UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date: 18-May-2010

I, Kristie Powell , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Arts in Art History It is entitled: "The Artist Couple:" Collectivism in Margaret Macdonald’s and Charles

Rennie Mackintosh’s Modern Interior Designs of 1900-1906

Student Signature: Kristie Powell

This work and its defense approved by: Committee Chair: Kimberly Paice, PhD Kimberly Paice, PhD

6/18/2010 724

“The Artist Couple:”

Collectivism in Margaret Macdonald’s and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Modern Interior Designs of 1900‐1906

A thesis submitted to The Art History Faculty Of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning University of Cincinnati In candidacy for the degree of Masters of Arts in Art History

Kristie Powell May 2010

Thesis Chair: Dr. Kimberly Paice Abstract

Margaret Macdonald (1864‐1933) was a Scottish artist and designer whose marriage to the internationally renowned architect and designer, Charles Rennie

Mackintosh (1868‐1928), has partly obscured the importance of her contributions to art and design. Her collective approach was, in fact, part of what Mackintosh called her "genius," while he considered his own contributions to their projects more akin to "talent or ability." This study is part of the recent scholarship that brings attention to Macdonald’s contributions and crucial roles in collective design work of the modern era. Introducing the study, I evaluate the role of collectivism as it informs Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s tea‐room designs. Next, I examine the influence of the Arts and Crafts style on the design of the couple’s Mains Street flat home. The modern revival of practices used by medieval guilds includes

Macdonald’s use of the medium gesso, as I discuss in the second chapter of the study. In concluding, I discuss the Gesamtkunswerk, the total work of art, in relation to the Music Room that the Scottish couple created for Franz Waerndorfer. With the current study’s focus on Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s interior designs, I hope to augment understandings of collectivism in order to acknowledge unsung contributions of many modern women and other producers; the hopes that such thinking may continue to inform art making and design today.

Acknowledgements

This study could not have been possible without the assistance and encouragement of many people. I would first like to thank the person who has given me the most advice and support throughout this project, my advisor Dr. Kim Paice.

Whether she was helping me find sources for further research or sorting out difficult concepts, Kim was an inspiration. She encouraged my work from its inception, and for that, I am thankful.

Sincerest thanks to my committee members Kristi Nelson and Cindy

Damschroder. Their assistance on this project was crucial, and I appreciate their insight and advice. Also, I would like to thank my peers in the University of

Cincinnati’s MA art history program. I am grateful for their copyediting, as well as their constant support and humor throughout the past two years.

I would also like to express thanks to the Graduate School Association at the

University of Cincinnati. Through the GSA, I was awarded a travel grant that allowed me to visit Glasgow. Without their funds, I would not have been able to use several archives and personally see some of Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s surviving works. The archivists and librarians of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art

Galleries, the Glasgow School of Art, and the Hunterian Art Gallery were not only helpful, but accommodating.

As always, I would like to thank my parents, who are invariably and hugely supportive, and Jackson Silvanik, who is my sternest and most amusing critic and indispensable companion.

Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………..2

Chapter 1: Blurring Gender: Collectivism in the Cranston Tea‐Rooms…………………………………………………………….10

Chapter 2: ‘Ecstatic Communion from the Heights of Loving Mateship’: The Drawing Room at the Mackintoshes’ Mains Street Flat, 1900…………………………24

Chapter 3: The Waerndorfer Music Room: An Embodiment of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Modern Design…………………………………36

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………....48

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………………..51

Bibliography and Works Consulted……………………………………………………………………..53

1 Introduction

I had talent, but Margaret had genius.1 Charles Rennie Mackintosh

You must remember in all of my architectural efforts, you have been half if not three‐quarters of them.2 Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Margaret Macdonald (1864‐1933), the Scottish painter and designer, was the most successful female artist in Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century (figure

1). By 1900, her work had exhibited in London, Liége and Vienna, and was published in The Yellow Book, The Studio, Dekorative Kunst und Dekoration and Ver

Sacrum. Despite her achievements, Macdonald’s career has been overshadowed by the better‐known work of her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868‐1928), the internationally celebrated architect and designer (figure 2).3 Endlessly compared with Mackintosh’s legacy, Macdonald’s work is often ignored, attributed to

Mackintosh or harshly criticized as “decadent.” Art historian Thomas Howarth in his well‐known study Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement (1952) commented that Macdonald limited Mackintosh’s vision by encouraging him “to dissipate his energies on work of comparative importance.” Here, Howarth is referring to Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s collective interior designs. In the early twentieth century, design was viewed as a lesser art form. Macdonald’s gesso panels, metalwork and embroidered tapestries functioned as decorative addendums

1 Mackintosh’s comment was reported by Desmond Chapman‐Huston in The Lamp of Memory (London: Skeffington & Sons, 1949), 147. 2 Letter from C. R. Mackintosh to M. Macdonald, 16 May 1927, Collection of Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. 3 The artist signed her work “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh,” but to avoid confusion with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, I refer to her throughout the study by her original surname, “Macdonald.”

2 to Mackintosh’s architecture. Thus, in keeping with traditional hierarchies, architecture retained its lofty position amongst the arts while design assumes a subordinate role. The failure to address Macdonald’s work in its own right is in part due to her tendency to engage in collaborative endeavors both with her sister and her husband. This study examines the role of collaboration in Macdonald’s practice and draws attention to her practice in its own right.

Mackintosh, Macdonald, her sister Frances Macdonald (1873‐1921) and

Frances’s husband James Herbert MacNair (1868‐1955) were the Glasgow Four, an informal, creative alliance that shared a distinctive method of stylized imagery of nature, the female figure and Romantic literature. Their designs were influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, the Pre‐Raphaelites and

Celtic folklore. The Four, along with a few other friends from the Glasgow School of

Art, spent their weekends at rented bungalows in the Scottish village Dunure. It is uncertain what occurred during these weekend getaways, but the Four acquired the reputation as “bohemians.”4 The Four came to international acclaim after their participation in Vienna’s Eighth Secession Exhibition in 1900 and the first

International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art at Turin in 1902. On the

Continent, the Four’s designs were especially praised for their creation of the

Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. These expositions established Glasgow as one of the major centers of design in early twentieth‐century Europe.

4 Thomas Howarth, “Introduction: Some Thoughts on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, ‘Girls’—and Glasgow,” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing), 60.

3 The Glasgow Style, also known as Scotto‐Continental Art Nouveau, indicates work created in Glasgow, particularly in alliance with the Glasgow School of Art, from roughly 1890 to 1920. The style’s most distinguishing characteristics are stylized, organic motifs such as the Glasgow Rose, a linear, simplified version of the flower that is prevalent throughout the work of the Four. The paintings, drawings and designs of the Four were not well received in Scotland. Critics took offense to the Four’s attenuated, conventionalized human figures, giving the artists the derisive title of “the Spook School.” By the 1890s, the group had moved away from

“the Spook School” to concentrate on larger projects in design. One of the Glasgow

Style’s aims was to minimize the gap between fine and industrial art. The style had an early conceptual base with socialist educational aims and a collective studio approach. Similar to these endeavors, Macdonald’s work blurs the boundaries between design and architecture, the individual artist and the collective, and art and life.

More than two‐thirds of Macdonald’s work is collaborative; therefore, collectivism is a definitive characteristic of Macdonald’s artistic vision. At the turn of the twentieth century, collaboration was essential for any aspiring female artist.

Macdonald’s career is marked by two distinct partnerships, first, with her sister

Frances, and later with Mackintosh. Until Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s marriage in 1900, Macdonald shared a studio with Frances. The sisters created poster designs, metalwork and embroidery—“feminine” art. After 1900, Macdonald worked exclusively with Mackintosh, allowing her access to endeavors typically considered domains of male artisans and architects such as furniture design,

4 exhibition design and architecture. Most scholars agree that Macdonald’s work is strongest when it is allied with Mackintosh’s work.

From 1898 to 1909, over half of Macdonald’s artistic output was done in collaboration with Mackintosh. Together, the couple created startlingly austere, wholly complete interior designs. From 1898‐1906, the couple jointly worked on thirteen buildings, exhibition spaces, architectural designs and interiors. Both

Macdonald and Mackintosh achieved their greatest success and critical acclaim in the years of their closest and most intense professional interaction. Macdonald’s involvement in these projects ranged from the simple inclusion of one or more pieces to the creation of an entire decorative program and theme, and if we are to believe Mackintosh, Macdonald was ever‐present in their collective work.

Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s interior designs were most profoundly influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Founded by William Morris and John Ruskin, the Arts and Crafts Movement developed in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its approach to design was an influential theme of modernism to the Bauhaus. The Arts and Crafts Movement championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsperson, and the qualities of materials. The movement aimed to transform the domestic environment into a meaningful whole. The two twentieth‐century groups most influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement were the Vienna Secessionists and the Glasgow Four.

