Development of Mackintosh’s Works in the Decade after 1900

The monolithic view of Mackintosh’s work reveals the development of his taste, especially in 1900, which is widely known in the Continent as the peak of his career.

Geometric patterns gradually appear as paramount alternative elements determining the effect of more multifaceted representations and new schemes, and are displayed in Mackintosh’s furniture, interior designs and building façades. In the first half of 1900, the flat at 120 Mains Street, where Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald lived, had a white bedroom in white, deep-colored dining room and white drawing room (fig. 102).

Mackintosh was inspired by George Walton’s preference for lightness to decorate subsequent tea rooms in a domestic style (fig. 103).²⁵³ Mackintosh’s attitudes to interior designs, equally important to the exterior of the buildings, ushered in a new age.

Consequently, a piece of furniture transformed from a useful item for daily life into an

251 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (as note 239), p. B.

252 “Mackintosh’s furniture is often criticized for being uncomfortable and unfunctional, and this particularly applied to his chairs,” in: Timothy Neat (as note 119), p. 156.

253 Wendy Kaplan (as note 9), p. 235. George Walton (1867-1933) dominated the tea room commissions at Buchanan Street and at Argyle Street, while Mackintosh only contributed the wall decoration and movable furniture.

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object with stylishness and individuality, not only as a part of the interior, but also a work of art. Furniture was consistently adorned with stylized plant motifs. For the Ladies’ Luncheon Room at Ingram Street commissioned by Miss Cranston in November 1900, Mackintosh integrated deep-colored furniture into airy-fairy white surroundings (fig. 99). The use of contrasting colors enhanced the polyphony of his abstract expressions in his productive years.

Simultaneously, the proposal to the Dean of Guild for the design of the Daily Record building was proceeding in 1900.²⁵⁴ Tree forms on the façade of the Daily Record building were more abstract, with squares rooted in plant motifs (fig. 74). Red and green bricks project from the white brick background. In Charles Rennie

Mackintosh, James Macaulay describes these sprout-like ornament with stylized tree

patterns on the façade of the Daily Record newspaper building as “three-dimensional pointillism.” ²⁵⁵ Designs for the House for an Art Lover competition of 1900-1901 were also underway.²⁵⁶ The detached Hill House was built in early 1902 in Helensburgh and actually completed in 1904. ²⁵⁷ Mackintosh engaged in the construction of Scotland Street Public School after the Willow Tea Rooms in 1903 (fig.

107).²⁵⁸ The audacious use of geometric squares and triangles paved the way for the formation of foliated embellishment in Scotland Street Public School. Mackintosh reiterates the promise that “Art is the flower. Life is the green leaf.”²⁵⁹ Revisions to the Glasgow School of Art in the second stage began in 1907 (fig. 87).

The chronology of Mackintosh’s projects is proof of his design progression.

Mackintosh never stopped in his design process. Most of his furniture was prolifically

259 Mackintosh “Seemliness, 1902,” in: Pamela Robertson (as note 1), p. 224 [G 15].

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produced for commissioned interior designs and exhibitions in the decade after 1900.

It is important to remember that his schemes were always overlapping with each other at any one time.²⁶⁰ In view of this, it would be quixotic to establish an accurate timeline that chronicled each piece of furniture in succession. Nevertheless, his use of curvilinear and linear lines with exaggerated features and cut-out forms was always present and spread to graphic designs, architectural ornaments, and furniture from the 1890s onward. A transition from the use of stepped, receding and intricate geometric patterns to an increasing use of squares and triangles is clear from the characteristics of his work of the 1900s.

Being impressed by the publication Studio, the interest of the Austrian artists in Scottish designers led them to invite Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald, James McNair and Frances Macdonald to the eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in the November and December of 1900, which aimed to display furniture and applied art.²⁶¹ They exhibited thirty-three items, including furniture, metalwork, glass, textiles, paintings and gesso panels in the catalog.²⁶² William Eadie mentioned that Mackintosh noticed the popularity of geometric forms applied in work at the exhibition in Vienna.²⁶³ The visit in 1900 was crucial in the context of Mackintosh’s stylistic transitional time looking forward to unity and simplicity, which later influenced his subsequent case of Scotland Street Public School in 1903.²⁶⁴ Identifiable stylized plant motifs appeared to

260 Robert Macleod (as note 233), p. 119.

261 Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann served as vice president of the eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in the November and December of 1900, in: Roger Billciffe, and Peter Vergo, “Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Austrian Art Revival,” in: Burlington Magazine 119, November 1977, p. 739.

