Home Is Where Your Art Is Rennie and Rose
'T hose who want to see fine art should bypass London and go straight to Glasgow," wrote the German critic Hermann Muthesius in 1902. "Glasgow's take on fine art is unique," he added. "In architecture, information technology is a new, young city."
What most defenseless his eye was the piece of work of a young couple, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, who were quietly making wildly original furniture, buildings and interiors. These struck him every bit utterly "divergent from everything that is familiar". Fusing the sinuous forms of art nouveau with rugged Scots baronial motifs and exotic Japanese touches, their designs were a startling sight – too much for many British critics to stomach.
Generations later, as Glasgow lays on a dizzying roster of events for the 150th anniversary of Mackintosh's birth on 7 June, it tin can exist difficult to encounter the work every bit radical. The world is now awash with Mackintosh mugs, tea-towels, brooches, earrings, cushions and mirrors – a plethora of chintzy merchandise adorned with the trademark floral tendrils and abstract grids. What was once provocative is now the stuff of the gift shop.
"People ship me all kinds of horrible 'Mockintosh' trinkets because they know I'g a fan," says Robyne Calvert, Mackintosh research fellow at Glasgow School of Art. "Sometimes they're described as 'Renée Mackintosh', to add together an extra exotic ring." Calvert, who is from Florida, caught her first glimpse of a Mackintosh building during a university lecture – and was so spellbound, she ultimately headed for the source in Glasgow.
When non writing academic papers, she collects instances of Mackintosh designs appearing in popular culture. "There's something virtually the work that speaks of sci-fi or steampunk, suggesting a kind of postapocalyptic future," she says, noting that Mackintosh chairs have appeared in a number of movies and Television set shows, including Blade Runner, Doctor Who and Inception.
Calvert was recently surprised to observe that, in the video for Limited Yourself, Madonna thrusts her groin into a loftier-dorsum Mackintosh chair, before crawling beneath a table lined with yet more chairs to lap up a saucer of milk. What might Madonna practice if she were allow loose in the plush interiors of the newly restored Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, which reopens this month following a £four.5m renovation? The mind boggles.
The culmination of Mackintosh'south piece of work for entrepreneur Kate Cranston, the tea room is the very definition of a Gesamtkunstwerk – a full work of art for which he designed everything from the facade to the cutlery to the waitresses' uniforms, while Margaret adorned the walls with her sinuous gesso relief panels. Built in 1903, this was a fantasy for the ritual of afternoon tea, with a ladies' room at the front end in white, silver and rose, a darker panelled room at the back lined with oak and gray canvas, and a top-lit gallery held upwards past great timber posts, like tree trunks rising to a trellis awning.
Green glass droplets dangled from the stair balustrade, gleaming similar the rich fruit of an exotic tree, leading up to the salon de luxe, where punters could pay extra to sit in a sumptuous barrel-vaulted lounge of silk-upholstered walls, purple settees and silver-painted tables with matching loftier-backed chairs. Compared with the nighttime Victorian pubs and dining rooms of the fourth dimension, it was a futuristic wonder.
Afterward years equally a department store and jewellery shop, all of this has been recreated, much from scratch, past conservation specialists Simpson and Dark-brown, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and private donations. It has been a meticulous process, piecing clues together from contemporary photographs, given that few original drawings survive.
The neighbouring building has been transformed into a museum and instruction centre, where some of the original fittings volition be displayed, including the stained-glass doors of the salon de luxe. Now worth £one.5m each, they're too precious to put back in place.
A similarly forensic re-creation is under way at the school of fine art, where the famous Mackintosh library is existence lovingly rebuilt, later on existence totally destroyed by a burn down in 2014. A detailed survey was undertaken in the 1990s, so principal joiners Laurence McIntosh have most of the data they need to recreate the hallowed infinite. Those who knew it as a dark cave of books might be shocked past the brand new tulipwood that lines the room, a much lighter shade than the nearly black beams that used to criss-cantankerous this atmospheric haven of learning.
The library has been matched to the hue of photographs dating dorsum to 1909, while other rooms in the school, which is not yet open to the public, are returning to curious shades of minty green and rusty ruddy, post-obit months of specialist paint analysis. It won't be the whitewashed place that people retrieve, but it is what Mackintosh intended. His penchant for garish colour schemes is revealed in a magnificent exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which takes visitors on an encyclopedic romp through the work of both Mackintoshes, every bit well every bit a number of contemporaries and influences of the time.
Seeing their drawings of etiolated figures – one-half institute, half human, all sinews and tendrils – makes yous realise why they were nicknamed the "spook schoolhouse". Encountering a phallic stencil from some other tea room, you understand why the architect Edwin Lutyens exclaimed later on his visit: "The event is gorgeous! And a wee bit vulgar! … Information technology is all quite adept, all only a little outre."
Toshie was never i for half measures. His designs for a basement dug-out at the Willow Tea Rooms (sadly non office of the restoration) depict a jazzy optical fine art scheme with bright yellowish piece of furniture, majestic cushions and mesmerising grids covering the walls. "He was producing art deco designs fashion earlier art deco came into being," says curator Alison Dark-brown. "He used Yves Klein blue before Yves Klein was born."
He was a 1-off and consciously then. "Shake off all the props, the props tradition and authority offer you," he wrote, "and go alone – crawl, stumble, stagger – just go alone." After existence immersed in all the drawings and ephemera at the Kelvingrove, the buildings of Glasgow seem to sing afresh.
All of a sudden you lot detect how the bulbous water tank at the summit of the Herald offices (now the Lighthouse center for architecture and blueprint) is modelled on a thistle; how the sides of the Daily Record edifice (now dwelling to the Stereo cafe) use glazed white tiles to bounciness low-cal into the narrow alleyway; how the Mackintoshes used their ain house – today encased in a brutalist tomb at the Hunterian gallery – equally a showroom for their latest daring experiments in fittings and furniture.
The school of art is offer walking tours of key works. No 1 should miss the Mackintosh Church at Queen'south Cantankerous, one of his about intact original buildings. Designed in 1897, information technology shows the roots of later designs: the side gallery, modelled on a Japanese inn, would influence the art school's glorious library 10 years on. The church is currently home to an installation, a gigantic inflatable moon that dangles surreally beneath Mackintosh'due south dandy hull-like roof.
Scotland Street School, now a museum marooned on a busy road simply south of the Clyde, should non be missed, either, if only to see how the builder ever got his way, no matter the wishes of the client or the limits of the budget. Mackintosh was determined to build a glazed turreted castle of a schoolhouse and, despite the protests of the school board at the rising costs, that'south exactly what he created.
His linguistic communication of abstruse botanical motifs is in full menses, with thistle forms on the debate and seed pods at the entrance becoming shoots and blossoming trees equally they rise up through the building – watered with knowledge equally they climb. These were plush details that the board found "absolutely objectionable". Simply Mackintosh, through the deceptive circulation of culling drawings, got his style. As the uncompromising maestro said: "The artist's motto should be, 'I take my stand on what I myself consider my personal platonic.'"
This may partly explain why his architectural career only lasted 12 years, before he moved s and the commissions dried up. But, if yous can forget the tea towels, mugs and chintz, what dazzling years they were.
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See the programme for the Mackintosh 150 festival in Glasgow.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jun/07/charles-rennie-mackintosh-architect-of-choice-blade-runner-doctor-who-madonna-glasgow