Macdonald and Mackintosh’s interiors were especially praised for their creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total environment, which incorporates architecture, furniture, window treatments and wall decorations into a complete

5 work of art. The German architect Hermann Muthesies explained the revolutionary nature of their work in terms of the Gesamtkunstwerk:

The new element that the Scots brought into English art was a wider conception of the aims of interior design, a conception like that which was being set up as a goal of the continent….People now began to conceive the house as a complete entity…as a single work of art….Ornamentation, which during the Morris period had been the main predilection…stepped into the background….The room began to be a work of art in itself, not simply the result of a juxtaposition of artistically fashioned elements. 5

Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s interior designs certainly were revolutionary in their utilization of the Gesamtukunstwerk. Architecture theorist Nikolaus Pevsner in his groundbreaking study Pioneers of Modern Design (1936) interprets Mackintosh’s and Macdonald’s interior designs as “the legacy of Britain coming to the Modern

Movement.”6 This statement stems from his perception of the couple’s interiors as a total work of art.

The sole monograph in study about Macdonald’s practice is Margaret

Macdonald Mackintosh, 1864­1933 (1983) by Pamela Reekie Robertson. The study was published by the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow. Located within the University of Glasgow, the Hunterian Gallery is Scotland’s oldest public museum and boasts the

Mackintosh house, a reconstruction of the principal interiors from the couple’s

Glasgow home. In this study, Robertson divides Macdonald’s work chronologically into three sections: her student and studio work, her collaborations with

Mackintosh, and a period of declining activity after 1910. This study asserts that

Macdonald’s work is at its strongest when made in congruence with Mackintosh.

5 Christine Hughson, “Introduction,” in Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Haus eines Kunstfreundes. Meistens eins Innendekoration (Vienna: Darmstadt, 1901), 51. 6 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), 137.

6 Timothy Neat’s Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald (1994) analyzes the collective work of the artist couple. Neat’s lengthy text asserts that the work of

Mackintosh and Macdonald has “deciphered a symbolic language of images” which

Neat describes as “personal and archetypal.”7 By means of revealing symbolic content in the couple’s drawings and designs, Neat posits that their work can be read as a narrative of the artists’ personal relationship. In this iconographical interpretation, Neat upholds that Mackintosh’s relationship with Macdonald “hugely enlarged his ambitions as an artist”8 and calls their relationship “the love story of the twentieth century.”9 Neat describes Macdonald as “having great courage and fortitude, endless patience, a necessity when dealing with her volatile and somewhat paranoidal husband.”10 Neat claims that their marriage was an artistic and philosophical journey. This study’s iconographical analysis reveals new methods in which we can interpret Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s collaborative work.

In the current study, I offer a discussion of the notion of collectivism and how it pertains to and distinguishes Macdonald’s practice. With the rise of community art projects, the re‐articulation of scholarship on women artists has increased dramatically in recent years. In the later stages of modernism, the concept of an individualized vision is under scrutiny. Collective production opens many questions

7 Timothy Neat, Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald (Edinburgh: Canongate Press Ltd, 1994), 14. 8 Ibid, 9. 9 Ibid, 14. 10 Ibid, 25.

7 in contemporary art circles, and I will explain the role of collectivism and authorship in this study. Mackintosh frequently expressed a high regard for Macdonald’s work and valued her contributions to their designs. For instance, after their marriage,

Mackintosh began signing his sketches with their joint initials, “MMM : CRM.” Thus, collectivism was crucial on the road to inclusion for female artists at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe.

Additionally, I emphasize a social historical approach to the work of

Macdonald. This study focuses on a very narrow, but pivotal time frame, 1900 to

1906. I analyze the context of her work and the influences of the Pre‐Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and influences within the Glasgow Four. Macdonald and her contemporaries were struggling with issues which affected, not only the means of the production of their creations and the technical methods for their execution, but also the objective outcomes of their “subjective” innovations. This study also moves away from ideas of the individualized genius and situates

Macdonald’s work as the product of many factors, including social status, the rising prevalence of the machine, and her relationship with Mackintosh.

This study consists of three chapters. The first chapter focuses on the couple’s tea‐room designs, collectivism, and the contributions of Macdonald as in specific examples. In the second chapter, I explain how the couple’s Mains Street flat demonstrates the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Using William

Morris’s Red House as an example, I show how the Mains Street flat exemplifies a twist on the Arts and Crafts’ approach. In the final chapter, I explore the

8 Gesamtkunstwerk in modern design and how the Gesamtkunstwerk manifests itself in the Waerndorfer Music Room in Vienna.

Mackintosh assertion of his wife’s “genius” was not an isolated statement. He frequently praised Macdonald’s contributions to their collective designs. Even though “genius” is not what this study hopes to proclaim, one should consider her distinct situation within the canon of art history. It is not my hope to vindicate

Macdonald by disputing Mackintosh’s prominent and widely acknowledged position in the history of modern design, but rather question the relevance of art historical methodology which thrives on the notion that great artists are not products of many factors.

9 Chapter 1 Blurring Gender: Collectivism in the Cranston Tea­Rooms

Advanced women artists involved in the decorative arts in the early twentieth century were contributing to the most revolutionary directions—both social and aesthetic—of their times.11 Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin

In the Cranston tea‐rooms, Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie

Mackintosh implement a vocabulary of clean, geometric forms softened by simplified, curvilinear imagery of plants and the female body. Located in the heart of industrial Glasgow, the tea‐room designs reveal the pervasive influence of

Macdonald in both the theme and decorative schemes that were regularly used in the couple’s interiors. Among the first designs by the couple, the tea‐rooms reveal the progressive nature of Macdonald’s designs. The White Dining Room in the

Ingram Street Tea‐Rooms and the Room de Luxe in the Sauchiehall Street Tea‐

Rooms are among the best examples of the couple’s commercial designs, and I focus on these projects in this chapter. Here, I explore the roles of collectivism in the creation of the tea‐room designs and the significance of a female designer’s collaborative practice in the early twentieth century.

Encouraged by the strengthening Temperance Movement, the “Tea‐Room

Movement” flourished in late nineteenth‐century Glasgow. Miseries of alcohol abuse seemed to run in tandem with industrial growth, and Glasgow, “the Workshop of the World,” was also renowned as Britain’s most drink‐sodden city.12 Tea‐rooms

11 Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550­1950 (New York, New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1977), 2. 12 Perilla Kinchin, Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms (San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate, 1998), 13.

10 provided an alternative to daytime drunkenness and pub culture. By 1901, Glasgow was described as “a very Tokio for tea‐rooms.”13 The foremost proponent of this movement was Catherine Cranston (1849‐1934) who intended that “her Tea‐Rooms offer an alternative to the bars and drinking clubs which were a blight on Scottish life.”14 (figure 3) It was Cranston’s older brother, Stuart Cranston, who opened the first tea‐room. A tea dealer, Stuart Cranston began to offer his customers samples, advertising a cup of China tea “with sugar and cream, for 2d. [tuppence]—bread and cakes extra.”15 However, it would be his sister who would become the figure most identified with the movement. Catherine Cranston’s first tea‐room opened in 1878 and was known as “Miss Cranston’s Tea‐Rooms.”

By 1900, Glasgow was one of the richest cities in the world, the “Second City” of the British Empire. Transportation grew rapidly during this time. For the middle class, this meant that the workplace and home became increasingly distinct. Social and economic changes in Glasgow expressed itself in the creation of two types of social space—public, inhabited largely by men; and private or domestic which was occupied by women and children. The ways in which art and design were made during this period reflect this dichotomy of social space.16 The tea‐room was an arena in which the comfort of the home was brought into the public sphere.

Tea‐rooms were promoted on the footing of convenience, pleasant surroundings and good cheap food, with respectability as an added benefit. The tea‐

13 Ibid, 11. 14 Pamela Robertson, “Catherine Cranston,” Journal of Decorative Art Society, vol. 10 (1986), 12. 15 Perilla Kinchin, 13.

16 Juliet Kinchin, “Second City of the Empire,” Jude Burkhauser, ed. Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing), 29.

11 room proved to be so popular that entrepreneurs struggled to keep up with the demand. Prices were low enough to attract a large and varied clientele. Also, tea‐ rooms were places where both sexes could socialize freely. Elements of homely décor—starched tablecloths, flowers, plates of cakes set out ready on tables, comely waitresses—had a powerful appeal to men. At a tea‐room, men could relax over a game of dominoes, checkers, billiards or smoke. These spaces also catered to the dining and drinking needs of middle class women, who found them convenient and appropriate arenas for friendly engagement among themselves. In the last quarter of the nineteenth‐century, women were eager to leave the seclusion of the home.17

Tea‐rooms were places where ladies could respectably go alone; before this, eating out without an escort was nearly impossible. Even the smallest tea shops were segregated as well as providing “general” areas which meant that both sexes could use without social discomfort.

