(ESSAY) I knew Peter Brandes because my (and my husband’s) ancestors came from Sweden. It was because of that heritage that my husband, son, mother and I took a roots trip through Norway, Sweden and Denmark in 1994. On that trip we made a friend for life in Copenhagen. Her name is Birgitte Prip.

After that first trip, both my family or I alone, have gone back to Denmark every year but one. I fell in love with the place, its history and art. And, every time, my friend Birgitte was our guide.

Looking to find something new for me to see, some time around 2000, 2001, or 2002 Birgitte took me to see Vejleå (pronounced Vie-low) Church in the Copenhagen suburb of Ishøj ( pronounced Iss-hoy). It was there that I met Peter Brandes.

This past Jan. 4 , the painter, photographer and ceramicist died in a hospital not far from his home in Eskebjerg in rural Sjelland. My husband, son and I were at his funeral two weeks later at Gamtofte Church on Fyn. He was buried in the churchyard next to his mother and father, Thomas and Gerda Brandes. The flag of the church flew half-mast.

Peter was born in Assens on March 5, 1944. His Jewish father Thomas had left Germany in the 1930s and had become a serious Christian. He met Gerda; they married and had a daughter in 1940. In 1944, when Peter was in utero, the news came that the occupying Germans were about to round up all Jews and deport them to camps in Germany or Poland. The fact that Thomas Brandes had converted to Christianity made no difference. He was one of the Jews the Danes famously saved by transporting them in small fishing boats to Sweden. Peter’s father’s boat was one the Germans actually chased, and he ended up in Latvia before eventually making it to Sweden. Peter was more than two years old before he met his father.

As Peter grew there was only one thing he wanted to be – an artist. Self-taught, he worked with artists such as Dane Asger Jorn, German Markus Lupertz and others. After Jorn’s death, he bought the artist’s home in Paris where eventually he and his second wife Maja Lisa Engelhardt both had studios. Over time, his reputation grew.

When Birgitte took me to Vejleå, I had never heard of Peter Brandes. I walked into that church and was stunned. Never had I seen a modern space that shouted the glory of God in contemporary visual vocabulary like this one. I could not believe it.

In the mid-1990s, the Danish state Lutheran Church decided that a house of worship was needed in this Copenhagen suburb. Willem Wohlert, a Catholic and the architect of the 1958 addition to Denmark’s world-renowned Louisiana modern art museum in Humlebaek north of Copenhagen, was engaged to do the design. At the time, Wohlert was in his mid-70s. He did the initial drawings but his son, Claus, completed the work. It was Claus who brought Brandes to the project.

On that first visit, I knew none of this history and neither did Birgitte. After I caught my breath, I asked her: “Who did this? The wonder of it?”

Denmark is crisscrossed with more than 800 churches built before the year 1200. The pattern is the same – tall square tower with pitched roof connected to a low building for narthex and nave. Many, if not most, are painted white. In my travels across the country, I had seen and visited many.

What Wohlert did was take that basic, beloved design and modernize it using geometric forms, the tall square tower, a nave of two double cubes with tetrahedrons on top, and a half-cylinder for the apse. The triangles created by the tetrahedrons were the frames for Peter’s astonishing stained glass.

Peter followed Wohlert’s lead and used the building blocks of color — the three primary colors and their complementaries. The windows at the back in blues, greens, and purples told the Old Testament prophecies — the God-thwarted sacrifice of Isaac, the tragedy of Cain and Abel, the suffering of Job. The windows in the front half used the other spectrum – reds, yellows, orange.

The “Raising of Lazarus,” “Christ’s Prayer in Gethsemane” the second, and in the front in blazing red and orange the “Crucifixion and Resurrection” over the altar. On one wall to the left of the altar was the bowed head of suffering Christ on the cross. On the opposite wall were three heads – Christ on the cross with two thieves. The silver on the altar repeated the motifs of the windows. For Peter, I later learned, there were no depictions of disciples because the congregation was to understand that they are now the disciples.

I walked out that day thankful and surprised. I had not thought it possible to find such work. Of course in my travels I had seen many modern churches but none had the powerful visual witness to the story of redemption that I saw at Vejleå. The vivid memory stayed in my mind.

A year or two later we hosted a gathering of artists, architects, and people who worked with the homeless and suffering. The question for the gathering was: What role might beauty play in helping suffering men and women and children create new lives? At the gathering Jim Palmer, then director of the Orange County Rescue Mission, a place Howard had supported since the late ‘70s, told me they had purchased property on a decommissioned naval air station about two miles from our office in Orange County, Calif. Not only that, they were building a chapel, the permission for which ultimately had to be signed by President George W. Bush because it would place a religious structure on formerly federal ground.

