the minster. Most of the other contributors were university-based scholars connected either with Cambridge or York, but the early architecture was covered by Eric A. Gee of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, which was based in the city; the chapter on the minster library was by C. B. L. Barr, of the university library, in the custody of which the minster library was kept.

Since then, there has been a crop of similar volumes as the other ancient cathedrals have followed suit. Most of these volumes had some sort of connection with a local university, and involvement from writers associated with the cathedral itself. They have tended to encompass several disciplinary perspectives: national and local history, musicology, archaeology, bibliography and the history of art and architecture.

Chichester cathedral from the west. Image: Peter Webster.

The combination of these perspectives has varied, however, as has the relative weight of contributions from the city in question and from the wider university sector. Oxford University Press published the volume for Canterbury Cathedral, the principal church in England, in 1995. More than a decade in the planning, the impetus had come both from the Press and from Donald Coggan, archbishop of Canterbury until 1980. All three editors were connected with Canterbury, including Patrick Collinson, regius professor in Cambridge but formerly professor at the University of Kent. However, the team of contributors was overwhelmingly academic and drawn from the universities.

By contrast, the 1994 volume for Chichester was composed of work from a more diverse and locally focused group. It was edited by the cathedral archivist, Mary Hobbs, with the assistance of a historian at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now the University of Chichester), Andrew Foster. The deputy county archivist (in whose care much of the historic archive rests) dealt with the cathedral’s archives and its antiquaries, and Hobbs herself with the library. The chapters on the medieval and early modern cathedral were from specialists, as were those on the architecture and on the cathedral’s art. The twentieth-century chapters, in contrast, were by clergy with a connection with the cathedral.

The cathedral history, then, has been a meeting point of institutional and local history with religious history more broadly, and the concerns of historians of architecture, music, art and of the book. The edited volume has been found to be a useful — indeed, probably the only — means of brokering that interchange.

Walter Hussey, the liturgy and the Eucharist

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[A short talk given to a symposium on Visual Communion, organised by Art and Christianity and held at the Bishop’s Palace in Chichester on Saturday 2nd March. On the panel with me were Frances Spalding, art historian and biographer of John Piper, and Simon Martin, director of Pallant House Gallery, where Walter Hussey’s private art collection is kept and shown. The theme was Hussey’s commissions for Chichester, and the 1966 tapestry by John Piper in particular. What follows is derived from my recent book on Hussey.]

Today I want to put Walter Hussey in theological context, and (since our theme is Visual Communion) to look in particular at his own liturgical and Eucharistic sense. In general I think that Walter Hussey is the most significant individual patron of the arts in the 20th century Church of England. Today, however, I want to suggest that Hussey was not very theologically driven, and almost entirely unliturgical, at least in relation to the visual arts.

Hussey was an instinctive patron: he knew what he liked, and went out to get it. A regular visitor to London galleries while at his first parish in Northampton, and from Chichester when dean of the cathedral, his interest in the London artistic scene was first developed when a curate in Kensington in the 1930s. He was also an assidous seeker of expert advice. His network of connections grew as he commissioned art, music and poetry for Northampton in the 1940s, which he used both as a source of intelligence and of expert witnesses whom he could use to help persuade his church council to assent to his plans. Hussey’s network was unique among provincial clergymen, and by and large he allowed it to do his thinking for him.

Even when given the opportunity, Hussey did not articulate his theology of art in any depth, but two themes emerge. Both derived from others, and neither was new in the 1940s: art as a means of instruction, of conveying a message, and art as offering.

In 1949 Hussey wrote that a piece of religious art ‘should convey to those who see it some aspect of the Christian truth.’ Speaking shortly before he retired in 1977, he argued that the artist ‘may, by forcing us to share his vision, lead us to the spiritual reality that lies behind the sounds and sights that we perceive with our senses.’

The work itself was also an offering, as was the effort of the artist in making it. The artist may well enjoy the act of making, and at some level feel compelled to do it, Hussey argued, but ‘whether he is entirely conscious of it or not, [he does it] because it is an act of worship which he must make.’ Hussey was fond of quoting Benjamin Britten’s comment to him that ‘ultimately all one’s music must be written to the glory of God’. There was a pervasive sense in his thinking that the act of making was in itself religious in some way.