The decorative schemes of the tea‐rooms in Glasgow were associated with what was then labeled the “New Art Movement.”18 The tea‐room was seen as a modern endeavor, and its aesthetic was largely due to the influence of Cranston, a patron to the city’s most progressive artists of the time. Her predilection for advanced design took the artistic tea‐room to international renown. Articles about

Cranston’s tea‐rooms appeared in Glasgow, London and Germany. In Glasgow in

1901, “J.H. Muir” (a pseudonym) devotes several paragraphs to the tea‐room, seeing it as a distinctive and central feature of Glaswegian life. Muir noted, “Artistic taste allied with domestic comfort was a distinguishing characteristic of typical Glasgow

17 Perilla Kinchin, 16. 18 J. Jeffrey Waddel, “Some Recent Glasgow Tea‐Rooms,” The Builders’ Journal (April 15, 1903), 126.

12 tea‐rooms.”19 An article that appeared in The Studio about Cranston’s tea‐houses claimed, “It’s not easy to imagine what would be the position of modern decorative art today, apart from a group of tea‐houses controlled by Miss Cranston.”20

Cranston’s name became so well‐known that her taste for artistic interiors became synonymous with modern decorative art in Glasgow. Her decision to retain her maiden name after her 1892 marriage to John Cochrane underlines the high level of recognition she had already achieved.

In Victorian society, the decorative arts were thought to be best suited for female designers, whereas the fine arts required strength and ambition, characteristics typical of men. Men and women rarely did the same work, and the sexual division of labor was justified by an ideology that defined design and the applied arts as feminine and the fine arts as masculine. It was not until the Arts and

Crafts Movement in the mid‐nineteenth century that women began to move beyond typical gender roles. John Ruskin, the leader of the Neo‐Gothic revival in England, encouraged women to play a part in the “beautiful adornment of the state.”21 In some ways, women revived the craft movement largely because it was a way to receive cheap labor while keeping women in the home. It was a means of tapping women’s culture without disturbing the suppressed place of women in society.

Despite sexism with regards to the divisions of labor, Mackintosh spoke of transmitting “instinct,” “emotion” and “poetry” in his work—all ideas identified with

19 James Hamilton Muir, Glasgow in 1901 (Glasgow, 1901), 166. 20 J. Taylor, “Modern Decorative Art at Glasgow,” The Studio, 39 (October 1906), 32. 21 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Deborah Epstein Nord, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 12.

13 female persona.22 Macdonald and Mackintosh’s artistic visions were nearly identical, and this only strengthened their creative relationship. According to the

British writer and journalist Isabelle Anscombe in her book A Woman’s Touch:

Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day, women designers, such as

Macdonald, pioneered the practical application of abstraction to the modern interior.23 This would not have been possible without Mackintosh’s respect for

Macdonald and her designs. At this time, it was rare for male artists to welcome the participation of a female artist in his commissions, and even more extraordinary that Macdonald was able to create the entire decorative themes of the Ingram Street and Sauchiehall Street Tea‐Rooms.

Mackintosh had worked on Cranston’s interiors for her Argyle Street and

Buchanan Street Tea‐Rooms alongside the architect and designer George Walton

(1867‐1933) in 1896 to 1897. For the commission, Walton designed the furniture and fittings while Mackintosh produced the murals and the stenciling for the walls.

For Cranston’s expansion of the Argyle Street premises in 1897, Mackintosh experimented with the furniture, producing his first tall‐backed “Mackintosh” chair, while Walton handled the wall decorations and fittings (figure 4). After Walton left for a career opportunity in London in 1900, Mackintosh and Macdonald took control of the decorative endeavors for Cranston’s newest tea shop, the tea‐rooms at Ingram

Street.

22 “Seemliness,” lecture by Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the Glasgow School of Art [1902], Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. 23 Isabelle Anscombe, A Woman’s Tough: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (New York City: Viking Penguin Inc., 1984), 12.

14 Walton’s departure must have been a welcome one for Mackintosh.

Mackintosh’s designs were usually site‐specific, and it was most likely challenging for him to work alongside a designer other than Macdonald. For the Ingram Street

Tea‐Rooms, Cranston wanted a new ladies’ lunch hall and a subterranean billiard room. For these spaces, the couple designed every detail—all of the decorations and furnishings, determining the color schemes and designing the cutlery, carpets, curtains, metalwork, lighting and wall hangings. It is even claimed that they designed the waitresses’ uniforms.24

The Ingram Street Tea‐Rooms occupied numbers 205 to 215, a group of connecting rooms on the ground floor of an office block. Mackintosh was commissioned to decorate numbers 213 to 215, the first project for Cranston in which he created both the furniture and the decoration. The project included the

White Dining Room with a small mezzanine balcony, kitchens, servery, and a ladies’ dressing room on the south end. At the same time, Mackintosh designed the billiards room in the basement beneath the White Dining Room and began to work on the Cloister Room. The entire project was complete in 1912.

It is important to remember that when Mackintosh received a commission completely under his control, he wasted no time bringing Macdonald into the project. Macdonald’s known contributions to the White Dining Room are The May

Queen (1900), a large gesso piece, and The Dew (1901), a beaten metal panel

(figures 5 and 6). Both were made in collaboration with Mackintosh who created pendants for them. In addition to these signed works, Macdonald must have

24 Thomas Howarth, “Miss Cranston, a Glasgow Entrepreneur,” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), 37.

15 designed the stencil pattern for the balcony walls, which is identical to the rose design she used in previous projects.25 Only occasionally as with the Hill House drawing room lampshade or possibly the Little Hills, did Macdonald work to a specific design by Mackintosh.26

In order to create the White Dining Room, the couple removed the dividing walls to create four open, connecting spaces. They paneled all of the rooms with white‐painted wood. In the balcony, the walls were stenciled. A cornice with overhanging picture rails and colored insets run the entire length of all four walls of the room, intersecting the screens of windows on the north side. On the east and west walls the gesso panels The Wassail (1900) and The May Queen hang above the cornice (figure 7 and figure 5). The first panel is attributed to Mackintosh and the second to Macdonald.27 The overall atmosphere of the room was one of stately elegance, serenity and unity. This was accomplished through the high ceilings, which were emphasized by the wall treatments, the rhythmic repetition of linear compositional elements, the pure white used on the walls, table cloths and curtains, accented with touches of color and the brilliant light that entered through the north window.

The large gesso panels, The May Queen and The Wassail, which were placed on opposite walls, covered much of the wall surface in the White Dining Room. The panels are the couple’s first experiments with gesso on such a grand scale. Each

25 These designs were the Two Red Roses Across the Moon and the Defence of Guinevere series. 26 Robertson, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh 1864­1893 (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1983), n.p.. 27 Both bear Macdonald’s signature. Pamela Reekie Robertson has pointed out that the signature on The Wassail does not appear in contemporary photographs, so it must have been added when the panel was repainted later. This was confirmed when the panel underwent restoration in 1990.

16 consists of three separate parts. The celebration of Wassail and May Day are both appropriate to the social activities that would have taken place in the White Dining

Room. The May Queen was Macdonald’s conception and execution. The May Queen is set with twine, glass beads and tin inlay. In this panel, the May Queen stands alone in the center. She is linked to her companions by garlands of flowers as in the traditional May Day dance. The four women gaze intently at the central figure.

Behind the figures is a rectilinear pattern that is similar to the one used in The Dew.

These lines help to focus and to link the viewer’s attention. It also acts as a supporting structure for the organic forms of the women and flowers. As is typical of Macdonald’s work, the composition’s lines weave boundaries between woman and nature.

Mackintosh’s complimentary design, The Wassail, is similar in form, but wassailing ushers in the winter, not summer. Mackintosh’s design is more graphic and linear than Macdonald’s and is, appropriately, less overt in its sensuality. At the center of The Wassail, two women look at one another, and this compositional introversion should be contrasted with The May Queen in which a single figure meets the gaze of the viewer. Each set of figures is set along stylized circles.

Between each pair are trees, butterflies and flowers. Vine‐like lines form a pattern over the figures and link the groups of women, insects and vegetation.

The close interaction of the two artists is apparent in the similarities between The May Queen and The Wassail. Both employ a symmetrical composition, almost identical female figures and a combination of simplified areas of flat color. In both panels, the women are not clearly defined, but are instead suggested by faces

17 surrounded by clouds of hair and flowers, surmounting simple, flat shapes, circles, ovals and thin rectangles. This abstract treatment of figures is very close to the technique Macdonald used to describe women in the embroidered panels she produced around the same time.

