Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Six people went to the funeral of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He had abandoned Scotland 14 years before, fed up of the struggle to realise his architectural visions. After his death, Mackintosh’s paintings and furniture were deemed almost worthless by valuers. Within five years, all that would change, with Mackintosh’s first retrospective exhibition at the McLellan Galleries.

Seventy years later, Mackintosh is ubiquitous – the multi-million pound “Mockintosh” industry pours out jewellery and trinkets, and we all recognise a Mackintosh piece when we see it. Or we think we do. Mackintosh in fact designed only two bits of jewellery, and our collective memory of this pioneering architect is all mixed up with a merchandising dream.

Mackintosh was first and foremost an architect. He ignored his policeman father’s wishes and at the age of 16 entered into an apprenticeship with a Glasgow firm of architects. Enrolling later at Glasgow School of Art to continue his studies, he won first prize in the student show for his watercolour studies of Italian architecture. “But hang it, Newbery,” one of the judges said to the School’s director, on finding out that Mackintosh was on the architecture course, “this man ought to be an artist.”

Mackintosh was an artist. His buildings were never empty shells or pure façades. They were holistic schemes where every detail – from chimney pots to knives and forks – contributed to a greater whole. “Architecture is the synthesis of the fine arts,” he said, “the commune of all the crafts.”

Room settings became works of art in Mackintosh’s hands, a notion which was radical at the turn of the century, before it fell foul of the likes of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. In his famous “white rooms”, expanses of white painted wood and drapery are dotted with tiny gems of coloured glass and winding, languid rose buds. Responsible for over 400 furniture designs, Mackintosh was particularly fond of the chair. His famous high-backed chairs, whether ladder-back or lattice-back, are instantly recognisable.

As part of a group called The Four, Mackintosh set up a room in the Eighth Secessionist Exhibition in Vienna in 1900. The Scottish Room was celebrated by the avant-garde in Vienna, and the ripples were to spread far. The following year more artists would create room settings, and elements of Mackintosh’s design were to enter into the vocabulary of Art Nouveau. Even Gustav Klimt – famous for The Kiss – was to be influenced by what he saw in that room.

While Mackintosh was fêted by artists in Vienna and by architects in Germany, he took much of his inspiration from Scotland. Baronial architecture, with its castle towers and thick, harled walls, stood at the centre of Mackintosh’s pioneering modernism.

“Seemliness” was a favourite word of his, meaning that architecture should always answer to its purpose. Concrete and steel were not always the answer, and in this sense he rejected the technological obsessions of the modern movement. All the same, Mackintosh’s buildings were ahead of their time, adjoining blank masses of harled wall in configurations which anticipated bauhaus design. These buildings, like Hill House in Helensburgh, were a unique fusion of Scotland’s tradition with modern ideas, staunchly pursuing a vision uncompromised by fashion, and a function uncompromised by style.

Glasgow School of Art, which took 10 years to build, was breathtaking. Architectural theorist Robert Venturi called its street façade one of the greatest achievements of all time, comparable in scale and majesty to the work of Michelangelo. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner counted the building among the most pioneering in Britain, and said of Mackintosh that “building in his hands becomes an abstract art, both musical and mathematical”. Architects have voted Mackintosh the most important British architect of the last 150 years, and Glasgow School of Art the most important building.

Mackintosh was a great Scot. He looked back to a time before Scottish architecture was drowned in classicising trends and he understood it to the core. With that experience he made new buildings enriched with principles of oriental design and continental symbolism. Their apparent simplicity can be astounding, while walking around them reveals a complexity which is hard to unravel. Inside, light plays off dark, old vies with new, and eroticism flirts with innocence.

Mackintosh created a uniquely Scottish strand of the Arts and Crafts movement and of Art Nouveau. After he was gone there was Art Deco, Bauhaus, Modernism, Minimalism and Postmodernism. In every one, in large part or small, lies his legacy.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.09.04