Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The May Queen: panel from the Ladies' Luncheon Room, Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1900, Gesso, hessian, scrim, twine, glass beads, thread, tin leaf, 62 1/2 x 179 7/8 in. (overall), Glasgow Museums, Acquired by Glasgow Corporation, as part of the Ingram Street Tearooms, 1950, © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection, Courtesy American Federation of Arts
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (designer)
High-backed chair for the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1900-1901
Stained oak, modern horse-hair upholstery, 59 x 18 5/8 x 17 1/8 in.
Glasgow Museums, Acquired by Glasgow Corporation,
as part of the Ingram Street Tearooms, 1950
© CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection
Courtesy American Federation of Arts
The exhibition was curated by Alison Brown, Glasgow Museums’ curator for European Decorative Arts and Design from 1800 to the present, a position she has held since 1999. Her research, publication contributions, and collection work has particular focus on art and design education and the decorative arts and design produced in Glasgow from 1860 to 1950. She is curator of the Mackintosh and Glasgow Style Gallery at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
PUBLICATION
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with new photography presenting new research by guest curator Alison Brown on Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style. The exhibition catalogue was prefaced by two contextual essays: one by Brown on the story on the collecting, study, and understanding of the Glasgow Style, and an introduction by Dr. Martin Bellamy, Research and Curatorial Manager, Glasgow Museums. The catalogue was 144 pages with 180 color illustrations, co-published by DelMonico Books•Prestel.
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style included 166 remarkable works of art and design, the majority of which was on public display for the first time in North America. Characterized by taut lines, stylized natural forms, sleek curves, and emphatic geometries, the Glasgow Style was unique – the only British response to the international Art Nouveau movement of the late 1890s – 1900s.
The first Mackintosh retrospective to tour the United States in a generation, Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style introduced audiences to some of the architect-designer-artist’s most iconic works. It presented his big, bold graphic designs for posters and his high-backed chairs for Miss Catherine Cranston’s famous Glasgow city-center artistic tearooms, in contrast with his lesser-known but equally striking experiments in textile design, interior design and the intricate watercolors he painted in the last years of his life. Offering a unique and expanded dialogue about Mackintosh’s milieu, this exhibition highlighted the connections between Mackintosh, his predecessors, contemporaries, collaborators, patrons, kindred spirits, and his hometown city of Glasgow – industrial heartland of nineteenth-century Scotland. Their distinctive variant of Art Nouveau was embraced by the Glasgow School of Art and centered around its Technical Art Studios, whose full spectrum of media work displayed in the exhibition includes: books, ceramics, stained glass, glass, mosaic, metalwork, furniture, textiles, stenciling, needlework, posters, interior and architectural design. Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style presented the most comprehensive appraisal of the Glasgow Style ever assembled in the United States.
This groundbreaking showcase unpacked themes such as the international influences upon Mackintosh’s work, the Glasgow School of Art’s crucial support and encouragement of women designers at a time of great social change, and the physical processes involved in making the visionary interiors, furnishings, and decorative works of art and design that together present and define the imaginative breadth of the Glasgow Style. Works included in the exhibition were drawn from the very best of Glasgow Museum’s internationally renowned civic collections, alongside key pieces from The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, The Glasgow School of Art, and important loans from private collections.
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style is a touring exhibition co-organized by Glasgow Museums and the American Federation of Arts. Support for the US national tour is provided by the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation. The exhibition comprises works from the collections of Glasgow City Council (Museums and Collections), with loans from Scottish collections and private lenders.