The restrained and elegant musings that inspired the Ingram Street Tea‐

Rooms blossomed into opulent fantasy in the Willow Tea‐Rooms on Sauchiehall

Street. This is the only one of Miss Cranston’s tea‐rooms that can still be partially experienced. Sauchiehall Street was Glasgow’s up‐and‐coming shopping street. For the Willow Tea‐Rooms, Mackintosh had control of the entire decorative and architectural schemes, inside and out. Opened on October 29, 1903, The Evening

News deemed it “the acme of originality.” The Bailie wrote that the design

“fairly outshines all others in the matters of arrangement and colour. The furnishings, besides, is of the richest and most luxurious character. Indeed Miss Cranston has carried the question of comfort fairly into that of luxury, when providing for the enjoyment of her friends and patrons. Her “Salon de Luxe” on the first floor is simply a marvel of the art of the upholsterer and decorator.”28

As at the Ingram Street Tea‐Rooms, upon entering the Willow Tea‐Rooms, customers passed behind a white enameled inset with elegant leaded glass panels to the central cashier’s station. Patrons are given a choice. One could enter into an illuminated ladies’ tea‐room at the front, a darker, general lunch saloon at the back, or up the stairs to tea gallery built over the back saloon. All of the spaces were interlaced, separated only by ironwork screens and slightly different color schemes.

Up the stairs on the first floor, only customers willing to pay a bit extra would push open the doors to enter the Salon de Luxe, popularly known as the Room de Luxe, a

28 Perilla Kinchin, 51.

18 kind of glittering treasure trove of luxury, decadence and spectacle—the ultimate example of the tea room as a work of art. Even the waitresses in the Salon de Luxe, dressed in white uniforms with chokers of pink glass beads, were purported to be exceptionally attractive.29

At the most obvious level, the Willow Tea‐Rooms were more luxurious than the Ingram Tea‐Rooms. On a deeper level, Macdonald and Mackintosh’s conception of interior design shifted towards a unified whole based on a single multi‐faceted motif with both symbolic and literary references. Thus, the Room de Luxe took an additional theoretical dimension, beyond the purely visual or utilitarian aspects of the couple’s earlier work. In the case of the later tea‐rooms, the willow provided a theme for which Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet, “Willowwood,” (1868) supplied a specific narrative and symbolic component. The sorrowful mood and sonorous rhythms of the sonnet were suggested in a panel by Macdonald. Her gesso panel O

Ye that Walk in Willow Wood (1903) functioned as the centerpiece of the room’s design scheme (figure 8). O Ye That Walk in Willow Wood, the inspiration of the

Salon de Luxe’s decoration, portrays three elongated female figures, dripping with ornate strings of glass jewels. The Room de Luxe reconciled the visual, symbolic and literary aspects of design more so than any of the couple’s previous projects.

O Ye That Walk in Willow Wood was designed to stand opposite of the steel fireplace in the Room de Luxe. According to Robertson, the delicate beauty of purple and silver in the Room de Luxe with Macdonald’s tall gesso panel depicting

Rossetti’s sonnet “Willowwood,” could not have been achieved without her

29 Perilla Kinchin, 60.

19 participation.30 In Rossetti’s sonnet, a man is allowed to cross the chasm of death, symbolized by a flowing fountain and a well, for a final reunion with his dead lover, whose soul wanders lost in the Willowwood. Through the agency of Love personified the Willowwood is made visible and the lovers are able to embrace “as meeting rose and rose together cling….”31 The poem’s imagery perfectly aligns with

Macdonald’s iconography.

Macdonald’s panel illustrates the lines of the poems that describe the tragedy of the situation: the visions of the souls in the Willowwood, the song sung by Love to weave his spell, and the last glimpse of the lover’s spirit.32 In this piece, the grey‐ eyed woman gazes directly out of the composition. She appears eternally silent and calm. Overlying the woman and her companions are long raised vertical lines dotted with small oval shapes, intended to represent the willow branches and leaves. Set within the branches are glittering jewels. In 1905, Muthesius wrote:

Just as it is impossible to put into prose the perfection of Rossetti’s sonnets, so it is impossible to describe Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s work O Ye, O Ye That Walk in the WIllowwood. [The panel] is a symphony of peaceful, pure colors, of lines which seem to have been touched by the Breath of Fate, or star‐like precious gems whose luster weaves a veil of mysterious light over the faces and forms of women who wander silently through the willow grove under a magic spell.33

The rest of the room extends the rarefied world created in O Ye That Walk in Willow

Wood. Unlike the interiors for the White Dining Room at Ingram Street, the panel is

30 Robertson, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh 1864­1893, (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1993), n.p.. 31 Rossetti, “Willowwood,” Oswald Doughty, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Dent Publishing, 1957), 116. 32 Billie K. Wickre, “Collaboration in the work of Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and J. Herbert MacNair” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993), 421. 33 “Ein Mackintosh Tee Haus in Glasgow,” 268.

20 not separated in form or meaning from its surroundings. The Room de Luxe was a world unto itself.

The typical Glaswegian, who could never have lived with anything like the designs in the Sauchiehall or Ingram Street tea‐rooms, loved the strangeness of Miss

Cranston’s tea‐rooms. Dining there was a unique, theatrical experience. In the

Cranston tea‐rooms, the decorative overstatement and novelty lent excitement to the adventure of eating out. To go out and play in this specialness for the price of tea and cake was quite appealing to the middle class. The importance of Cranston’s commissions cannot be underestimated for the tea‐rooms were important showplaces patronized by the artist and the upper middle class of the city.

Macdonald wrote to Anna Muthesius at the end of 1904: “It is very amusing—and in spite of all the efforts to stamp out the Mackintosh influence—the whole town is getting covered with imitations of Mackintosh tea‐rooms, Mackintosh shops

Mackintosh furniture &c—it is too funny—I wonder how it will end.”34 In October

1917, Cranston’s husband John Cochrane died, marking the end of Miss Cranston’s

Tea‐Room business. She sold the tea‐rooms and her house that were filled with

Mackintosh furnishings and moved into the North British Hotel. Many of the furniture pieces and design elements in the tea‐rooms were neglected or thrown away, a testament to the general public’s attitude towards tea‐room design as replaceable.

An adventurous patron, Cranston encouraged the artists to give their fantasies full reign in the interiors. In the Ingram Street and Willow Tea‐Rooms,

34 Quoted in Perilla Kinchin, 63.

21 Mackintosh and Macdonald’s imaginations draw more strongly on the decorations than in any previous projects. The interiors the couple did together for Cranston seem to draw heavily upon Macdonald’s creative energies for their themes and decorative schemes. In these spaces, the couple created magical worlds, pure white and glittering with crystal globe chandeliers, polished silver, colored glass and jewel‐studded murals.

22 Chapter 2 ‘Ecstatic Communion from the Heights of Loving Mateship’: The Drawing Room at the Mackintoshes’ Mains Street Flat, 1899­1900

The white interiors that Mackintosh and his wife designed for themselves [are] refined to a degree which the lives of even the artistically educated are still a long way from matching…they are the milestones placed by a genius far ahead of use to mark the way to excellence for mankind in the future.35 Hermann Muthesius

Before their marriage in 1900, Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie

Mackintosh decorated and furnished their flat in Glasgow, No. 120 Mains Street, to which they returned after their honeymoon on Holy Island. As proponents of the

Arts and Crafts Movement, Macdonald and Mackintosh wanted a home that focused on domesticity, a bulwark against the impersonal forces of the city. They sought to transform the domestic environment into a meaningful whole. As well as being the first interior the couple designed unrestricted by the whims of a patron, the Mains

Street flat is the first documented example of Mackintosh and Macdonald’s mature collaborative efforts. Here, the artist couple was able to experiment and put into practice many of the theories that they had been developing while working on earlier and smaller projects. Such theories include the hallmark for these interiors, the use of bold contrasts between light and dark and a restrained use of decoration.

In this chapter, I shall discuss the decoration of the drawing room in the Mains

Street flat, a room that strongly bears Macdonald’s influence (figure 9).36

35 Das englische Haus, 3 vols (Berlin 1904‐05), trans. J. Seligman (London 1979), 52. 36 I have elected not to write about the bedroom in this context, in part because David Brett has written extensively on the white bedroom at 120 Mains Street in Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship, (London, 1992) and “The Eroticism of Domestic Space,” Journal of Propaganda and Decorative Arts 10 (Fall 1988), 6‐13.

23 Work began on the Mains Street interiors early in 1900 in anticipation of the couple’s August nuptials. These rooms were prototypes upon which future interiors like Mackintosh’s Hous’hill and Windyhill designs were based. Although the Mains

Street designs are usually credited to Mackintosh alone, Macdonald would certainly have participated in the design and decoration of her own home, and the white rooms seem particularly to conform to her preferences and utilitarian attitude. The simple elegance of the rooms, the fluidity of space, and the restrained and focus of applied pattern and decoration all bespeak Macdonald’s influence.

