1

ARCHITECT JOHN T. COMES––STATE HISTORICAL MARKER CEREMONY, JANUARY 27, 2013

Albert M. Tannler, History & Landmarks Foundation

BIOGRAPHY

John Theodore Comes was born in Larochette, Luxemburg on January 29, 1873, the son of a woodcarver who brought his family to America and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1882. Comes came East to study architecture at Mt. St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Maryland. About 1894 he arrived in Pittsburgh, and found work with architect F. H. DeArment and later the Pittsburgh field office of Peabody & Stearns of . After designing Pittsburgh churches for Rutan & Russell and Beezer Brothers1, he opened his own firm around 1902.

In 1921, Comes established Comes & McMullen, later Comes, Perry & McMullen with Leo McMullen and William R. Perry.2 John Comes died April 13, 1922 at the age of 49 at his home at 3242 Beechwood Boulevard.

ACHIEVEMENTS

A devout Roman Catholic, John Comes specialized in ecclesiastical design. His sometime partner, architect and historian Leo McMullen, tells us: “During the twenty odd years of his active individual practice, he designed over fifty churches, schools, rectories, and convents in the diocese, and equally as many beyond its confines.”3 Outside of Pennsylvania, his buildings can be found in California, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, New York, Utah, and Washington, D.C.

An activist in his profession, Comes founded the Pittsburgh Architectural Club in 1896, a professional and social organization for apprentices not yet eligible for membership in the American Institute of Architects. Beginning in 1900, the periodic exhibitions sponsored by the Architectural Club brought the work of architects, designers, and artists from across the country and around the world to this area.

Comes admired Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) whose championship of a modern architecture inspired by the late medieval design

1 Leo A. McMullen, "Architecture in the Diocese," Catholic Pittsburgh's First Hundred Years 1843-1943 (: Loyola University Press), 1943, 192: "[Rutan & Russell’s] St. Augustine Church (1901) marked a new era in the history of ecclesiastical arts in the diocese. It was acclaimed as a masterpiece, and when Beezer Brothers, the architects, were assigned the task of providing working drawings for St. John the Baptist Church, Liberty Avenue, they engaged Mr. Comes to prepare the designs. For this structure he chose a free interpretation of Italian Romanesque, and his success with the building, which was completed in 1903, surpassed that of this earlier essay.” 2 The new firm of Comes, Perry & McMullen is announced in The Charette 2:12 (December 1921), 6. 3 McMullen, "Architecture in the Diocese," 192.

1 2 vocabulary and craftsmanship exerted an immense influence nationwide, both by the example of his “Modern American Gothic” designs and by his writings as an advocate for revitalized Gothic art forms. Comes had written about Cram’s importance in a review in the Pittsburgh Catholic of the 1907 Architectural Club exhibition:

Mr. Ralph Adams Cram … has perhaps done more than any other man, to awaken a sincere appreciation of Gothic architecture of the middle ages, especially that of England. Looking at [his] designs from a mediaeval Catholic standpoint, they are far more Catholic, than contemporary Catholic architecture in this country to-day.

Comes was a prolific writer: he published an illustrated monograph Christian Art and Architecture and his articles and reviews appeared not only in publications like The Pittsburgh Catholic, Christian Art (edited by Ralph Adams Cram) and Ecclesiastical Review, but also in Architectural Review, International Studio, and House and Garden.

