PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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The Glasgow School is the group of artists, architects and designers who, from the 1890s to about 1910, made Glasgow, then a wealthy industrial city, one of the centres of artistic renewal in Europe. The name covers painters such as the Glasgow Boys, artists such as the Glasgow Girls and above all The Four, the inventors of the Glasgow Style, the Scottish version of Art Nouveau.
The Four
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair and the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald emerged from the Glasgow School of Art, then run by the progressive Fra Newbery, who also encouraged women to work as artists. The Four worked together on posters, repoussé metalwork, furniture and interiors; later they also became two couples, with the marriages of Margaret and Mackintosh and of Frances and MacNair. Their elongated, stylised figures, found unsettling by critics, earned the group the mocking nickname of the Spook School.
The Glasgow Style
The Glasgow Style blended Celtic tradition, the lessons of the Arts and Crafts movement and a taste for Japanese art. Compared with French and Belgian Art Nouveau it is more vertical and rigorous: straight, slender lines, white surfaces, small touches of colour and the stylised rose that became the emblem of the style.
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Mackintosh's works
- the Glasgow School of Art (1897-1909), the building that made his international reputation, devastated by two fires in 2014 and 2018;
- Hill House in Helensburgh (1902-1904), a house designed down to the last detail, from the architecture to the furniture;
- the tea rooms of Catherine Cranston in Glasgow, including the Willow Tearooms (1903), reopened in 2018 after restoration;
- his chairs with very tall backs, such as the 1902 Hill House chair, still made today by Cassina, which has reissued it since 1973.
Success in Europe
Little appreciated at home, The Four found their audience on the Continent. In 1900 they exhibited at the eighth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, where their geometric style impressed Josef Hoffmann and the Viennese artists. In 1902 Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald presented the Rose Boudoir at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin.
After 1910 the season of the Glasgow Style came to an end. Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1914 and died in London in 1928, almost forgotten. Rediscovered after the Second World War, he is now considered one of the fathers of modern design.
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