So much for Hussey’s theology of the arts. What do I mean by suggesting that Hussey’s approach was unliturgical in relation to the visual arts? To begin with, I certainly do not think that Hussey, as a clergyman responsible to leading liturgical worship, was unconcerned with its conduct. Woe betide the chorister with brown shoes beneath his cassock rather than the regulation black; the two boys carrying the candles in procession had to be of the same height for the visual effect. All was to be done decently and in order.

My point is rather that his patronage was purely aesthetic: the object is everything, and the context of use in which it sits – the regular worship of real people in a particular place – is largely secondary.

David Stancliffe, retired bishop of Salisbury, reviewed my book on Hussey, and made the following point, with which I largely agree:

Hussey seems to have viewed commissions in isolation rather than as part of a coherent whole. It was Coventry’s architect, [Basil] Spence, who described the building as a jewel-case for the series of commissions it contained, and in a way this is rather what Hussey’s commissions feel like.

Take, for instance, the Chagall window at Chichester, Hussey’s retirement project, which stands as a commentary on his work. The theme (which Hussey gave to Chagall) is of ‘the arts to the glory of God’, and though a beautiful thing, it is a work of art about the idea of sacred art; a piece on (or rather, in) a gallery wall, for solitary contemplation. Tucked away in the north quire aisle, it bears no relation to any chapel or altar.

The Mary Magdalene chapel in Chichester cathedral

In contrast, the Graham Sutherland painting Noli me tangere is on an altar, but it is not one that is used to any great extent, by virtue of its location in the building. The whole ensemble in the Mary Magdalene chapel is – to my non-specialist eye, as an historian rather than a critic – the most perfect thing in the building: altar, candlesticks, rail and painting form a perfect whole in union with the stonework and with the prevailing light. But it is something that demands to be seen, either from a distance or from close up, rather than being an invitation to prayer.

What about Piper? Surely it is ‘liturgical’, given where it is, behind the high altar? Here I turn to Hussey’s relationship to the Eucharist in particular.

Everything in Hussey’s background should have disposed Hussey to being more focussed on the Eucharist than was typical amongst Anglicans. St Matthew’s, in which Hussey’s father ministered, was founded as an Anglo-Catholic counter to the strength of the Nonconformist churches in Northampton. John Rowden Hussey had first instituted a Sunday Eucharist each week (not yet the almost universal practice that it is now), then a daily one; St Matthew’s also had reservation of the sacrament at a time when it was a highly controversial practice. In 1925 the church hosted the annual Eucharistic Congress of the English Church Union, a national celebration of Anglo-Catholic identity. Emphasis on the Eucharist was a badge of identity for a highly self-conscious movement. Nothing of this would Hussey then have unlearned when moving from Northampton to study first at Oxford and then for ordination at Cuddesdon College.

The Eucharist in progress at St Matthew’s, Northampton. 1940s-1950s. Image: Peter Webster

Once at Chichester, Hussey’s practice was to reserve the role of celebrant at the principal Sunday service to himself. This may have been a felt necessity, a measure of the centrality of the Eucharist to his thought and feeling. I suspect it is more likely that it was simply something he saw as central to the proper role of a dean. (It may also have been a means to avoid preaching, which was not a strength.)

In his musical commissioning for Chichester, Hussey was clearly thinking about the Eucharist, as evidenced by the commission of a mass from the American composer William Albright in 1975. There had previously been a scheme for a new setting of the communion service in English from Benjamin Britten. It was first mooted in 1967 by Britten and pursued for years by Hussey, but without success before Britten’s death in 1976.

Given all this, one might have expected Hussey, when he saw the opportunity to remake the area around the high altar at Chichester, to focus on the Eucharist in particular. I make no comment on Piper’s tapestry as a piece of work in and of itself, but a little thought experiment will make the point. If you were to take it and place it in some other place in the building, would its symbolism become unintelligible? That is, is the iconic scheme very closely tied to the altar and the work that goes on there? The answer is very clearly not, but if it was eucharistic in its content, it surely would.

The Piper tapestry at Chichester, viewed from beyond the Arundel screen.

(Members of my audience in Chichester made the point that the tapestry can be glossed in Eucharistic terms, which is true, particularly the figure of the cross, but the subject – the Trinity, to which the cathedral is dedicated – was suggested by Piper’s ally Moelwyn Merchant, and there is no evidence that Hussey tried to guide Piper towards a Eucharistic scheme. They also made the point that the remarkable glow of the tapestry that can be seen from the west doors draws the visitor into the building towards the altar where the most important work of the cathedral goes on. This is also quite true, but this is a much more recently recovered idea of sacred space – the notion of liturgy as pilgrimage – which was far from Hussey’s thinking.)