It would be impossible to write about 120 Mains Street without noting the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Although Mackintosh and Macdonald’s designs are often linked to Art Nouveau, their designs broke from Art Nouveau’s curvalinearity, favoring a geometric style in which ornament is secondary to the clear expression of spatial structure.37 A principle aim of the Arts and Crafts

Movement was that design should be manifestly homemade where the construction is clearly expressed. It was founded in opposition to the expansion of industry and sought to ameliorate the conditions of the working class. William Morris’s own home, the Red House at Bexleyheath, Kent, (1859‐60), was one of the first domestic spaces to exemplify the principles of the Modern Movement in architecture and the decorative arts (figures 10 and 11).

Designed by Phillip Webb (1831‐1915) and Morris, the interior of the Red

House was unique in consciously matching the exterior. All of the textiles were

37Jean‐Claude Delorme, Architects’ Dream Houses (New York City, New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 27.

24 designed and handcrafted by Morris and his circle of friends, including the artists

Edward Burne‐Jones, Dante‐Gabriel Rossetti, and Webb. The use of red brick rather than stone, the absence of projecting elements, and the avoidance of any symmetry or pronounced compositional axis all point to an explicit desire to distance the house from Victorian‐style architecture.38 Morris’s intent that there should be an obvious presence of the craftsperson has continued to influence designers. Two such designers are Mackintosh and Macdonald, and the couple’s interiors stand as an extension of the Arts and Crafts ideology.

By the 1890s, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s concerns had narrowed to a personal introspection and a nostalgic search for some lost secret of human life.39

Unlike Morris, Mackintosh and Macdonald rejected the heavy furniture and woodwork that was prevalent in the Red House, in favor of plain white wallpaper and painted walls and little furniture. Touches of color and pattern were added in stenciling, leaded glass windows, metal panels and embroidered pillows. The wooden furniture was painted white or stained deep brown or green and accented by shimmering panels or brilliantly colored stained glass. According to the Scottish art historian Annette Carruthers in her publication The Scottish Home (1996), the

Mains Street flat moved away from a value‐laden evocation of history to a more open‐ended and poetic expression of style.40 Unlike the Red House that sought to create a medieval utopia, the Mains Street flat offered a new aesthetic of refinement

38 Delorme, 17. 39 Ibid. 40 Annette Carruthers, The Scottish Home (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing 1996), 178‐9.

25 and unity where the rooms were carefully coordinated in color, form, and texture and each piece was custom‐made and site‐specific.

Furthermore, the Red House relied on nineteenth‐century historicism in its aim of the medieval ideal. Macdonald and Mackintosh shied from period styles of design and architecture. Their “ruthless scraping of traditions” was perhaps the primary reason their designs were met with opposition in England as it was the antithesis of the English character.41 Instead, the Mains Street flat is in alliance with the new, international style that characterizes modern design after 1900. The drawing room’s overwhelmingly white and austere interior was among the first modern design that was an autonomous creation unto itself.

Throughout the Mains Street flat, spaces are clearly articulated and distinctly defined through effects of color, light, furnishings, and decoration; yet, unity is maintained through the repetition of certain shapes in all of the rooms, an overall linear quality, a consistency of broad, unadorned areas accented with colorful and intricate details. The rooms are decorated according to their use, function and position within the home. The more public areas, such as the front‐entry hall and dining room, were decorated in darker spaces, while the white interiors, to which one ascended on the upper floors of the house, were reserved for more private uses.

A friend of the couple, Desmond Chapman‐Huston, explains that the house was “a unity, perfect from top to bottom.”42

41 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), 137. 42 Desmond Chapman‐Huston, The Lamp of Memory, (n.d), n.p.; quoted in Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement (London: Routeledge, 1977), 136.

26 In contrast to the dark dining room (figure 12), the drawing room was open, airy and filled with natural light. This room and the white bedroom upstairs were the rooms in which Macdonald’s involvement was strongest. In the context of the rapid urbanization in Glasgow and the pollution and disease that accompanied it, the exaggerated whiteness of the drawing room can be interpreted as an attempt to control the immediate environment and to exclude the threatening elements of society. Walter Benjamin catalogued decoration as a social construct used to counter the advance of technology in the creation of a workplace and to empower the homeowner.43 To an extent, decoration is a way to exert power. The most obvious manifestation of this is the white walls in the drawing room and bedroom.

The pristine whiteness of the rooms in Mains Street is a conscious attempt to maintain a power that many felt had been forfeited with the rise of the machine. In the drawing room, the couple created an equally dramatic effect with white for wall and floor‐coverings as well as for the majority of the furniture.

In a typical Victorian household, the drawing room was used to receive visitors. The drawing room was usually adorned with heavy curtains and thick lace at the windows, a patterned carpet, generously upholstered seating, ornate furniture and a huge range of ornaments, pictures and surface decoration.44 In contrast to Victorian drawing rooms, the Mains Street drawing room is bare. In addition to about a half dozen chairs, all of different design, the room contained four other pieces of furniture, a small oval coffee table, a square card table, a writing

43 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 160‐2. 44 Massey, 8.

27 desk, a bookcase, and a fireplace. The sense of freedom and spaciousness engendered by the sparse furnishings was accentuated further by the treatment of the open connecting spaces and a floor that was covered with a gray carpet.

Carefully placed furniture revealed a debt to Japanese house design.

The drawing room’s white walls, ivory carpet, painted furniture and linen curtains, which gently diffuse the light throughout the room, all increase the sense of luminosity in this interior. The emphasis on light, the relative sparseness, and the moveable quality of the furnishings were especially tailored to Macdonald’s needs, for she used this room as a studio, placing her easel near a window to maximize her access to the available light when working.45 To do the detailed work that characterized her watercolors and gesso panels, it would have been essential for her to have as much natural light as possible, especially since she found it difficult to work in gaslight. She wrote to Anna Muthesius that the darkness of the winters in

Glasgow was especially hard on her, saying, “It becomes most depressing and it is so very bad for one’s eyes—trying to work always by gas light.”46 Personal friend of the couple and historian Desmond Chapman Huston affirms that the room was created primarily for Macdonald’s use, stating that it was designed “in order that her genius may have a fitting home and her exquisite, quiet art congenial and fitting

45 Mary Newbery Sturrock reported that Macdonald worked in the drawing room. She said, “She put up an easel near the western window until she got plenty of light. As an art student, I was impressed by the fact that she could work with oils, thinned oils, without getting the white carpet dirty.” Quoted in Moffit, 53. 46 Margaret Macdonald to Anna Muthesius, undated letter, probably late 1902 or early 1903, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow University.

28 surroundings.”47 The Mains Street drawing room was a serene space of relaxation and contemplation.

The design of the furniture in the drawing room, like that in the dining room, was based on the interaction of the broad plain areas of accented decorative glass or metal panels. One of the most commanding pieces of the room is Macdonald’s writing desk (figure 13). Although it is known to have been designed by

Mackintosh, the desk also bore signs of Macdonald’s influence, and she almost certainly produced the repoussé panels for it. Mackintosh’s design for the desk includes tiny sketches for two different panel compositions, neither of which was adopted for the piece, although the final panels do maintain the central oval used as the thematic form in the design. The desk has deep‐sided cupboards that support the horizontal writing surface and a divided cupboard for stationary and other supplies.

Both the writing surface and the cupboard are neatly concealed behind the panel doors when the desk is not being used. Constructed of oak painted white, the desk includes two beaten metal panels placed adjacent to one another in the center of the doors. As placed, they form one symmetrical composition comprising two groups of three women, grouped on either side of a central oval shape. Although the panels are unsigned, they contain many elements that are characteristic of

Macdonald’s work: the mirror image composition, elongated female figures, depicted in flowing gowns and clustered asymmetrically, the abstraction of the

47 Desmond Chapman‐Huston, “Dreamers in the Moon,” from A Creel of Pear—Stray Papers (London 1910), 3. He also reported that Mackintosh told him that the southwest window was added to the drawing room so that Macdonald could watch the sunset. The Lamp of Memory, 126.

29 bodies into swelling geometric forms defined by incised lines, and the presence of the stylized roses.

The design of the desk echoes the overall theme of the room and in fact relates to the whole flat. The contrast between the plain surfaces and the decorative elements, the unity created by the smooth white surfaces, and the linear emphasis of the desk corresponds to the design scheme in the entire room and help to create unity in the interior. In addition, certain motifs used on the desk surfaces are distributed throughout the room in details such as stenciled images of the rose. The large curves set against rigid straight lines are common to all the furniture, and the large fireplace surround and the oval shapes in the desk and its metal panels are found in the other pieces of furniture and as glass inserts into the upper panel in the door and in the light fixtures.

