The Four Quarters

‘The Four Quarters’ are four circular stained glass windows designed by Brian Clarke between 1989 and 1990 in response to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. In the summer of 1988, Clarke listened to a performance of Vivaldi’s violin concerto in the square at Darmstadt, performed by Yehudi Menuhin to raise funds for his stained glass commission for the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue/Neue Synagogue. The following year, he designed and had fabricated the first of these works: the blue and white winter window, Fourth Quarter. In 1990 he designed three further works for exhibition at the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, one ‘quarter’ for each season.

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‘The Four Quarters’ are four circular stained glass windows designed by Brian Clarke between 1989 and 1990 in response to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. In the summer of 1988, Clarke listened to a performance of Vivaldi’s violin concerto in the square at Darmstadt, performed by Yehudi Menuhin to raise funds for his stained glass commission for the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue/Neue Synagogue. The following year, he designed and had fabricated the first of these works: the blue and white winter window, Fourth Quarter. In 1990 he designed three further works for exhibition at the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, one ‘quarter’ for each season.

In the 1990 monograph Brian Clarke (Art Random) Paul Bedlock writes:

‘All of Clarke's work is imbued with a preoccupation with the relationship and tension between opposites, and his favourite leitmotifs: the cross, the amorph, the grid and the geometric elements, can all be understood in terms of an equilibrium which has been disturbed or tormented. In Clarke's work the ritual order of repeated elements is disrupted: straight gives way to bent, soft to hard, defined to diffuse, rough to smooth, etc.’

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