Fundamentally, Hussey did not start with the thought: “here is an opportunity to have a great artist respond to the fundamental liturgical act of my Church, around which my whole formation was orientated”. Instead, his first thought is: “here is a drab and dark space with an existing reredos that is of a poor standard and is out of proportion to its surroundings. Let’s make it look better.”

I argue then that though Hussey is a highly significant figure, but his patronage is centred on the artistic object itself, rather than on where it is located and to what use it might be put. His influence has been limited by the fact that, at a time when all the churches were thinking very hard about their worship – architecture, layout, words – Hussey (by and large) was not.

[My book on Walter Hussey is published by Palgrave Macmillan.]

Chagall in Chichester

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[It is forty years this month since the unveiling of a stained glass window in Chichester cathedral, designed by Marc Chagall. This edited extract from my book on Walter Hussey, dean of Chichester, who commissioned it, tells the story of its making.]

Hussey had begun to think more or less immediately, on his arrival at Chichester in 1955, of new stained glass for the cathedral. However, it was only after his retirement in 1977 that he achieved his goal, in between which he had commissioned work from Graham Sutherland, John Piper and many others.

The Chagall window is located in a curiously obscure area of the building. Geoffrey Clarke’s pulpit in aluminium faces out into the nave; Sutherland’s Noli me tangere is visible from the full length of the south aisle; the colours of Piper’s tapestry frame the high altar, the focus of the central liturgical work of the cathedral, and are visible from the west end. By contrast, the Chagall window is tucked away in the wall of the north quire aisle, and so the visitor to the cathedral must venture deep into the building to find it. As Robert Holtby, Hussey’s successor as dean, noted in his sermon at the service of dedication, it is also all but invisible from the outside. Inside, it is the frame or backdrop to no liturgical action, being connected to none of the chapels and their altars. As such, of all the artistic work in the building, it is most like a painting in a gallery: an object for personal viewing and contemplation, not a companion to the collective action of the congregation as the Body of Christ as it worships.

The Chagall window in Chichester cathedral

In one sense, this more detached position suits the work itself, a work of art in a church on the theme of the arts in the Church. The theme of the 150th psalm was suggested by Hussey, the common property of Hussey and of Chagall the Jew. But the subtitle – ‘The arts to the glory of God’ – suggests that the project was also a gloss on Hussey’s life’s work, which took on a valedictory quality as retirement approached. ‘True artists of all sorts, as creators of some of the most worthwhile of man’s work, are well adapted to express man’s worship of God’ he wrote to Chagall. ‘I can imagine a window showing a variety of these artistic activities all caught up in a great act of worship – Psalm 150….. it has been the great enthusiasm of my life and work to commission for the Church the very best artists I could, in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in music and in literature.’

In the early 1950s, Chagall, after decades in Russia, Germany, France and the USA, had returned to France where he would stay for the rest of his life. This late period in the artist’s work, which was to extend for three decades, was marked both by a return to the Biblical subjects of Chagall’s Russian childhood, and a move into new media: in particular, stained glass. In 1959 he received his first commission for new glass for a church building: the cathedral at Metz. Several other such commissions were to follow; particularly notable were the twelve windows for the synagogue of the medical centre at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, completed in 1961. These windows formed the basis of a record-breaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, preceded by a similar show at the Louvre in the summer of 1961.

Hussey visited Paris to see the Louvre exhibition, and was impressed by Chagall’s handling of colour. This impression was shared by ‘sensitive and expert friends’, one of which may well have been John Piper, who had been impressed by the only other Chagall windows in an English church, at Tudeley in Kent. The other such friend may have been Robert Potter, cathedral architect, since it was Hussey who had recommended Potter as architect to Lady d’Avigdor Goldschmid, in the memory of whose daughter the Tudeley windows were made.

Others were less sure. In 1970, Hussey sought the advice of Edwin Mullins, art critic of the Sunday Telegraph, who thought rather too much attention was being paid to both Piper and Chagall and suggested several other names, including Ceri Richards, Patrick Heron, Bridget Riley and Richard Smith. But by this time, Hussey had approached Chagall; by October 1969, he understood that Chagall was considering the idea seriously with his maker of all his glass, Charles Marq, after a visit to Chichester, possibly in connection with the unveiling of the first Tudeley glass in 1967.