I looked at Jim and asked: “Would you want stained glass windows?”

His response was immediate: “Sure. What do you have in mind?”

Well, what I had in mind was Vejleå and Peter Brandes.

I called Birgitte. Could she find Peter? Would he consider coming to California to do this project?

Birgitte’s response: “I can find him.” Little did I know she had to make a few phone calls before she got to Peter to explain that an American lady wanted to talk to him. Peter told her he knew all about American ladies and would talk to us. In the end, he said he would come — but only if he could bring his wife, artist Maja Lisa Engelhardt.

They eventually came, we met and hit it off from the start. And, in 2008 the chapel at the Orange County Rescue Mission not only had stained glass windows depicting each of the twelve apostles with images of their suffering but also an 18-foot-high ceramic jar with the same motifs of the apostles in clay set in a pool of water — reflecting both the story of the woman who met Jesus at the well and Jesus’ own promise of living water.

That was the beginning of a friendship not only with Peter but with Maja Lisa. Over the next 20 years, we would work with Peter and Maja to create a large window of Christ at the Last Supper and at Emmaus for the chapel at our home and smaller windows of Abraham’s feast for the three angels and the turning of water into wine at the wedding at Cana inside our house. In addition, four, 350-square-foot stained glass windows and a golden cross for Christ Chapel at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Mich.; a complete renovation of Calvary Chapel at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif. (with stained glass by Peter and a golden resurrection wall by Maja); and windows and bronzes for the new library at St. Michael’s Norbertine Monastery in Silverado Canyon in Orange County.

In between, we visited them in Denmark and Paris where they had a home, worked with them on tours for Biola University in Denmark and Italy and an installation for a conference in Florence at the Museo Marino Marini. We met them in Pietra Santa, Italy, and saw where they did bronze casting and mosaic work. We were in Roskilde when new bronze doors and a chapel of St. Andrew by Peter were dedicated at the ancient cathedral where the kings and queens of Denmark are buried.

We traveled to Viborg, another historic church, for the dedication of new bronze doors done by Maja. Best of all, we flew north of the Arctic Circle to Alta, Norway, in February, for the dedication of the new Cathedral of the Northern Lights, where Peter had done the art for the interior including a giant bronze statue of Christ. And, they came to California. Peter designed the silver communion service for our Presbyterian Church. He and Maja and Birgitte Prip all came for the dedication.

Meanwhile, both were working in churches across Denmark. In more than 75 historic and recent churches, Peter and Maja had refreshed these ancient spaces with changes in color, new paintings and bronzes, stained glass, carpets for altar spaces, tapestries, and gilding, all done with respect for the original design and fittings. On one tour, Maja and Birgitte led a group of California women to see a dozen or so of those churches. We didn’t sleep much but we saw beauty and met the Danes who cherished their heritage.

Peter and Maja both had paintings in the offices of Parliament and work in Danish and German museums, some in France. Peter had even done a giant vase at Yad Vashem in Israel, never forgetting his Jewish heritage.

I write this and memories wash over me. In December of 2023 we went to Denmark to see what turned out to be Peter’s last major commission – the Resurrection Chapel at Aarhus Cathedral, a church whose history stretches back more than 800 years.

In that chapel, Peter suspended a larger-than-life-sized bronze of Lazarus — the man Jesus raised from the dead — over the center facing the baptismal font he also designed. Lazarus is holding his soul, an image taken from ancient images of Christ holding the soul of the Virgin Mary at her death. The gilded altar he embossed with images of living water and the life-giving story of Jesus, all pointing to the baptismal font with a blue-washed stained glass window above.

The other four windows in the apse glowed in yellow, orange, mauve. Peter had drawn faces from the images carved in the cathedral’s 15th century Bernt Notke altarpiece in the chancel on those windows. Two-sided, the windows facing the street outside images outlined in black against a white background, glowing from outside at night. We listened as Peter explained everything, never imagining this was his last major work.

Over the next year Peter’s health deteriorated but he kept working — designing and making prints for three art books — one of poetry, one of the ancient hymns of Romanus, another of the story of Isaac and Ishmael. And, he made many drawings. Finally, on Jan. 4 he died, with Maja Lisa by his side.

His legacy is a body of work — both sacred and secular — unique in the 20th and early 21st centuries. A gift to the world.

Roberta Ahmanson is a philanthropist, art collector and writer who started her career as a religion reporter at the San Bernadino Sun and Orange County Register. She is the co-author of “Islam at the Crossroads” and “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion.” She is also the chairperson of The Media Project’s Board of Directors.