The unity of the interiors is further reflected in Macdonald’s gesso panel, The

White Rose and the Red Rose (1902), which occupied a prominent place over the fireplace (figure 14).48 According to the art historian Sharon F. Parkinson,

Macdonald’s revival of gesso is perhaps one of Macdonald’s greatest accomplishments.49 From 1900 to 1909, one‐third of her work was in the gesso medium.50 Gesso comprises glue‐size, mixed with either calcium sulphate, which produces the soft gesso that was used during the Italian Renaissance, or calcium

48 Two versions of The White Rose and the Red Rose were done by Macdonald 1901‐02. The first was sold to Fritz Wärndorfer after the Turin exhibition, 1902. The second, a duplicate, hung in the drawing room at 78 Florentine Terrace. Robertson, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, n.p. 49 Sharon Fell Parkinson, “Les Sept Princesses: The Influence of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Dramatic Symbols, as Depicted in his Play, Upon the Visual Symbols of Margaret Macdonald’s Gesso Panels,” dissertation submitted to Ohio University (Nov 1994), 160. 50 Robertson, “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh 1864‐1893,” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), 112.

30 carbonate, which produces a hard gesso that was used in northern Europe. It is inflexible and absorbent and, once dry, may be worked to produce a smooth surface.

Variations on the basic recipe occur, notably the inclusion of white pigment to increase its brilliance. With its propensity for texturing and layering, gesso has a greater potential for including a wide range of materials and color and was better suited to develop a decorative style. Macdonald’s use of gesso can also be interpreted as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, and their revitalization of medieval art techniques and methods. Her gesso panels were sculptural in effect, with beads, shells and decorative string protruding from the canvas. The implication of this medium could be aligned with the ideals of John

Ruskin, who believed art must embellish, adorn, teach and elevate society by its form, content, manufacture and use.

The White Rose and the Red Rose was designed for the “Rose Boudoir” room, the Scottish gallery at the 1902 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in

Turin, and it occupied a place in the drawing room after the exhibition. The gesso was applied over a rough cloth support, allowing the texture of the fabric to show through in some areas. Some of the areas of gesso, such as those on the faces of the figures, were applied thickly and sanded to a smooth texture. Areas of the panel were delicately tinted ivory, green and pink, with blue, green and red glass beads, moonstones, and mother‐of‐pearl accents. String was used to create the flowing linear patterns on the surface. The two roses in the title refer to the two female figures who dominate the compositions, one marked by a white rose bud placed in the center of her forehead, a white rose near her left cheek, and a cluster of white

31 roses on her breast, the other women adorned with red roses in her hair and under her chin. White and red roses are placed throughout the composition.

In the White Rose and the Red Rose, the figure associated with white roses stands erect, facing front. She has been placed in the exact center of the composition and the long vertical shape of her body forms a column that divides the composition from top to bottom. The red rose woman is placed to the right and turns toward her companion, her head slightly bowed to her. The pink shape that defines the body of the second figure is placed at a slight diagonal slanting outward from the center, suggesting that the woman leans toward the central figure. Beyond the geometric shapes that suggest flowing drapery and garments, the bodies of the women are undefined and seemingly lost in the organic swirling of raised curving lines on the surface of the panel. The two women, although shown as being separate figures, are also differentiated. The ambiguous definitions of the figures with the backdrop are suggestive of a commune. On either side of the composition straight raised lines describe stems supporting the large roses at each upper corner. Horizontal lines move across the upper part of the composition, supporting other roses. These straight lines in combination with the long vertical of the central woman suggest elements of structure, defining the edges of the composition, stabilizing it, and controlling the large canvas. It visually resembles post and lintel construction, and may be intended to suggest a trellis, which would connect it thematically with the decorations in the dining room.

The greatest detail and movements in the composition are concentrated within or around the linear compositional elements: a flourish of roses and swirling

32 lines at the panel’s outer corners and a cluster of roses in long lines suggesting hair articulated within the outlines of the central figure’s body. Some of the basic motifs used in the desk and its decorative panel are repeated in the gesso panel in terms of formal and thematic concerns. They include the symmetrical division of the composition with emphasis placed on the center, the repetition of shapes including the oval and rose shape, the contrast between plain and highly detailed surfaces and smooth and rough textures, the rhythmic repetition of lines and curves throughout, and the subject matter of women associated with roses.

Many of these effects are parallel to those created throughout the room. The

“structural” elements in the panel, the vertical and horizontal lines of applied string, find correspondence in the vertical straps and the cornice applied to the wall surfaces, simultaneously creating an illusion of shallow space and accenting the flatness and function of the surface. The play of curves against the straight lines and flat surfaces is like the interaction of lines and planes within the furniture and between furniture and wall surfaces. The visible brushwork in the application of gesso and paint and the frank revelation of the cloth beneath it, set against areas of almost artificial smoothness that mimic flesh, reveal the artifice of artistic technique and suggest an interest in revealing artistic process and methods of construction in an actual sense. This concern parallels Mackintosh’s desire to bring signs of craft in the construction elements to the surface in this interior, in visual form if not in actuality, through the reference to post and lintel construction in the straps and cornice, the focus on the wall surface in this interior, and the frank revelation of the interior spaces and their demands on the exterior of his other buildings. The

33 illusion of space within a shallow relief surface, the linear division into distinct parts, the balance between pattern and flat color, the unifying effects of a linear

“web” on the surface of the composition, the play of solids and voids, plastic qualities of the interaction of straight lines and curves are all consistent throughout her work and are reflected in the underlying conception of the interiors.

The luminous quality of the room, the restraint of superfluous decorative elements, the unity of furniture and decorative effects, including the gesso panel, stained glass and wall treatments, create an air of elegant serenity that was dependent on the harmonious interaction of the two artists. Some critics identified the poetic serenity of the interiors as the outcome of a mystical experience that gave rise to the creative process. That experience, they said, was rooted in the union of two minds or souls. E. B. Kalas wrote a description of the Mackintosh apartment in

1905 for De la Tamis à la Spree: l’essor des industries d’art. He described the pristine interiors and their inhabitants in a way that suggests that the interiors are both the result of and the setting for the mystical union of creative souls:

On the second floor of a modest building in the great industrial smokey town of Glasgow there is a drawing room amazingly white and clean looking. Walls, ceilings and furniture have all the virginal beauty of white satin. The note throughout is white‐white and violet….In the stillness of the studio among a bevy of plants and strewn with novels of Maeterlinck, two visionary souls, in ecstatic communion from the heights of loving mateship, are wafted still further aloft to the heavenly regions of creation.51

The mention of “virginal white satin” and “ecstatic communion from the heights of loving mateship” implies the erotic union of bride and bridegroom, a

51 B. E. Kalas, “The Art of Glasgow,” De la Tamise à la Sprèe: L’essor des industries d’art, trans, John Dunlop (Rheims, 1905), reprinted in Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition Catalogue (Glasgow, 1933), 1.

34 union, in this account both symbolic and actual, that results in artistic creation.

Mystical qualities as they pertain to the union of souls embodied in the drawing room were referred to by other contemporaries of the couple. Desmond Chapman‐

Huston described their room as a “shrine made with love” and, in the same paragraph, a nest, an oasis, a revelation, and a delight, emphasizing the mystical aspects of worship, initiation into secret knowledge, and the qualities of physical comfort and pleasure.52 The mystical process of creativity was dependent upon the loving union of two individuals, the “visionary souls.”53

52 Chapman‐Huston, The Lamp of Memory, 125. 53 Brett, The Poetics of Workmanship, 103. The erotic aspects of the couple’s interiors have been explored recently by Brett. In this book, Brett concurs with my theory that the white interiors must be understood to be the product of two minds, although equal participation by both artists in every aspect cannot be assumed.