Hussey was accustomed to waiting for his schemes to come to fruition, but the six-year silence that then ensued must have tried even his patience. In 1975, he wrote again, stressing that time was now short, as he was to retire in 1977. Marq and his wife Brigitte then came to Chichester in April 1976, met with cathedral staff and inspected the site. Chagall was fit and active, and his wife was keen for him to take on the commission, but there would be a further delay. Chagall, it turned out, was having difficulty getting started; would Hussey go to see him?

Hussey described his difficulties in getting to France in December 1976, and in finding the Chagall’s home: a sorry tale of flight delays, linguistic incomprehension and wrong directions on a rainy night. Once there, he and Chagall conversed over a full-size drawing of the window, with Madame Chagall interpreting, and in the company of the Marqs. Chagall asked how Hussey imagined the window; Hussey ventured the idea of an array of figures representing the various arts, arranged around a central figure. It should also have the ‘rich and luscious colours’ that Hussey had been so impressed by in the Louvre. Chagall seemed to like the idea, and indeed the final design was along these lines.

This meeting seems to have released Chagall’s thinking, and the sketches were begun in January, and a maquette had been made by March. Marq sent a colour photograph of the maquette, stating that the glass work could not be finished until the summer, and possibly rather later, as a particular kind of red glass was only produced by the manufacturers at St Just twice a year. Now clear that the window would not be installed before he retired, Hussey resolved to move the matter as far on as it could be. The design was accepted by the cathedral chapter on the basis of the photograph, apparently without dissent. Both Potter and the Clerk of the Works, Eric Brooks approved the design: ‘happiness and satisfaction all round’. Even then, the window was not to be installed for over a year; it was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in October 1978.

One critic has described the Chagall window as Hussey’s ‘crowning achievement’, which ‘immeasurably enriched the Cathedral’. Kenneth Clark thought it a ‘triumph’. How significant is the Chagall window in the history of patronage and of religious art in England? On the one hand, it is one of only two Chagall works in English churches, and the only one in a cathedral. On the other, the twelve window scheme at Tudeley is on a much larger scale, and was commissioned earlier (although the whole sequence unfolded over several years, between 1967 and 1985). Neither was particularly early in Chagall’s work in glass.

The Chagall commission shows the limits of Hussey’s engagement with the very contemporary in art as he had grown older. The commissions of Henry Moore and Sutherland at Northampton were of relatively unknown young artists by a young provincial priest, which provoked scandalised reactions amongst press and public. The Chagall commission is by one old man of an even older man, who was still producing fine work, but who had long since ceased to be in critical favour. The window provoked no particularly adverse reaction: there was little to fear from Chagall in 1978.

Chagall was also now a very expensive man to hire; the eventual cost of the commission was in excess of £20,000, not including fees and expenses for Chagall and Marq. For previous commissions, Hussey had been supported financially by either a collecting box, as at Northampton, or by the private funds of a donor connected with the church (as with Moore at Northampton, and Cecil Collins at Chichester). The Friends of the cathedral had also funded the Sutherland painting, copes from Ceri Richards, and the Piper tapestry. In the case of Chagall, Hussey had assured the Chapter that he would not be calling on Chapter funds. Not only that, but he had also undertaken not to approach any Chichester people who had not yet contributed to the restoration appeal for the cathedral fabric, or any trusts and charities that might support it. Hussey was thus obliged to seek the aid of trusts that specialised in art, with or without any particular connection with the churches. The target was met, with a significant contribution from Hussey himself (£4,000), as well as public funds from the Arts Council. In this, Hussey moved some way from his earlier model of funding, in which a local church community commissioned a work of art and covered the costs in its own strength. Both models of patronage have survived him.

[Church and Patronage in 20th century Britain: Walter Hussey and the arts is available in paperback from all good bookshops, or direct from Palgrave Macmillan (from where there is also an ebook edition available), or Amazon, including a Kindle edition).]

Murder in the cathedral

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When some months ago I read Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle for this series on clergy in fiction, I thought I had perhaps found the novel with the largest number of clerical characters (four in all.) I had not reckoned, however, with Holy Disorders, a detective novel by Edmund Crispin. It was first published in 1946 by Gollancz, and subsequently in an inexpensive Penguin Classic Crime edition in 1958. Featuring Crispin’s sleuth Gervase Fen, it is an entertaining tale of murder and black magic set around the south-west cathedral city of Tolnbridge. An attempt has been made on the life of the cathedral organist, and suspicion falls on the several clergy of the cathedral.

