“A Living Tradition”: Craft, Reconstruction and Resistance in the Making of the Coventry Tapestry

Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral is generally regarded as a monument of Britain’s postwar reconstruction and a showcase of native art and craft. Ironically, the cathedral’s centerpiece, Graham Sutherland’s tapestry of Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph, was woven in France, where the tapestry industry had come to symbolize that nation’s recovery from occupation and war. This article probes the connections between craft and modernism, and the profound impact of the Second World War on attitudes to architecture, art and craft. It demonstrates how the original concept of the tapestry as an integral part of the design of Coventry Cathedral was threatened by the difficulties surrounding its creation. The significance which the tapestry then assumed as an example of Anglo-French artistic collaboration was in turn jeopardized by Sutherland’s determination to retain control.