35 Chapter 3 The Waerndorfer Music Room (1906): An Embodiment of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Modern Design

A specter haunts the theory and practice of the arts throughout our century: the specter of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a notion born of late romanticism, nurtured and matured within the modernist moment, and never wholly exorcised in the era of postmodernism and of electronic reproduction.54 Annette Michelson

Mrs. Mackintosh is outstanding for her illustrations of mystic poetry. Maeterlinck’s imaginative writing…echo profoundly in her soul, and under [his] influence her hand creates drawings, paintings and reliefs whose unusually meticulous and delicate execution never hampers their spiritual clarity. I know of no plaster relief by any living artist which can be compared to hers.55 E. B. Kalas

In 1902, Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh were at the height of their careers. The newlywed couple achieved international success at the eighth Vienna Secession exhibition of 1900. Well‐illustrated features of their installation appeared in periodicals such as Dekorative Kunst, The Studio and Yellow

Book.56 Their work was praised for their creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that combines architecture, decoration, space, and light that contributes to the perception of unity. The creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk was a main objective of Viennese interior design at the time. The impact made by their room installation at the eighth Secession led to the couple’s most substantial commission outside of Glasgow, the Music Room for the Viennese businessman Franz

54 Annette Michelson, “’Where is Your Rupture?’: Mass Culture and Gesamtkunstwerk,” October, (Spring 1991): 95. 55 B. E. Kalas, “De la Tamis a la Spree: L’essor des industries d’art,” trans by John Dunlop, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh Exhibition Catalogue (1933), 4. 56 Talwin Morris, “Concerning the Work of Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair—An Appreciation” Dekorative Kunst (Nov 1898). Signed “D.M.,” “Scotch Notes,” The Studio (No 4, July 1891). Gleeson White, “Some Glasgow Designers and Their Work,” The Studio (vol. 11, 1897). William Watson, “Tell Me Not Now,” Yellow Book (Oct 1894).

36 Waerndorfer (1868‐1939). A physical embodiment of a total environment, the

Music Room was at one time believed to have been destroyed after World War I; however, recent inquiry has led to the rediscovery of several of its contents including Macdonald’s masterpiece, the gesso panel The Seven Princesses (1906).57

(figure 15) This discovery has substantively expanded both one’s understandings of

Macdonald’s artistic achievement and of the nature of Macdonald’s and

Mackintosh’s collaborative practice.

During their lifetimes, Macdonald and Mackintosh’s work was never fully accepted in Britain. Critics/scholars dismissed their work as “decadent” due to its references to Symbolist literature and mythology and its use of the contorted imagery of women. On the Continent, in contrast, the couple’s designs were praised for the same reason their work was dismissed in Scotland. Whereas most modern endeavors opposed the decorative, the Vienna Secessionists hailed design to be of equal importance with the fine arts, particularly designs that embodied the

Gesamtkunstwerk. The Vienna Secession was formed on May 22, 1897, when the painter Gustav Klimt and his colleagues left a meeting of Künstlergenossenschaft over a policy concerning exhibitions that they considered discriminatory.58

Nineteen artists, including Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Kolo Moser and Carl Moll, rejected the conservative attitude toward the arts of the Künstlerhaus.

The Vienna Secession was formed shortly after, and the practice of these artists and

57 Painted in 1903, The Seven Princesses was found in 1993 in the basement of Osterreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst. 58 For further reading on the exhibition policy dispute, see James Shedel Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897­1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, Inc., 1981), 17‐21.

37 designers added artistry to mundane objects to make them useable things of beauty, celebrated the organicism of life and art’s link to it, and championed the equality of the fine and applied arts and sought their unification in the total work of art.59 The

Secession’s motto, “To the time its art. To art, its freedom,” demonstrates two of the key concepts that informed the member’s works—a desire to be modern and an assertion of the artist’s liberties to work across different media. In opposition to the floral embellishment of Secessionist design, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos published his diatribe “Ornament and Crime” (1908). In his attack on ornamentation, Loos called for a practice in which art, language, and discipline would be made ever more distinct.60 According to Loos, decoration was a “crime” against the physical and economic well‐being of the nation because it required excessive labor and material.61 His emphasis on functionalism and use of largely unadorned materials with clean lines and surfaces sought to reflect the simple, practical beauty he saw fitting for modern life.

Loos was apparently unaware that the Secessionists, too, had a desire to link art and life. In the their desire to be modern, the Secessionists sought to unify the fine and applied arts. The Eighth Secession Exhibition in 1900 was the first organized retrospective of “modern interiors furnished in accordance with a new

Viennese taste.”62 The Secessionists rejected easel painting in favor of the applied arts. Hoffmann formulated the Eighth Secession’s program: “As before in painting

59 James Shedel, Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897­1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, Inc., 1981), 3. 60 Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” in ed. Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 23. 61 Shedel, 167. 62 Christian Brandstätter, Wiener Werkstätte Design in Vienna 1903­1932 (New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 8.

38 and sculpture [at the first exhibition], now we also wish to display works of foreign creativity in competition with the achievements of our own artists in the field of arts and crafts.”63 To the exhibition, Macdonald and Mackintosh lent furniture from their

Mains Street flat, some embroidery and metalwork by Macdonald, a clock and watercolors by Macdonald and her sister Frances Macdonald, and the two panels

The May Queen (1900) and Wassail (1900) from the Ingram Street Tea‐Rooms

(figures 5 and 7).

The Eighth Secession was the newlyweds’ first journey from Glasgow as a married couple, and it was highly successful. Macdonald’s hair always caused a sensation when she travelled abroad. Her presence was noted by a Viennese newspaper that mentioned “a young lady with reddish hair, dressed elegantly in an unusual manner, attracted general attention.”64 One report even claimed that students from the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts carried Macdonald and

Mackintosh through the streets in triumph. The May Queen and Wassail were mentioned in a number of reviews, and two years later, a number of allegorical plaster “friezes” were similarly positioned in various side rooms of the Secession building, most notably Klimt’s Beethoven frieze (1902), a radiant composition of gold that fuses music and visuality (figure 16). The couple’s geometric style, with its emphasis on a clear, spatial structure, greatly influenced the Secessionists. The interiors of Macdonald and Mackintosh were among the first designs to break with

Art Nouveau’s curvalinearity. According to the Scottish art critic Jude Burkhauser, the Vienna Exhibition established Mackintosh as one of the first modern architects

63 Ibid. 64 “Report on the Opening of the 8th Secession Exhibition,” Neur Freie Presse, Vienna, 3 Nov 1900.

39 and also affirmed that he “gave new life to a group of brilliant young architects, decorators, sculptors, and metalworkers who at once acknowledged him as their leader.”65

The success of Macdonald and Mackintosh in Vienna led to the commission of the Waerndorfer Music Room, which was to be the couple’s most sophisticated interior. Franz Waerndorfer was the second son of a wealthy Jewish co‐owner of what had by 1900 become the Österreichisches Textilwerk, one of the largest textile manufacturing concerns in Austria. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the

Secession from its inception and was interested in the Arts and Crafts movement.

His business allowed him to make frequent trips to England where Waerndorfer would come in contact with William Morris and his followers. Waerndorfer would later become the financial backing and business manager of the Wiener Werkstätte, the English‐inspired craft workshop that was founded with Hoffmann and Moser in

1903.

The philosophical underpinning of the Wiener Werkstätte was the

Gesamtkunstwerk. The composer Richard Wagner (1813‐1883) is credited with formulating the concept in a series of publications from 1849 to 1851. Called the

“epitome of modernity” by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk was to be used to mend social, political and cultural divisions. Writing in exile in Zurich after the failure of the German revolution in

1849, Wagner saw the disintegration of the community of the arts as a symbol of the

65 Jude Burkhauser, “The Glasgow Style” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing), 82.

40 selfishness of the individual members of a greater social whole.66 In Vienna, the

Gesamtkunstwerk manifested itself in word, image and music. Wagner’s theatre in

Bayreuth, now known as Bayreuth Festspielhaus, is the last modernist aesthetic utopia.67 The Gesamtkunswerk aligns with the modernist’s anti‐historicism.

According to the theorist and critic of contemporary culture Craig Owens, Wagner’s goal for Bayreuth was “to create an artificial paradise of immediacy, transparency, and wholeness.”68

Though it is customary to begin discussions of the Gesamtkunstwerk with reference to Wagner, many modern artist groups embraced the Gesamtkunstwerk without subscribing to the Gesamtkunswerk to end all synthesis—the totalitarian state. The work of architect Walter Gropius director of the Bauhaus, the Blaue

Reiter, the Ballets Russes and De Stijl, all reveal different aspects of the

Gesamtkunswerk and how it was developed. Art Nouveau and its notion of the

Gesamtkunstwerk hoped to fix the bonds between art and society. By the early twentieth century, the Gesamtkunstwerk had become key to a collective artistic ambition, and as Peter Vergo observed, “the term Gesamtkunstwerk was hurled around like a kind of verbal projectile.”69 Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor

Adorno in a well‐known study of Wagner states, ““When the dream is at its most exalted, the commodity is closest to hand.”70 This statement alludes to how the

Gesamtkunstwerk, despite its utopian aim, was an elitist concept that only the rich

66 Wagner (1983), 17. 67 Craig Owens, “Bayreuth ’82,” October (Sept 1982): 132. 68 Ibid. 69 Peter Vergo, “The Origins of Expressionism and the Notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Behr, Fanning and Jarman, Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 12. 70 Rodney Livingstone, trans., In Search of Wagner, by Theodor Adorno, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1981), 23.

41 could try to achieve. The Gesamtkunstwerk is largely a utopian concept that is linked with ambivalence towards the transformation of society in the machine era.