262 “Vienna Secession Archives, Eighth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession Catalogue, 1900, pp. 34-35,” at Mackintosh Architecture

http://www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/images/?filename=a435_016&xml=doc (accessed March 10, 2017)

263 William Eadie, Movements of Modernity: The Case of Glasgow and Art Nouveau, London 1990, p.

24.

264 Roger Billciffe, and Peter Vergo, “Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Austrian Art Revival,” in:

Burlington Magazine 119, November 1977, p. 739. In 1900, when Mackintosh displayed his artwork in the Secession Exhibition, Otto Wagner’s Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1898-1899) and Majolikahaus (1899), as well as Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building (1897) had already been erected in Vienna. Plant-related motif decoration had been used on façades. Through mutual contact with

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be in geometrical patterns of squares, rectangles and triangles. His plant motifs evolved from naturalistic to contorted to geometric, but overlapped in the middle stage of transition between 1900 and 1903. Mackintosh continuously attempted to balance artistic quality and mass production. ²⁶⁵ The individuality and creativity of Mackintosh’s plant motifs within the “total work of art” plays a part in this tendency toward geometricalized “abstraction.” After the second phase of the Glasgow School of Art in 1907-1909, he used more intricate and stepped forms which moved more toward pure geometric and “cubist abstractions” in the design of 1916-1919 at 78 Derngate, Northampton (fig. 108).²⁶⁶ This progressive shift came as a surprise, turning his autonomous forms and outlines into repetitive patterns from 1907 to 1916. This was perhaps one of his responses to the changing artistic world, industrialization and even the outbreak of war in 1914. The loss of his work led to Mackintosh’s depressive years and finally ended his partnership in the firm in 1913.²⁶⁷ However, textile designs enriched his plant motifs based on geometric patterns from 1915 onwards (fig. 117).²⁶⁸ A hint of the extension of his textile designs to how he practiced as an interior designer appeared in mural decoration at 78 Derngate (fig. 108), the last aesthetically pleasing interior case that he completed.

In the above mentioned representations stemming from the plant motifs decorated on the two buildings, Mackintosh’s typical characteristics are expressed in

Mackintosh’s and other exhibiters’ work in the Vienna Secession Exhibition, Josef Hoffmann was inspired to found the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903 with the goal of elevating the standard of crafts through geometric stylization. Hoffmann’s curiosity about the geometric forms can be observed in his logotype design with a leaf and his Sanatorium Purkersdorf of 1903-1904. Otto Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank of 1904-1906 also deserves attention.

265 William Eadie (as note 263), p. 25.

266 Design for Stencilled Mural Decoration, 78 Derngate, Northampton, 1916, pencil and watercolor on paper mounted on board, 79.3 x 56.4 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41150. Hiroaki Kimura (as note 137), p. 1.

267 Wendy Kaplan (as note 9), p. 23.

268 Ibid., p. 24. Tulip and Lattice, between 1915 and 1923, pencil and watercolor on paper, 39.8 x 28.8 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA41064.

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symmetrical composition, perpendicular lines and abstract. Rectilinear forms are dominant. Synthetically, analysis of the architectural ornaments in Queen’s Cross Church and Scotland Street Public School draw attention in terms of three aspects. First, the ornament designs of the whole buildings are consistent and unified both in the exterior and interior. Second, the ornamental arrangements of the said two buildings are obviously related to plant motifs, evidencing the continuous use of plant forms from two-dimensional graphic designs to three-dimensional architectural ornaments throughout Mackintosh’s creation career. Ornaments in Scotland Street Public School tend toward geometricalized abstraction. Third, “designing architectural ornaments” is not a division of style but a successive thinking process, which formed from the initial concept and is evident in the final work. Through observing the plant motifs in Mackintosh’s work, it is notable that there is increasing usage of geometric stylization.

In 1900, Margaret Macdonald and Mackintosh married in August and went to the Vienna Secession Exhibition together.²⁶⁹ Henceforward, they shared art and life closely. “I have only two interests – you first and my work next,” Mackintosh said to his wife.²⁷⁰ In 1900, the compelling gesso panel, The Wassail (fig. 98) and The May

Queen (fig. 118),

²⁷¹ originally set on the frieze of the wall at Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tea Rooms (fig. 99) were chosen to be present in the exhibition hall. The Wassail is reminiscent of the sketch design based on a tree motif with two female face-to-face figures in pencil and wash on paper in the Sketchbook of Tours in East Anglia and

Devon (fig. 100).

²⁷² Obviously, this combination of figures and a tree holding the

269 Janice Helland (as note 190), p. 131.

270 Pamela Roberson, The Chronycle: The Letters of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Margaret Macdonald, 1927, Glasgow 2001, p. 99 [21 B].

