Timely tribute to the guru of austere art
Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Making the Glasgow Style
British culture is ridiculously London-centric. The number of modern art movements that have flourished outside the capital barely fills the fingers of one hand: the St Ives artists, of course; the Bloomsbury Group at Charleston; and, scraping the barrel a bit, Eric Gill’s arts and crafts experiments at Ditchling. Towering above all of these is the mighty Glasgow School, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s merging of architecture, art and design in a home-grown brand of art nouveau whose influence was felt all over Europe. Mackintosh’s masterpiece, Glasgow School of Art, was all but destroyed in a fire last year, so this major exhibition featuring more than 250 objects is very timely.
It begins with a single piece of furniture that feels very much the young man’s mission statement: a preposterously tall-backed chair – nearly 5ft high – with an air of “this is art – take it or leave it!”
The show gives a convincing sense of why Glasgow was a good place in which to create a new austere, and distinctively Nordic brand of art nouveau. Then the second city of the British Empire, the city had the economic clout to import ideas from as far afield as Japan, and export new designs around the world, without even touching on London.
Mackintosh, a clerk’s son, rose prodigiously through the architectural firm Honeyman and Kepple. While designing landmarks such as the Glasgow Herald Building – drawings and plans for which are shown here – he developed a more experimental approach, working with two art students named Macdonald: Margaret, whom he eventually married, and her sister Frances, who married his best friend and fellow architect, Herbert Macnair. The Four, as they styled themselves, collaborated on designs for tea rooms – then a prominent feature of middle-class Glasgow life – which gave them scope to create complete environments: everything from wall friezes and stained glass to crockery and cutlery.
Mackintosh’s furniture for the Argyle Tea Room (1898) has a looping, almost opiated art nouveau curve, seen best in the lopsided ovoid headrest of an elegant chair. But it’s trumped by Macdonald’s 4.5m-long and positively psychedelic May Queen frieze, 1900, for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tea Room. Its hallucinatory arabesques are picked out in string, with jewels formed from clusters of painted pebbles – details that wouldn’t have been visible in its original position high on the café wall.
Photographs show these objects as they appeared in an exhibition in 1900 at the Vienna Secession, though the exhibition misses the opportunity to really put Mackintosh in his European context and prove how far abreast he was of rivals such as Gustav Klimt and Antoni Gaudi. There’s a lot of good support material, though: card stencils, beautiful architectural drawings and twee embroidery.
The bigger stuff – furniture, doors, glass – is rather flatly presented; you don’t feel immersed in Glasgow style in the way Mackintosh intended. The nearest we get to that is a wonderful walk-through section of the Chinese Room from the Ingram Street Tearoom, a pagoda-like construction of criss-cross beams in a beautiful, but incongruous blue (you’d expect it be red). Here you’re in touch with the quintessential modernist idea that design should alter not only your tastes, but your very consciousness.
Mackintosh didn’t get any major commissions in the city after his great School of Art, which is only represented here – frustratingly – by plans and a few photographs. He went on producing vibrant textile designs after his move to England in 1914, but the somewhat pedestrian presentation struggles to make this material feel exciting.
This is a worthwhile attempt to evoke a vital moment in European culture, one that’s still far too little acknowledged south of the border. Ultimately, though, you’re left itching to jump on a train to Glasgow to experience what’s left of Mackintosh’s world in situ.