Signpost 4: Glasgow - Two Big Macs

Our first three signposts have shown us that Art Nouveau designers and architects embraced the urban and modernizing milieu of the cities within which they worked. Glasgow in the late 19th century was no different. Glasgow’s economy relied on heavy industry like shipbuilding, locomotives, and textile production. Ancillary industries fitted the interiors of ships and train cars, thus designers and artists worked in related workshops. Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh said that the job of the designer was to clothe “in grace and beauty the new forms and conditions that modern developments of life—social, commercial and religious—insist upon.” Glaswegians embraced the engineering marvels of their city, thinking the Forth Bridge beautiful, while William Morris, that lover of historicism, called it “the supreme specimen of ugliness.” By the end of century, the mercantile elites used their wealth to patronize the arts and commissioned decorative arts and interior design that signaled wealth and sophistication to Glasgow society.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh benefited from this new and progressive patronage. Today he is the star of the Glasgow style, the focus of books and exhibitions. However, in reality, Glasgow’s “new art” developed from the vision of four individuals. In the early 1890s, Mackintosh was an architectural apprentice and art student. Along with his friend and colleague, Herbert MacNair, he began socializing with a group of female students at the Glasgow School of Art—the school welcomed a large number of women—who called themselves “The Immortals”. Two sisters in the group, Frances and Margaret Macdonald, were gaining a controversial reputation for their strange, elongated, symbolic representations of women. Together, the four became artistically and romantically involved. Frances married Herbert, Margaret married Charles, and they became known as The Four. Separately and collaboratively, they created art and design that defined Glasgow’s style at the turn of the 20th century. The work of Margaret and Charles remains the most well-known and influential.

Embroidered panels

Margaret Macdonald

1902

The Glasgow style is a mixture of international and regional influences. Alexander Reid, a prominent art dealer, displayed important Art Nouveau artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Aubrey Beardsley alongside the works of Frances and Margaret Macdonald and other local artists. As The Four developed their own visual language, it was initially two-dimensional. They flattened natural and figurative forms, but did it within a linear, geometric, elongated framework, lacking the fluidity and attenuation of the English, French, and Belgian designers. They also drew inspiration from their surroundings using the muted colors of Scottish countryside like heathery purples, dusty pinks, greys, and greens. Mackintosh, in particular, would draw on Scottish architecture for his buildings.

Mural design for Buchanan Street Tea Room

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

1896

As Mackintosh began executing solo commissions, his singular style emerged. He kept the classical foundations of his training but infused them with Scottish vernacular and Japanese influences. His “new” architecture was more geometric and linear than the “new” architects on the Continent. One of his first commissions was a new building for the Glasgow School of Art with its austere, balanced exterior and its magnificent library, tragically destroyed by fire, twice.

Glasgow School of Art

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

1896-1909

Photo credit: Glasgow School of Art By© John a s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=227002

Following a key tenet of the Art Nouveau movement, Mackintosh and Macdonald produced interiors as total works of art. Kate Cranston hired the couple to design the interiors of her tearooms across the city. Mackintosh designed the furniture and fixtures while Macdonald created wall murals, hangings, and other decorative accents using her stylized female figures and flora. They also designed innovative domestic interiors of simplicity and geometry filled with Mackintosh’s custom furniture. Like his wife’s elongated figures, Mackintosh’s designed chairs with unusual height and striking backsplat patterns. He used screens and tall dadoes (wall panels) that gave a sense of verticality to interior spaces. Radically, for the time, they created a number of all-white interiors.

Chair for Argyl Street Tea Room

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

1897 - 1900

Photo credit: ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The couple gained an international reputation exhibiting at the Vienna Secession exhibition in 1900 and the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902. The Mackintoshs’ work was particularly influential among the artists of the Secession (see Signpost #5) who also eschewed the fluidity of French and Belgian design for a rational and geometric aesthetic.  While admired in Europe, in the U.K. Mackintosh was largely ignored south of Hadrian’s wall, completing only one residential commission in Northampton in 1916. By the time World War I started, the already-faded Art Nouveau movement ended. Like many of its architects and artists, Mackintosh and Macdonald found it difficult to find commissions and lived a meager, peripatetic life until their deaths in 1928 and 1933 respectively.

Parlor, 6 Florentine Terrace; Charles Rennie Mackintosh & Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh; 1906 - 1914

Reconstructed at The Hunterian Museum ©The University of Glasgow