At a time when the Roman Catholic congregations of Southwestern Pennsylvania were expanding rapidly and outgrowing church buildings, Comes sought to maintain high standards of architectural design and construction, despite the pressure to build quickly and cheaply. He wrote:

Every detail of design and construction must be … radically truthful and honest …. The material must always be what it professes to be—no more, no less. Veining a substance to imitate marble, graining pine to make it simulate oak, and other shams are entirely condemned …. How inconsistent to teach from the pulpit that the church is the ground and pillar of truth, when perhaps the architectural pillar located back of the speaker, instead of being a pillar of honest masonry, is nothing but a hollow sham of metal lath and plaster painted to simulate marble, thereby violating the vital principal of truth in architecture.4

Comes worked closely with architectural craftsman and artisans––stained glass window glazers; sculptors in metal, wood, and stone; muralists; and designers and fabricators of ecclesiastical furniture and lighting fixtures. He collaborated with regional artists–– sculptors, woodcarvers, metalsmiths, and muralists––such as Franz Aretz (1876-1965) of Pittsburgh, Felix Lieftucher (b. 1883) of Cincinnati, and Henry Schmitt (1860-1921) of Buffalo.

Stained glass windows presented a particular challenge. Roman Catholic churches in America usually imported windows designed and made in Germany––completed windows were considered art works and were not taxed as heavily as the raw glass from Germany or England that American glass studios imported to make windows. Glass firms in Munich, Germany had two advantages over those in America. In addition to producing a less costly product for Roman Catholic churches in America, Munich windows had received both royal and papal approval. In 1870 the king of Bavaria

4 John T. Comes, Christian Art and Architecture, 2nd enlarged edition (Published by the author, 1920), 47.

2 3 designated one of the two principal firms, Franz Zettler & Company––Zettler's father- in-law Franz Mayer operated the other––as the “Royal Bavarian Art Institute for Pictorial Painting in Glass,” and the firm received a gold medal from Pope Pius IX.

German windows were made from traditional medieval materials––hand-blown panes of glass framed in lead and supported by iron rods––but the iconography was derived from the three-dimensional classical realism of early Renaissance painting. In an article about a new Western Pennsylvania Roman Catholic church, Comes noted:

The inevitable Munich window does what it can to disturb the general harmony. When will workers in glass realize the conventional limitations of their art, and give us windows without perspective and without the other accessories of a painting on canvas? Hofmann may have been a good artist, but that in itself is no sufficient reason that church windows should have become more or less modified copies of his paintings.5

Comes is referring to German painter Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911) whose oil paintings––in particular Christ in the Garden in Gethsemane (1890)––were often copied in stained glass windows.

Comes understood that stained glass windows are architectural elements of a building: "Realism [in a stained glass window] obliterates the wall, perspective destroys it by conveying the impression of distance," he wrote. A stained glass window should be "not so much a thing for itself as a decorated portion of the wall. . . ."6

The visual language derived from Renaissance Classicism also characterized the American opalescent glass window––handblown glass mixed with opaline or milk glass––invented by in the 1880s and aggressively marketed by Louis Tiffany.

English window glass was also made the traditional way, but was based as well on medieval methods of design and construction first reasserted by Gothic Revival architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,7 then championed by critic John Ruskin, polymath William Morris, architect Philip Webb, artist Edward Burne-Jones, and passed on to their heirs in the Arts & Crafts movement.

What are these medieval methods of design and construction? William Morris believed that the great glass windows of the Middle Ages were an architecturally sophisticated achievement that could be revived, but not drastically altered technologically. Morris explained how stained glass windows were made to John Ruskin in 1883:

5 John T. Comes, “St. Vincent’s Abbey Church,” Christian Art 2:2 (November 1907), 86. 6 [John T. Comes] “The Windows,” A Notable Work of Christian Art: St. Paul’s Church Butler Pa. Dedicated Sept. 10 1911, 8. 7 The largest number of architectural elements designed by Pugin and extant in the United States are found in the English Nationality Room, The Cathedral of Learning, the University of Pittsburgh.