Cathedral at night (Salisbury).
Image: Lee Hughes (Flickr), CC BY-NC-ND-2.0

There are five clerical characters, all of them lightly drawn but with some deftness. Both bishop and dean are absent, for reasons we never know, and the cathedral is overseen by the precentor, Dr Butler. The precentor has the frame of a giant, and ‘the coldest eyes … ever seen in a human being.’ High-handed with clergy, organists and his family, Butler cuts a remote and unpopular figure. Canons Spitshuker and Garbin, one a Tractarian, the other a Low Churchman, busy themselves in furious and inconclusive disputes about doctrine: ‘unlike parallel lines, it was inconceivable that their views should ever meet, even at infinity.’ The two are also divided by class and wealth: Spitshuker, rotund and complacent, descends from a family long connected with the church; Garbin, a scholarship boy from a poor family, has a more personal, more earnest view of his vocation. A scholar, of the Albigensian heresy, Garbin suspected the precentor of plagiarising his work; an offence over which he almost resigned his canonry. The chancellor, Sir John Dallow, is the expert in the long and dark history of witchcraft in Tolnbridge: it is easy to become an expert when one has almost nothing to do and considerable wealth to support one in doing it. Finally, there is the young July Savernake, vicar of a nearby parish, who spends half the year living beyond his means as the curé bon viveur, and the other as the poor parson. He also has designs on the hand of Frances, the precentor’s daughter.

Crispin’s world owes a good deal to Trollope, and may well have been inspired by another murder in the cathedral, that written for Canterbury by T.S.Eliot a decade earlier. The cathedral provides a convenient setting for a complex plot: a group of people with relationships and rivalries of long standing, which live in close proximity in a small town, around a building with many doors, dim lighting and many secrets. But it is purely incidental that these characters are clergy. The plot never engages their conduct as religious professionals; there are no points of decision that are dramatic by reason of the faith of the person who must decide. At heart, Holy Disorders is a morally conventional tale in which a murderer is brought to book. Crispin has no design on the reader’s conscience; no desire to dramatise the place of the national church at the end of a world war. His purpose is simply to entertain, in which purpose he succeeds.

Walter Hussey and the Arts: chapter summaries

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Abstracts of each chapter of Church and Patronage in 20th Century Britain: Walter Hussey and the Arts (now available from Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 as ebook and hardback), with links to purchasable PDF versions of each.

The book as a whole
The first full-length treatment of Walter Hussey’s work as a patron between 1943 and 1978, first for the Anglican parish church of St Matthew in Northampton, and then at Chichester Cathedral. He was responsible for the most significant sequence of works of art commissioned for the British churches in the twentieth century. They included music by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein and William Walton, visual art by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Marc Chagall, and poetry by W. H. Auden. Placing Hussey in theological context and in a period of rapid cultural change, it explores the making and reception of the commissions, and the longer-term influence of his work, still felt today.
As well as contributing to the religious and cultural history of Britain, and of Anglo-Catholicism and the cathedrals in particular, the book will be of interest to all those concerned with the relationship between theology and the arts, and to historians of music and the visual arts.

Chapter 1. Introduction
The introduction outlines Hussey’s reputation as patron of the arts both during his career and since his death. It reviews the scholarly literature to date insofar as it has paid Hussey any attention, and sets out the several areas of the current historiography of British religion and the arts to which the study addresses itself. Finally it outlines the argument of the book chapter by chapter and ends with some remarks on the scope of the book and what it aims (and does not aim) to do. Buy the PDF

Chapter 2. The formation of a patron
Chapter 2 traces Hussey’s formation in the 1920s and 1930s: the son of a clergyman who progressed through public school (Marlborough), Oxford and ordination training at the Anglo-Catholic Cuddesdon College to a curacy in London. It also examines his early aesthetic development, as a viewer, listener, amateur musician and artist, and lays out the context for that development: of Anglican theologies of the arts of the 1920s, and the available examples of ecclesiastical patronage that others set. It argues that Hussey’s understanding of the arts in relation to culture and of the right form of patronage were both present in their essentials before he began his work at Northampton, as were his particular enthusiasms and artistic blind spots. It also shows that Hussey’s homosexuality was key to understanding the relationships he was later to form with those he commissioned. Buy the PDF

