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Glasgow, even as it was Scotland’s principal center of shipbuilding and marine engineering, created some of the most lyrical modern architecture ever built. This is no paradox, for in each field the same impulse was at play—a forthright willingness to embrace the facts of modern life. Such is the theme of “Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style,” currently on view at the Walters Art Museum here. Jointly curated by Alison Brown of the Glasgow Museums/Glasgow Life and Andrew Eschelbacher of the American Federation of Arts, the exhibition of some 165 drawings and decorative art objects is extravagantly beautiful, although the obligatory dim lighting gives it a rather funereal character. As it turns out, this is entirely appropriate. (After closing at the Walters the show travels. See www.amfedarts.org for details.)
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
The Walters Art Museum, through Jan. 5, 2020
The dominant figure is, of course, Mackintosh, the architect and painter who is best known for his distinctive ladderback chair (although regrettably none are included here). His entire career revolved around the Glasgow School of Art. Mackintosh made the school and the school made Mackintosh. He enrolled at age 15 in 1883 and took classes for the next decade, working during the day as an architectural draftsman. The Glasgow School of Art was resolutely committed to the Arts and Crafts style, an anti-industrial movement that sought to revive traditional craftsmanship in cooperative, guild-like settings. Accordingly, its students were exposed to every field of design—furniture and ceramics, posters and stained glass, textiles and book design. For this it assembled a decorative art collection of exceptional historic and geographic breadth; Mackintosh, this exhibition shows, used it prolifically.
Easily the most gifted student of his generation, Mackintosh was chosen in 1897 to design the new Glasgow School of Art. It could have been built nowhere else. With its brilliantly lighted studios clasped by cliff-like end walls, it had the burliness of Scottish baronial architecture while its details were everywhere tempered with Mackintosh’s distinctive decorative sensibility. Through this manifested a decidedly Japanese current, something characteristic of Glasgow, which had strong connections to rapidly industrializing Japan and which in 1878 acquired more than a thousand objects “illustrative of Japanese arts manufactures.”
Because it burned down twice, once in 2014 and again in 2018, just as its reconstruction was nearly complete, there is nothing from the Glasgow School of Art displayed here, except for Mackintosh’s original cross-section in which he deftly drew an elaborate decorative scheme, with richly carved paneled walls and a lavish figural frieze.
“Designing the New” takes pains to show that Mackintosh was not the only luminary of the Glasgow School, and it gathers a great many attractive objects by other artists. An astonishing book cover by Talwin Morris, devoted to the late Queen Victoria, shows a pattern of roses and crowned hearts that at first glance seems purely decorative, until we notice that the hearts are bleeding and the roses weeping. And no object was too humble to be made a thing of beauty: Jessie M. King, the illustrator of children’s books, is represented by several designs, including a whimsical menu card for Miss Cranston’s Lunch and Tea Rooms, its lies as delicate as a spider’s web.
But the real stars are The Four, the happy band consisting of Mackintosh, his friend James Herbert MacNair, and the two sisters they married, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, all of them students of the school. So intimate was their collaboration, especially in the mid-1890s, that it is often impossible to identify separate hands, as in the dazzling poster designs. All are characterized by long and elegant tendrils that swing with abandon across a blank field, their expressiveness gaining from the surrounding, spatial silence, launching themselves as coiled whips and then turning themselves into the stalks of flowers.
The architecture itself receives only fitful treatment. There are no models, virtually no floor plans or photographs, and the few perspectives and technical drawings are scattered among the furniture and textiles; we do not really meet Mackintosh the architect. Yet in a sense he was not a traditional architect but rather an extraordinarily sensitive decorative artist who, when requested, could design a sublime building. The best of his interiors, like the handful of tearooms he designed for Miss Cranston, are not so much buildings as lovely inhabitable paintings. These are represented not only by period photographs (most of the tearooms have been altered) but by chairs, tables, a mirror, and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s “The May Queen, ” a frieze in gesso that measures some 5 by 15 feet and that is the most tantalizing object in the exhibition.
There is not an item of furniture or a lampshade designed by Mackintosh in this show that would survive industrial mass production. One realizes how much they depend on slight graceful modulations of contour and color—what an artist calls touch. Even the simplest of his designs, a modest brass lighting fixture intended for a billiard table, sparkles like an item of blue and gold jewelry. One can no more re-create a burned Mackintosh building than one can re-create a burned Stradivarius violin. All that one can make is a facsimile.
—Mr. Lewis teaches architectural history at Williams College and reviews architecture for the Journal.
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‘Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style’ Review: Scottish Modern - The Wall Street Journal
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