3 4

We paint on glass; first the lines of draperies, features, and the like with an opaque colour . . . with thinner washes … of the same colour, we shade objects . . . but always using this shading to explain form.… You will understand that we rely almost entirely for our colour on the actual colour of the glass; and the more the design will enable us to break up the pieces, and the more mosaic-like it is, the better we like it.8

Instead of using the leading to outline naturalistic shapes and suggest perspective, Morris advocated assertive, seemingly random leading to help focus the light and sharpen the colors. "It is highly desirable to break up the surface of the work by means of them," Morris stated, as they intensified "pieces of exquisite color." In “Glass, Painted or Stained,” published in 1890, Morris wrote: “This art of mosaic window-glass is especially an art of the middle ages; there is no essential difference between its processes as now carried on and those of the 12th century; any departure from the medieval method of production in this art will only lead us astray.”9 Morris calls the practice of modeling stained glass windows after famous paintings “mere caricature” and he observes that “the picture-window … cannot form, as a window should do, a part of the architecture of the building."10 The result of the medieval approach are windows: flat images on a flat surface that transmit light and color. Comes was committed to this Arts & Crafts approach to stained glass window design. He worked with a number of important 20th-century craftsman who created church windows second to none: Harry Eldredge Goodhue (1873-1918), a founding member of the Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston, designed and made all the windows at Comes' Holy Family Latrobe; Leo Thomas (1876-1950) of Munich designed and made all the windows for Comes' St. Paul Butler, and George Sotter (1879-1953), who worked with his wife, Alice (1883-1967), and Leo Pitassi (1886-1947) of Pittsburgh designed and supervised the making of the windows by Petgen Studios for St. Agnes Pittsburgh.

Sculptor Franz Aretz of Pittsburgh and muralist Felix Lieftucher of Cincinnati also created artwork for St. Agnes. Among other things, Aretz designed and made the reredos and the main tabernacle in the church and the spectacular Rose window Calvary Group outside on the facade. Lieftucher designed the interior murals, which he painted with the assistance of two Pittsburgh art students in the 1930s.11

8 William Morris to John Ruskin, April 15, 1883, Collected Letters, Volume II, 186. Spelling and punctuation slightly altered for clarity. 9 Morris, “Glass, Painted or Stained,” 45 10 Morris, “Glass, Painted or Stained,” 48. 11 Ruth Ayers, "2 Girl Art Students Paint Murals on Church Walls," Pittsburgh Press, 6 January 1931, 2.

4 5

LEGACY

Comes’ ecclesiastical architecture has—to quote his Boston Roman Catholic contemporary Charles Maginnis (1867-1955)—“an air of suave reticence and refinement.”12 In addition to his own surviving buildings, Comes’ legacy may well be his influence and example that resulted in a remarkable body of ecclesiastical architecture created by Roman Catholic architects in Pittsburgh who came after him: Leo McMullen and William Perry, William P. Hutchins, Edmund and Herman Lang, Albert Link, Carlton Strong, and Edward J. Weber. Equally important was his role and example supporting and nurturing regional ecclesiastical designers, artists, and craftsmen.

In the third edition of his Church Building, published in 1924, Ralph Adams Cram wrote: it is possible to say not only that the Roman Catholic church is returning to good art but that at the present rate, she bids fair to outstrip all others in the race. . . . I think it may safely be said that it is in the United States that the leadership is to be found . . . the great work of restoration . . . has been accomplished largely by two men, [C. D. Maginnis and] John Comes, whose death last year was a tragedy both for the Church and for us who remain.13

What Comes wrote about Cram's Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh in 1908, is applicable to his own architectural work. This building, he wrote: is not a cut and dried study in archeology, nor a copy in any sense of the churches which inspired it; . . . it is, withal, vital and modern, full of details and motives that are interesting and refreshing; it is as though one had mastered a long-forgotten language, had acquired the ideas and felt the ideals to which it gave expression, had read the meaning of an old faith and civilization and had translated them all into the speech of the day.14

12 Charles D. Maginnis, "The Work of John T. Comes," Architectural Record 55:1(January 1924): 93- 101. 13“Twenty-Five Years After,” Church Building. 3rd edition. (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1924), 320. 14 John T. Comes, “Calvary Church, Pittsburg, Pa,” Architectural Review 15:1 (January 1908), 1-3.

5