Chapter 3. The 1943 Jubilee festival at Northampton
Chapters 3 and 4 together examine the full record of patronage for Northampton. Chapter 3 begins by situating the church of St Matthew in its local context, and as a prominent example of an Anglo-Catholic church. It then examines the five ventures that together formed the jubilee festival of the church in 1943: an organ recital from George Thalben-Ball, a concert by the BBC Orchestra, new music from Benjamin Britten (his Rejoice in the Lamb) and from Michael Tippett, and finally (in 1944) the sculpture Madonna and Child by Henry Moore. It examines in particular the critical and public reactions to each work, and shows that the debates that the Moore provoked went to the very heart of what religious art was, and what it was for. Buy the PDF

Chapter 4. Music, art and poetry: 1944-55
Chapter 4 continues the story of Hussey’s patronage from 1944 until his departure from Northampton in 1955. It produced a painting from Graham Sutherland (Crucifixion, 1946), poetry from W.H. Auden and Norman Nicholson, and music from Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Edmund Rubbra and Gerald Finzi (Lo, the full final sacrifice, 1947) amongst others, including Benjamin Britten (for a second time). Those twelve years also saw the establishment of Hussey’s characteristic modus operandi, as he created ex nihilo a network of supportive critics, clergy and key players in the spheres of art, music and broadcasting. Buy the PDF

Chapter 5: The religious arts on a rising tide: people, media, networks
Chapter 5 places Hussey’s growing renown in the changed context of the immediate post-war period. Whilst the characteristic catholic understanding of the nature of culture was mostly unaltered by the War, Hussey’s project was now also framed by the need for reconstruction, both physical and (as some saw it) cultural and spiritual. The chapter describes a moment at which a new settlement between the church and the arts seemed possible, supported by a growth in media coverage, scholarly interest and exhibitions. It also details two key relationships in Hussey’s network: with Kenneth Clark, perhaps the most influential individual in British art, and with George Bell, bishop of Chichester, the other most significant figure in Anglican patronage of the arts in the period. It was Bell who brought Hussey from Northampton to Chichester in 1955: the cathedral of a diocese in which Bell had done significant work in relation to the arts, but that was itself not quite ready for a project such as Hussey’s. Buy the PDF

Chapter 6: new visual art for Chichester
Hussey’s commissions of new visual art and new music for Chichester cathedral are examined in chapters 6 and 7 respectively. Chapter 6 begins with an examination of what cathedrals were thought to be for, since their purposes were in question in a new way in the fifties and sixties. It then examines each of the works of visual art in turn: works by Graham Sutherland, Geoffrey Clarke, John Piper, Ceri Richards, Cecil Collins and Marc Chagall. As in chapters 3 and 4, it examines both the making of the works and their reception, and argues that, whilst highly effective in their own right, the works as a whole strike a less radical note than the Northampton pair from 1944-6. Buy the PDF

Chapter 7: Chichester music
Chapter 7 examines the series of compositions of new music for Chichester. It argues that the final compositions in the 1970s from the older figures William Walton and Lennox Berkeley have a similarly conservative flavour to the works of visual art documented in chapter 6. However, the commissions from Bryan Kelly, James Bernard, William Albright and in particular from Leonard Bernstein (the Chichester Psalms) show a more consistent engagement with contemporary trends in composition, and in particular the revolution in ‘church pop’ then under way. Buy the PDF

Chapter 8: cathedral, city and diocese
Hussey’s time as dean was one of searching, indeed existential questioning of the very purpose of the cathedrals within the church, in their urban environments, and as destinations for tourists. The whole of Hussey’s career was a response to these challenges by one particular means; chapter 8 examines the rest of his record as dean, and argues that his overwhelming focus on the arts was to the detriment of other areas of the cathedral’s life. Buy the PDF

Chapter 9: Legacy
The book ends with a reflection on the nature of Hussey’s model of patronage. Hussey did inspire others during his career and immediately following to commission new works for churches. But chapter 9 argues that Hussey’s success was in large part due to his personal qualities; his work was not as a distant, demanding patron but as a friend and collaborator, and as an unofficial chaplain to those with whom he worked. As such, his way of working was not easily codified into a model that could easily be transferred to other contexts, and the more public and institutional way in which the churches have come to work in the very recent past is perhaps an acknowledgment of the fact. More fundamentally, it argues that Hussey’s work was based on a catholic understanding of the relationship between national religion and culture, formed before the Second World War but given new impetus by it, which became hard to sustain as both the arts and the position of the churches changed during the long Sixties. Those in the present day churches who would see a live tradition of ecclesiastical patronage have needed to look elsewhere for their justification. Buy the PDF