Thousands of people must have passed this way, without the remotest idea of what they were missing.

St Mark’s Church stands next to Swanswell Park in the Coventry suburb of Hillfields. The building looks considerably older than it is, the result of retro Gothic architecture and the soft Coventry sandstone from which it was constructed, which turns anything medieval in just a few years.

In fact, the church was built only in 1868 to serve an expanding and relatively poor corner of the city. For a century they worshipped in it, and then they didn’t, and by 1972 the church had become surplus to requirements (or should that be “surplice to requirements”?). In the following year it was handed over to the NHS.

For more than 30 years, then, St Mark’s became part of a hospital. Until the redevelopment of the Walsgrave Hospital was completed in 2006, it doubled as an annex to the out-patients department. Only the east end of the church was left untouched and partitioned off, and most of the time kept firmly locked. They unlock it just once a year, during the Heritage Open Days. And then the folk of Coventry get to see what was just a wooden partition away, when they popped in with a dislocated ankle or a chesty cough.

Occupying the whole of the east wall of the church is a huge mural, reaching high into the roof. The painting is in muted colours – blue and yellow predominating – on a ground of light pink. The modelling reminds me a little of Graham Sutherland, but that might just be because I’m in Coventry.

The subject matter of the painting is the Ascension, though it has something of a Last Judgement about it too. Christ rises in majesty at the centre, surrounding partly by angels, but also by the bedraggled and emaciated figures of the poor and dispossessed. One male figure lifts his chained hands upwards in the direction of the risen God. It’s powerful and unsettling stuff.

Almost as striking, on the floor below the painting, are little spots of blue paint, fresh from the brush of the artist, when he painted the mural exactly 50 years ago.

The man who held that brush was Hans Feibusch.

The story of Hans Feibusch gives immediate context to those figures who haunt his Coventry mural. He was born in Frankfurt-on-Maine in 1898, and served on the Russian front in the First World War, before returning to his homeland to begin his training as an artist, both in Berlin and in Italy.

By the time he was in his early thirties Feibusch was one of the most respected artists in Germany, receiving the Grand State Prize for painting in 1930. And in 1937 Feibusch featured in one of the most significant art exhibitions ever staged in 20th-century Europe, alongside such luminaries as Chagall, Picasso, Van Gogh and Magritte.

St Mark’s Church in Hillfields, Coventry
St Mark’s Church in Hillfields, Coventry

This is not the accolade it sounds. The 1937 show was entitled Entartete Kunst – the Degenerate Art Exhibition – and constituted the spearhead of Joseph Goebbels’ mission to rid the Third Reich of Jewish, Bolshevik and Modernist tendencies in art.

To be an artist in Hitler’s Germany was hardly comfortable, but to be a Jewish artist was to put one’s very life at risk. As early as 1933 Hans Feibusch had seen the writing on the wall, and fled to England to join his fiancée, and he remained in here for the rest of his long life. Germany’s loss was England’s gain.

By the late 1930s Feibusch had converted to Christianity. With support and patronage from George Bell, the then Bishop of Chichester, the artist began find employment, producing a whole host of murals for churches and cathedrals, as well as secular commissions. The latter included a large mural in Dudley Town Hall (of Roger de Somery out hunting), painted in 1948 and recently restored. The Dudley painting is the only other work by Feibusch in the West Midlands.

It was entirely fitting, then, that the man, whose life had been torn apart by war, should come to the city which, more than any other, epitomized its destructive power.

The church of St Mark had suffered less than some in Coventry, but a bomb had blown out the east window, leaving a gaping hole that was hastily bricked up, in anticipation of a replacement window that never arrived. It was on this wall that Feibusch was invited to work. The mural was completed in 1963.

The St Mark’s mural was to be a far cry from most church art. Feibusch rejected the kind of “golden stars, chubby Christmas angels, lilies, lambs and shepherds” that were the mainstay of much Christian art. “The men,” he added, “who come home from the war, and all the rest of us, have seen too much horror and evil”. The artwork he produced paid due and painful respect to this haunted generation.

When Hans Feibusch died in London in July 1898 – a month short of his 100th birthday – he was the last surviving artist from Entartete Kunst. He did, in the final years of his life, return to Judaism, and is buried in Golders Green cemetery.

And so, just as the new cathedral at Coventry was rising from the ashes of the Blitz, a mile or two away a Jewish artist from Germany was making his own mark on the city’s history.

* My thanks to John Payne of the Coventry Society for images.