Big Mac at 150: Glasgow Celebrates in Style

Even before the devastating second fire in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art this summer, the city was making a big deal of its favourite son and perhaps its biggest tourist draw.

The excellent show on Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style at Kelvingrove Art Gallery was attracting lots of visitors from home and abroad -- the art-school blaze made international headlines -- when we saw it last week. And there's still a few weeks left to catch this exhibition, which provides an extremely detailed and fascinating overview, with about 250 artefacts, of the influences on the man and his circle, how he came to prominence, and the later years of decline.

The reason for the show is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mackintosh's birth. He grew up in a Glasgow that was undergoing massive expansion economically and that was increasingly open to the world. As Mackintosh trained as a draughtsman and later studied at the School of Art, Japanese, Persian and Indian objects were going on show in the city, and we get to see some excellent examples of those ceramics and fabrics that must have seemed so novel. There was already some rather exotic architecture in Glasgow, in the shape of churches in a Greek-Egyptian style by Alexander Thomson.

At the School of Art, Mackintosh formed a group called The Four, with his future wife Margaret Macdonald, her younger sister Frances and Frances' future husband, James Herbert McNair. It was The Four who began to develop an independent style that showed the influence of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley and of Japanese art. They started to design posters, and to exhibit. Hybrid plant and animal forms were a feature.

Mackintosh, meanwhile, was prospering both as an architect with the firm of Honeyman and Keppie, gaining the commission to design a new building for the art school in 1896, and as a furniture and interior designer, most famously for Miss Cranston's tea rooms dotted around central Glasgow. By 1900 he was sole designer for her Ingram St venture, producing bold, minimalist furniture, with high-backed chairs: cutting-edge dining. There are light fittings and wall decorations by Mackintosh to be seen in this show too; everything was intended to form a harmonious whole.

Margaret's gesso frieze of The May Queen, intended to be viewed up high in the ladies' luncheon room in Ingram St, is the biggest work in the exhibition. In contrast to her husband's largely straight lines, it's all swirls, and seen from close up, it looks a very tactile object, with twine, glass beads and mother of pearl adding lightness and interest to the coarse hessian and impasto gesso surface.

By this stage the new Glasgow Style -- Britain's only Art Nouveau movement -- was drawing attention abroad, particularly in Central Europe. Mackintosh had been commissioned to design a dining room in Munich in 1898, and The Four took part in the 1900 Vienna Secession show with a display of furniture, decorative designs and artwork.

Back in Scotland, Mackintosh also had commissions to design private residences, including Hill House in Helensburgh for the publisher Walter Blackie. And as at the tea rooms, it wasn't just the house that Mackintosh designed, it was the decor, and the furnishings. Here's a chair from the house, and you can see the little squares in the back that were to become the Mackintosh trademark.

Obviously, the best way to appreciate Mackintosh's architecture is to visit the buildings themselves, but the curators have provided videos that take you on a tour around and inside the sites, including a 1996 film of the School of Art. Across the exhibition space, there's another room showing videos of buildings by Mackintosh's contemporaries Salmon and Gillespie, including the rather wonderful Hatrack in the city centre.

Mackintosh's work in Glasgow, though, began to dry up, and his design for Scotland Street School in 1906 was his last public commission.

The Glasgow Style was going out of fashion, and Mackintosh eventually headed south. As World War I broke out, he was on the Suffolk coast, but he drew the attention of locals who suspected him of being a spy. Banished from East Anglia, he moved to London, and astonishingly, in the middle of the war, had one last trick up his sleeve, the remodelling of a house at 78 Derngate in Northampton for the model engineer WJ Bassett-Lowke. The astoundingly colourful, dazzling patterns he adopted preempt Art Deco.

But that was the final hurrah. After the war, the Mackintoshs moved to the south of France, where he devoted himself to delicate watercolour painting of flowers and the landscape. 

In 1927, Mackintosh was diagnosed with tongue cancer and he died the following year, aged just 60 and all but forgotten. How times have changed. 

Practicalities

Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style is on at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on Argyle St in Glasgow until August 14. It's open daily from 1000 to 1700 and tickets, costing a very reasonable £7, are available online here. You can walk out to Kelvingrove from the centre of Glasgow in about half an hour, or there are buses out from close to both Queen St and Central stations. Of course, if you just fancy a Big Mac T-shirt, you can buy one online here.

Images

Charles Rennie Mackintosh. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.
Frances Macdonald, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, James Herbert McNair, Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The May Queen. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Chair for Hill House. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland St School North elevation. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Grey Iris. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Collections. All rights reserved.