271 Margaret Macdonald, The May Queen, 1900, gesso, hessian, scrim, twine, glass beads, thread, mother-of-pearl and tin leaf, 158.8 x 457 cm, Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, inv. E.

1981.178.

272 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Sketchbook of Tours in East Anglia and Devon, p.65, pencil and wash on paper, 18.6 x 13.4 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv.

GLAHA 53013/43.

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overall vertical structure are deduced from certain aspects of the composition of Winter (fig. 26) and The Tree of Personal Effort (fig. 29), both of which were created in 1896.

The May Queen shared the similar characteristics of elongated female figures, stylized

robes and the symmetric composition. Their works seem to be in dialogue. In a personal letter dated 16 May 1927, Mackintosh wrote to Margaret, “You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not threequarters in them.”²⁷³ Margaret Macdonald’s contribution could prominently be seen in the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, the flat at 120 Mains Street, the House for an Art Lover, the Hill House and the Willow Tea Rooms. Mackintosh’s flower drawings and watercolors are double-signed

“CRM MMM,” which underlines Margaret’s attribution. Margaret Macdonald’s efforts are not explained in this thesis, however, her contribution should never be forgotten.

4. Conclusion

Mackintosh’s plant motifs derived from his studies from life, were treated as a vehicle for his symbolic meanings and ornament patterns, and integrated the three qualities of

“stability, utility and beauty.”²⁷⁴ Mackintosh used abstracted stylization with curved organic lines to represent plant and bird motifs in Queen’s Cross Church and developed these into geometric patterns in Scotland Street Public School.

The abstractions of plant motifs decorated on the buildings are inherent in his original drawings, as can be observed by studying his early graphics juxtaposed with furniture and interior designs. Plant motifs, as a fit entry point for studying symbolism, reflect his thoughts, emotions and hopes in his pursuit of a highly personal metaphysical meaning. The derivation of combinations of squares and triangles pertained to the question of how he conceived of the stylized tree and the Tree of Life in

273 Pamela Roberson (as note 270), p. 56 [4.1].

274 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, “Untitled Paper on Architecture, 1892”, in: Pamela Robertson (as note 1), p. 186 [E 15].

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dimensional form, and how he demonstrated them using the different materials of wrought iron, oak, and stone alternatively, according to function and need. For Mackintosh, ornament decorated on the buildings seems to be a microcosm of the framework of the client and designer’s intention.²⁷⁵ However, he also implied that we should not separately appreciate the lines of proportion and color.²⁷⁶ The whole building should be simultaneously taken into account in macrocosm.²⁷⁷

In light of this, Mackintosh’s talent for stylizing forms was inspired by nature, rather than consisted of a “direct imitation” of it.²⁷⁸ Plant symbolism is able to be emphasized on ornament and enlarged to architecture itself as a “total work of art.”²⁷⁹ Moreover, plants in his architecture are considered not only as the stylized ornament of a literal plant, but also as the appropriation of the organic process of plant growth consciously applied to the entire structure of a building and freestanding furniture.²⁸⁰ Mackintosh’s attitude to plants seems to be in conversation with his longing for the youth, growth and health in grimy industrial Glasgow, and proves that “Art is the flower.

Life is the green leaf.”²⁸¹

Mackintosh broadly used the Tree of Life both in his graphics and architecture.

In the Christian sense, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are together planted in the Garden of Eden.²⁸² The fruit of the Tree of Life can sustain Eve and Adam’s life eternally and for perpetuity.²⁸³ Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and are driven out of the Garden of Eden with

275 Timothy Neat (as note 119), p. 164.

276 Mackintosh, “Architecture 1893”, in: Pamela Robertson (as note 1), p. 208 [F 22].

277 Ibid, p. 208 [F 22]; Timothy Neat (as note 119) p. 164.

278 Mackintosh, “Architecture 1893,” in: Pamela Robertson (as note 1), pp. 204-205 [F 12].

279 Wendy Kaplan (as note 9), pp. 14, 78.

280 Timothy Neat (as note 119), p. 154.

281 William Buchanan, “Mackintosh, Newbery and the Building of the School,” in: William Buchanan (as note 17), p. 30.

282 “What is the Meaning of the Tree of Life?” in: Got Questions Ministries at https://www.gotquestions.org/tree-of-life.html (accessed June 9, 2017).

283 Ibid.

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sin to avoid them eating any more fruit from the Tree of Life.²⁸⁴ In the cases of both the

Glasgow School of Art Club’s Diploma of Honor of 1893 and the carving on the

Glasgow School of Art of 1896-1899, the female figure as the personification of art and the tree standing in the form of a cross are the metaphors for “man’s redemption.”²⁸⁵ Only through “resurrection” can human return to heaven to see the Tree of Life again.

