CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH 1868 – 1928
Guido Laganà [Curator/Editor]
Guido Laganà [Curator/Editor]: CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH 1868 – 1928. Milan-Paris: Electa Moniteur, 1990. First French-language edition. Originally published by Gruppo Editoriale Electa S.p.A., Milan, 1988. Square quarto. Black cloth titled in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Publishers decorated slipcase. Printed endpapers. 195 pp. 374 color and black and white illustrations. Pristine: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket housed in the Publishers slipcase. Rare.
10.25 x 11.25 hardcover book with 195 pages with 195 pages with 374 color and black and white illustrations. With essays by Andrew MacMillan, Jocelyn Grigg, Bruno del Priore, Pamela Robertson, and Anna Maria Porciatti. Translation by Rita Petrelli.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Scotland, 1868 – 1928) was born in Glasgow in 1868 and died in London on 10th December 1928. His personality is one of those that characterize the period immediately preceding the Modern Movement. His name is mainly connected with the design for the Glasgow School of Art: he was the animator and most authoritative exponent of the group known as the “Glasgow School” and he distinguished himself principally because he recovered the most authentic values of the Scottish idiom and of neo-Gothic taste. The group, also named “the School of Ghosts”, became known throughout Europe – in Liege in 1895, London in 1896, Vienna in 1900, Turin in 1902, Moscow in 1903, Budapest etc. Besides the School of Art, the most interesting works are undoubtedly: the “Windyhill” house at Kilmacolm (1900), the “Hill House” at Helensburgh (1902-3), the arrangement of the Derngate house, Northampton (1916-20), and the decorative work in Miss Cranston’s Tea-Rooms in Glasgow. Among the furnishings of his decorative interiors, it is above all the chair – an object of special attention in the “Cassina I Maestri” collection – which represents the focal point for coordinated spatial action. Within it, the controlling force of the composition is always resolved, sometimes articulated in fluent and delicate forms, at other times in severely geometric forms.
For Mackintosh, who saw architecture as the art that encompassed all the other visual arts, the design of furniture and interiors formed a vital part of his oeuvre. The exhibition rooms, interiors and even single pieces of furniture, which were so eagerly sought after by his European clients and colleagues, were designed with the same care as his major architectural commissions. In a working life of only twenty-five years, Mackintosh designed over 300 pieces of furniture, a number that seems all the more impressive given that the majority were produced in the periods 1897-1905 and 1916-1918.
A pioneer of modernism the architect, artist and designer created his own aesthetic by blending numerous influences from art nouveau to Asian painting. During his lifetime Mackintosh had only a small number of buildings realised, with the majority of his major projects including the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House and Willow Tea Rooms all being built before he turned forty. In later life he stopped practicing architecture altogether due to a lack of commissions, and concentrated on painting. Mackintosh died of cancer aged 60 in 1928.
While Mackintosh is best know for his architectural works, including the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House and House for an Art Lover, he also designed much of their decor and furnishings.
One of the most important figures in Mackintosh's career was Catherine Cranston – a patron who allowed him to showcase his talent as a designer and was appreciative of his all-encompassing approach. Cranston was a Glasgow-based businesswoman with a passion for the arts, who came up with the idea of opening a series of tea rooms in the city with artistic interiors.
Having already established a successful tea room on Argyle Street, she invited Mackintosh to work alongside architect and designer George Walton on the interiors of a new premises in Buchanan Street in 1896.The following year, Mackintosh and Walton collaborated again on the design of Cranston's Argyle Street Tea Rooms, with Mackintosh focusing on the furnishings. It was the first major private commission of his career and an opportunity to implement some of his ideas regarding the use of furniture to create a feeling of enclosure and spatial separation within a room.
One of the pieces Mackintosh designed for the project was a high-backed chair for the Luncheon Room that aimed to held provide a more intimate dining experience for diners. The Argyle Chair features long, tapering uprights that intersected with an enlarged oval headrest. The stylised shape of a swallow in flight was carved out of the headrest to lend it an artistic and emblematic quality. The chair's combination of simple and sculptural elements with an emphasis on natural forms echoed the ideas propounded by the Arts and Crafts movement, of which Mackintosh was an admirer. Its extraordinary back legs are a complex piece of woodworking, with a form that starts off square at the base before curving and gradually tapering to become circular at the top.
The unusual height of the chairs meant that they formed a screen around the tables, creating the feeling of a room within a room. It was a technique that Mackintosh would explore and refine further in several of his later furniture designs. In 1900, the Argyle Chair was exhibited at the Eighth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession in Austria, where Mackintosh's work was held in high regard and strongly influenced the work of the artists, architects and designers of the Wiener Werkstatte community.
Mackintosh would go on to design the furniture and interiors for several more of Cranston's premises, including the iconic Willow Tea Rooms. The pair remained good friends and he would eventually create the interiors for her Hill House in 1904.