Sinking Teeth Into Mackintosh Influences

Any commercial “Mockingtosh” exploitation shouldn’t take away from the breadth of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s achievements. A retrospective of his work, including artwork, comes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Sunday.

The Scottish architect and designer born in 1868 made major contributions to modern design early in this century. Although he died in 1928 in London, poor and ignored, his reputation is enjoying a major revival.

Today, he is compared to other leading early modernists such as Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, Viennese designers of Art Nouveau, and C.F.A. Voysey, an English Arts and Crafts architect and designer.

Mackintosh was able to combine two styles considered irreconcilable--the curves of Art Nouveau and the straight lines of Arts and Crafts--in interiors, furniture and textiles. He also was an accomplished artist, producing drawings and paintings.

The show “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” was organized by the Glasgow Museums in Scotland, where it opened in May 1996. After wintering in New York, it is at the Art Institute of Chicago; it’s at LACMA through Oct. 12.

A major draw in New York was from one of Mackintosh’s most famous commissions--the Ladies Luncheon Room in Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms in Glasgow. The turn-of-the-century lunchroom was re-created, using the original chairs, woodwork, gesso panels, light fixtures and coat racks and copies of the seven tables, each set with the appropriate linens and china in the Blue Willow pattern.

Also on view in New York was the dark oak order-desk chair from the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow. A play on horizontal and vertical lines creates the pattern for the curved chair back. A close-up photo of the chair is on the dust jacket of the show catalog from Abbeville Press ($60 hardcover, $45 paperbound).

The rehabilitation of Mackintosh’s reputation began shortly after his death at age 60. Until about 1960, he was appreciated mainly by other architects as a pioneer of a minimalist style, says Alan Crawford, a Mackintosh biographer and contributor to the catalog.

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A growing public of curators, collectors and designers has recognized Mackintosh’s ornamental decorative style and designs as Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles have gained favor.

Original Mackintosh designs have appreciated in value, and high-end copies of his furniture are available. Cassina of Milan has made more than 4,000 licensed reproductions of the order-desk chair ($3,530 at Cassina USA Inc., New York).

High-back dining chairs, generally more graceful than the American Arts and Crafts designs, are widely shown by retailers specializing in modern design.

Mackintosh’s fabrics follow a pattern of abstract florals and geometric motifs. He had a passion for purple, rose reds, blue reds and pinks. Some of these colors also are on stained glass insets in windows and doors and panel screens. A square of pink and purple stained glass with stand is $30 at the Metropolitan Museum gift shop.

To the layman, Mackintosh’s furniture appears to be the starting point for a number of famous American designs, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s tall-backed dining chairs and Harvey Ellis’ furniture designs for Gustav Stickley.

“The jury is still out on whether specific American designers and designs derive directly from Mackintosh or are an instance of motifs that are arrived at independently,” says J. Stewart Johnson, a consultant for 20th century design and architecture at the Metropolitan and a co-curator of the exhibition.

The encyclopedic exhibit of some 250 works revises a good portion of the Mackintosh legend. It gives more credit to his wife and collaborator, Margaret Macdonald. It explores more thoroughly his sensuous ornamental designs and his use of color. And it reveals how bouts of depression and alcoholism contributed to the obscurity that he suffered after early successes.

“At a deeper level,” Johnson says, “I hope the serenity of his decorating schemes will penetrate. But the obvious influence is small squares for table linens, draperies, upholstery fabric, furniture designs and so forth.”