This process symbolizes “nature’s circle” of life, just as plants grow from seeds to fruit.

The Tree of Life became a trademark, a form of “cosmical symbolism” in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and also could be translated into Glasgow’s coat of arms.²⁸⁶ Briefly, Mackintosh spiritually had an imagination of a beautiful and perfect world, a utopia, the “Garden of Eden.” He was looking forward to a brighter future both in art and life.

Mackintosh achieved an equilibrium of soft curve and solid geometry. His attitude towards ornament paved the way for a transition between Art Nouveau and Art

Deco.

²⁸⁷ He was one of the distinguished protagonists in the trend of Art Nouveau, in which the expressions of plant motifs determined designers’ artistic genre, which tended to vary in character. According to Pevsner, the artist in the 1800s was “now a priest” who spread humanity and beauty in pursuit of “the expression of the indwelling spirit of nature.”²⁸⁸ Alongside repeated curved lines and plant motifs, Mackintosh

286 William Buchanan, “Mackintosh, Newbery and the Building of the School,” in: William Buchanan (as note 17), p. 33.

287 Hiroaki Kimura (as note 137), p. 1.

288 Nikolaus Pevsner (as note 10), p. 14.

289 “Old architecture lived because it had a purpose. Modern architecture, to be real, must not be a mere envelope without contents.” Quoted from Mackintosh, “Architecture 1893,” in: Pamela

Robertson (as note 1), p. 206 [F 16]. “How are you to judge architecture, just as you judge painting or sculpture – form, color, proportion all visible qualities – and the one great invisible quality in all art,

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building. Furthermore, more importantly, as the “priest” of art, he went on what he believed in faith of the essence of things, the “soul,” transferred into his work by representing the motif Tree of Life. He lived at a time when artists, architects and designers undertook endless in vogue experiments with the aim of breaking tradition and bringing forth “true” and “honest” elements to the forefront of progressive design.²⁹⁰ Through research into his ideas and images, we can understand how he experienced these transitional steps in a short period of time, and why he was regarded as one of the “pioneers of modern design” in Pevsner’s words of 1960.²⁹¹

Research into Mackintosh has continued to emerge. Mackintosh’s work was inclusive of the characteristics of symmetrical and asymmetrical, perpendicular and curvilinear, organic and geometric, as well as abstract. In terms of Mackintosh’s design characteristics, Mackintosh’s unrealized 1901 design for House for an Art Lover was able to be realized in Scotland instead of Germany by architect Graham Roxburgh in 1987, where the interiors of the entrance hall, gallery, dining room and music room are only based on Mackintosh’s original fourteen drawings.²⁹² Unquestionably, there are consistencies in the ornament stylization between the three kinds of Mackintosh’s buildings – public religious and secular spaces and domestic spaces. For instance, precursors to elements of the main hall gallery of House for an Art Lover can be found in Queen’s Cross Church.²⁹³ The carving on the south façade of House for an Art Lover shows the Tree of Life interpreted by Graeme Robertson and produced by Jack Kennedy in 1990 according to their unified understanding of Mackintosh’s pulpit of the church

soul. These are the essential qualities of all true architecture,” in: Pamela Robertson (as note 1), p. 208 [F 22].

290 The reference of the word “true” and “honest” to “a beauty identical with truth (Keats),” quoted from Nikolaus Pevsner (as note 10), p. 14.

291 Ibid., pp. 11, 133-139. In the forewords for the third edition of Pioneers of Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, Nikolaus Pevsner stated that he took Thomas Howarth’s research on Mackintosh into account for this third edition in 1960.

292 Graham Roxburgh, Building the Dream: The Realisation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover, Glasgow 2006, p. 56.

293 James Cosgrove (ed.), House for an Art Lover, Glasgow 2004, pp. 24-25.

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and the carving above the porch of the Glasgow School of Art.²⁹⁴

Nowadays, these idiosyncratic details with high recognition among the public are still often quoted by products related to Mackintosh design patterns in Glasgow.

Trained as an architect, Mackintosh expressed his idea, his spirit, and even his “soul”

mainly through architecture, and extended this to interior design and furniture. Plant motifs brought vivacity into his design. Plant motifs in the formation of his ornament designs that shifted from curved organic to geometric forms evidence his visual consecutive thinking process displayed in two-dimensional images and three-dimensional objects, and also respond to Mackintosh’s core belief expressed in his lecture of 1902 entitled Seemliness, where he stated, “be independent and go alone,” a sentiment that designers in the twenty-first century still pursue today.

294 Graham Roxburgh (as note 292), p. 40.

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5. Bibliography

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