Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was a Scottish artist,

architect, and interior/furniture/textile designer who had a professional
influence on the development of the Modern movement. He worked to
create totally integrated art/architecture.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on June 7,
1868. He gained entry to the Glasgow School of Art where he studied
principally architecture and design and was recognized as a remarkable talent
by the school's director, Fra Newbery. Mackintosh joined the architectural
practice of Honeyman and Keppie (1889) as a draftsman and won the
competition to design and build a new School of Art for his mentor, Newbery,
in 1896: this was his first major building commission and was a revolutionary
design quite unlike anything erected in Europe to that date. Austere, elegant,
defiantly "modern," it was shorn of almost all decoration and made historical
references to Scottish vernacular architecture and to Japanese arts, a culture in
which Mackintosh had an abiding interest. The building established
Mackintosh from the outset as a radical architect determined to find a new design language appropriate for the
coming 20th century. It has been said that modern architecture began when Mackintosh built the Glasgow School of
Art.
While generally associated with the art nouveau style, Mackintosh rejected such comparisons and did not
feel part of the 19th-century art nouveau European style represented by Guimard, Horta, van der Velde, or Gaudi,
and little of their sinuous "whiplash" curvilinear expression is to be seen in Mackintosh's work. He sought to unite
natural forms, especially those deriving from plants and flowers, with a new architectural and design vocabulary that
set him well apart from the mainstream of architects who looked to Greece, Rome, and Egypt for inspiration from
the antique. His marriage to a talented artist-designer, Margaret Macdonald (1864-1933), and the marriage of her
sister, Frances, to Mackintosh's close friend Herbert McNair led to the formation of a brilliantly creative group,
clearly led by Mackintosh, known variously as "The Four" or "The Spook School."
Considerable attention was focussed on the work of Mackintosh and the "Glasgow Style" artists and
designers who had come from the School of Art. In 1900 Mackintosh and his friends were invited to create a room
complete with furnishings at the Vienna Seccession exhibition. This created huge interest, and the Mackintoshes
were lionized when they went to Vienna. Their exhibition display had a direct influence on the development of the
Wiener Werkstatte formed shortly thereafter by Josef Hoffmann. Hoffmann and Mackintosh were close friends, and
Hoffmann visited Glasgow twice to see Mackintosh's work, as did the influential critic Hermann Muthesius and the
Werkstatte's patron, Fritz Wrndorfer. "The Four" exhibited widely in Europe, both together and individually, and
Mackintosh received commissions for furniture from patrons in Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe.
In Glasgow Mackintosh's greatest public exposure was through the creation of a number of restaurants, the
tea rooms of his most enduring patron, Kate Cranston. The tea rooms provided a wonderful opportunity for
Mackintosh to put into practice his belief that the architect was responsible for every aspect of the commissioned
work. At The Willow Tea Room (1903) he converted an existing interior into a remarkable dramatic and elegant
series of contrasting interiors with furniture, carpet, wall decor, light fittings, menu, flower vases, cutlery, and
waitresses' wear all designed by Mackintosh to create a harmonious whole, implementing the idea of totally
integrated art-architecture. It is said that Mackintosh used to go to the Room de Luxe at The Willow just before it
opened for morning coffee to arrange the flowers and ensure the perfection of his creation!
Surprisingly, despite Mackintosh's fame in Europe and the numerous articles in, for example, The
Studio magazine devoted to his work, he never became a dominant force in Glasgow architecture. He created the
private house Windyhill in 1901, a number of tea rooms, many works of decorative art and furniture, and other
architectural conversions but never had the opportunity to create a second masterpiece after the School of Art and in
the manner of Hoffmann's success with the Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905) which owes so much to Mackintosh's
influence. The dramatic designs for the huge International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1901 were rejected as too
radical, and his entries for other competitionsfor example, Liverpool Cathedralwere unsuccessful. His direct
influence on European architecture came not by examples but by suggestions, notably the distribution of a full-color
lithographic portfolio of "Designs for the House of an Art-Lover" (1901), which was never built.
The Hill House of 1902 is the best example of Mackintosh's domestic architectural style and interior (open
to the public: National Trust for Scotland) and has survived virtually intact. The Mackintoshes' own house, complete
with its furnishings, has been brilliantly recreated at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow (open to the
public), while his Glasgow School of Art has undergone extensive restoration of its interiors and collection (open to
the public).
Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1915 for reasons never exactly clear but associated with a notable lack of
commissions and the general building slump occasioned by the onset of World War I. He moved to England and
journeyed to France and created a sumptuous series of watercolors of the landscape and flowers. Opportunities for a
stylized series of flower forms to become widely-distributed printed textiles failed to materialize.
The famous flowing white-on-white interiors of the Glasgow period were replaced by geometric black-on-
black interiors which clearly anticipated Art Deco in his final architectural commissions: 78 Derngate, Northampton,
England, in 1915/1916, and the "Dug-Out" additions to the Willow Tea Room in Glasgow.
Mackintosh was a visionary designer and architect who had a professional influence on the development of
the Modern movement. Although prolific during the height of his most creative years, 1896-1916, much of his work
has been lost and the remainder is essentially confined to the city of Glasgow and surrounding region. Although
completely neglected and largely ignored in the middle decades of this century, he has now been the subject of
intense scrutiny and rediscovery. His furniture and textile designs are being produced with notable success, and in
1979 a writing desk he designed in 1901 for his own use reached the then world record price paid at auction for any
piece of 20th-century furniture, 89,200 pounds. Now much admired and copied, he is seen as a central figure in the
development of integrated art-architecture at the turn of the century and a seminal influence on many architects and
designers of the Post Modern movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Charles Rennie Mackintosh died in distressed
circumstances in London in 1928; his wife Margaret in 1933.