Glasgow’s golden boy, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was difficult in life and remains difficult still.
He was a hard man to get to know, or to get along with, and he remains a difficult man to look back upon and try to understand. But Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the designer who helped define the fin de siècle, remains an important contributor to the history of modern design.
Born the son of a police superintendent in 1868, Mackintosh began apprenticing at a local architectural firm, Honeyman + Keppie, in 1884. His work was immediately recognized as being inventive and exciting. While Mackintosh embraced the Scottish aesthetic vernacular, choosing to work in traditional materials such as sandstone and harling (a type of stucco-like coating which was applied to the exterior of buildings to give the impression of an evenly applied skin), his actual designs broke away from familiar design developments and embraced the new art, the Art Nouveau, which was enveloping all of Europe.
Mackintosh’s work was first defined by his embracing of the organic and the whiplash line, both of which were prominent features in the Art Nouveau palette, but eventually Mackintosh befriended the Vienna Secessionists and began working with an entirely new template. The Vienna Secessionists (including design figureheads such as Josef Hoffmann and Kolomon Moser) and Mackintosh fed off of each other’s enthusiasm for the novel, moving away from the abstracted florals of the time, which were being found in architecture, furniture, and jewelry, and moving toward an abstraction which predicted the more geometric Art Deco.
Mackintosh embraced the German concept of gesamtkunstwerk (read: total work of art) and designed the entirety of his projects, including the architecture, interior spaces, furnishings, utilitarian objects and upholstery which filled his commissions. Additionally, he worked closely with his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, a gesso artist who was responsible for contributing original artwork to his interiors. Mackintosh was experimental (he was one of the very first to explore the idea of all white interiors, long before Modernists like Le Corbusier) and his projects were wide ranging, and included private homes, various schools, and a number of Glasgow tea houses for which he designed his most famous piece, the high backed dining chair.
While Mackintosh was excellent at developing his exciting new modern furniture vernacular (one that was paralleled simultaneously by Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly with the very high back chair - can you see the similarities?), and his designs were being spread through a variety of important journals and periodicals of the time, including The Studio, Ver Sacrum and Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. Although Mackintosh was being praised for his inventiveness, he was dismissive of the fact that the quality of his work was mediocre, to say the least. His concern for the particulars of his designs outweighed his understanding of craftsmanship (like many other designers at the time, was not a craftsman), and this hardheadedness, this inability to compromise his vision in order to ensure structural integrity, resulted in shoddy specimens. This characteristic of Mackintosh furniture often makes it difficult to distinguish between original Mackintosh pieces, and knock-offs.
While Charles Rennie Mackintosh rose quickly in his fame and recognition as a great architect and designer of the time, he fell out of favor just as abruptly. Mackintosh slid into obscurity, taking up painting and working with Liberty of London to design textile patterns, of which nearly none were produced. In 1928 he died of throat cancer (after a lifetime of making enemies and drinking heavily) with the art and architecture community barely acknowledging his passing, and when they did it was with a dismissive, condescending tone. He was long forgotten, but rediscovered in the mid 1960s by an art historian, Thomas Howarth, who was willing to work hard to remind the world of one of the forgotten founders of the modernist aesthetic.
If you’re interested in reading more about CR Mackintosh, Thomas Howarth’s tome, Mackintosh and the Modern Movement is a great place to start. Additionally, anything by Roger Billcliffe will prove to be a great beginners guide to his furniture design.