Macdonald and Mackintosh were exemplary exponents of the early twentieth‐century quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk in the visual arts and design. The

Waerndorfer Music Room combines architecture, design and decoration with music, literature and daily life. Waerndorfer was for Macdonald and Mackintosh the ideal patron, and similar to Macdonald and Mackintosh, he advocated the

Gesamtkunswerk. One way that Waerndorfer asserted this way of thinking is through the aesthetics of his living quarters. In 1900, Waerndorfer commissioned two major remodels; first, of his dining room, which was designed by Hoffmann; and second, of the music room, which was designed by Macdonald and Mackintosh.

The details of the commission were later finalized in Turin, Italy, in 1902 during the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art, a huge exposition featuring work from Europe and America. The Turin exhibition was considered the official stamp of recognition for the modern movement in design.71 It brought

Waerndorfer and the Scottish couple together again and allowed them to discuss the designs for the music room. The centerpiece of the Scottish Section was labeled

“The Rose Boudoir,” a room which Macdonald and Mackintosh presented the development of their achievements since Vienna, and they were awarded a diploma of honor (figure 17). The interior was unified by a single symbolic theme, namely of the Glasgow rose, a simplified, abstract version of the flower that is prevalent in the

71 Jude Burkhauser, “The Misses Macdonald and the Four” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing), 92.

42 Glasgow Style. The image of the rose informed all elements of the furniture inlays, light shades and color schemes. Macdonald’s two gesso panels The White Rose and the Red Rose (1902) and The Heart of the Rose (1902) were the major decorative elements of the room (figures 14 and 18). Also on display in the exhibition were the pages of Mackintoshes’ “House for an Art Lover” portfolio, the set of lithographs featuring his competition designs from 1901 (figure 19). The interiors in “House for an Art Lover” included a music room, sparsely furnished and decorated in the same spirit as the couple’s Mains Street flat. Waerndorfer greatly admired “The Rose

Boudoir” and many of its elements, such as the strong, thematic unity, the allusions to symbolism and literature and the aesthetics of “House for an Art Lover” that were employed in the Music Room.

Waerndorfer regarded Macdonald in the same esteem as her husband. In

1924, he concluded, “I have met one distinguished woman in my entire life: Mrs.

Mackintosh.”72 Unlike the tea‐rooms and the couples’ Mains Street flat, their music room was designed mainly with aesthetic purposes in mind. Its function may have been served in relation to the dining room as a kind of “minstrel’s gallery.”73 The cluttered appearance conveyed by the few surviving photographs leads one to suppose what it would have made a small reception room, holding only a few guests at a time. The Music Salon was commissioned after 1900 and completed by the end of 1902. In its day, it was described as “a place of pilgrimage for lovers of art, and

72 Waerndorfer to Eduard Josef Wimmer, 3 June 1924. Quoted in Peter Vergo, “Fritz Waerndorfer as Collector,” Alte und Moderne Kunst (1981), 38. 73 Pamela Robertson, “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh,” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920, (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing), 54.

43 for strangers coming to the city” an interior in which “each thought resolves itself as do the chords of music, tell the orchestration is perfect, the effect one of complete repose filling the soul.”74 The design was a physical embodiment of a the

Gesamtkunstwerk. One way Macdonald and Mackintosh achieved this was through the room’s overt theme of the symbolist drama The Seven Princesses (1891).

The Seven Princesses, written by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862‐1949), was regarded as the most articulate playwright at the time. Although The Seven

Princesses has fallen into obscurity today, in the early 1900s, Belgian Symbolism was very fashionable in avant‐garde circles. The periodical Deutsche Kunst und

Dekoration devoted a lengthy article to the subject in 1902. Macdonald greatly admired symbolist literature and had certainly heard of the play. In fact, The Seven

Princesses was first published in English in 1897 by The Pageant, a literary publication that combined literature and art, and its editor was Gleeson White, the writer who interviewed the Macdonald sisters in 1896.75

The Seven Princesses is a one‐act play with a simple narrative about the return of Prince Marcellus to his ancestral home to find one of his seven royal cousins, the Princess Ursula, dead. The play, however, has a deeper theme: the quest for knowledge, a quest which involves the passage through death. When the heroine Ursula, a symbol of ideal love/knowledge is approached by her prince, the result is death and the permanent separation of the two lovers.76 The Seven

74 A. S. Levetus, “Glasgow Artists in Vienna,” Glasgow Herald, 29 May 1909. 75 Robertson, “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: The Seven Princesses,” A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon (Vienna: Bouhlau, 2000), 60. 76 Bille Wickre, Collaboration in the Work of Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and J. Herbert MacNair, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1993, 397.

44 Princesses was regarded as unplayable due to its heavy use of symbolism and its repetitious dialogue and long silences. The art historian Billie Wickre has observed that Macdonald’s gesso and Maeterlinck’s play both express “the same melodic, ethereal and mysterious ideas.”77 Here, Wickre is likely referring to the ethereal, mystical quality of Macdonald’s imagery in the gesso panels. Macdonald’s interpretation of The Seven Princesses combined two of the final scenes of the play, the rising of the six awakening princesses and the moment when the princesses lent over their prostrate sister and lifted her up—“her hair disheveled, her head rigid and laid her on the topmost of the seven marble steps.”78

As the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk was in full force, there was a revival in the cosmic character of art, most notably in France, Belgium, Germany and Austria.

Symbolism became one of the key movements aligned with utopianism and the

Gesamtkunstwerk. Macdonald was more preoccupied with Symbolism than

Mackintosh, who was more interested in organic form and natural imagery.

According to art historian Timothy Neat, “It seems certain that is was women, particularly Margaret Macdonald, who conceived, promoted and most loyally affirmed the central poetic ideas—the sacred ideals—which lie at the heart of the work of the [Glasgow] Four.”79 As the machine began to permeate every aspect of society, artists and poets reverted to symbols to represent ideas in their art.

Macdonald and Mackintosh’s friends and colleagues involved in symbolism include

77 Collaboration of the Four, 148. 78 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Seven Princesses, trans. by Richard Hovey (London: Herbert Stone and Company, 1984), 323. 79 Timothy Neat, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor: Margaret Macdonald and the Principle of Choice,” Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880­1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, National Museums of Scotland Publishing),, 117.

45 Francis Newberry, Patrick Geddes, the Yeats brothers, Oscar Wilde, Jean Delville,

Hoffmann, Klimt, Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.80

The major features of the Waerndorfer music room were two full‐length decorative gesso panels that faced each other from opposite sides of the room. Only one frieze survives, namely, The Seven Princesses by Macdonald (figure 15).81 The panel was Macdonald’s most ambitious project and has as many as eleven layers of gesso.82 The surface was worked in a variety of ways: burnished to a porcelain finish for the shoulders and heads, modeled for the roses and piped on to create the decorative surface lines. Reflective colored glass jewels and pieces of shell were applied to the surface. Everything was sealed with varnish. According to art historian Pamela Robertson, the presence of this work in the room elevates “the stature of this room as a work of art beyond formal design terms.”83

The Waerndorfer music room was Macdonald’s and Mackintosh’s most important collaborative interior. It was the couple’s first and only significant commission outside of Glasgow, and it was their only commission where money was no object.84 The music room was certainly the interior to which Macdonald made her most substantial contribution. Her panel provided the keynote for imagery, motif and color throughout the room. It was also the couple’s last collaborative project and was their most sophisticated interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk. It was conceived of a single aesthetic with every detail in harmonious unity. It

80 Timothy Neat, Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald (Edinburgh: Canongate Press Ltd., 1994), 23. 81 Even though the room was completed in 1902, the frieze is inscribed with the date 1906. 82 Robertson, “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: The Seven Princesses,” 62. 83 “Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: The Seven Princesses,” 60. 84 Ibid, 58.

46 realized the couple’s ideal of the collaboration of architect/designer/artist and craftspeople and drew together the major expressive forms: drama, music and fine arts. As an entity, it was a living work of art which visitors and musicians participated. The Gesamtkunstwerk tapped into the hope of a more perfect, unified world where life can be improved through art. Such a view may admittedly be unrealistic in its ultimate goal, but it is one that clearly attempts to surpass what is merely commercial or aesthetic in the roles of art.

47 Conclusion

By 1927, the Mackintoshes relocated to the coastal town Port Vendres in the

South of France. The village had been a popular artistic hub since the mid‐ nineteenth century, and attracted leading painters including Jean‐Baptiste‐Camille

Corot, Charles‐François Daubigny, Johan Jongkind, Paul Signac and, more recently,

Henri Matisse and André Derain. The couple had taken up a residence nearby, preferring to paint the less obviously picturesque landscape of the village than to explore the peripheral coastline. The couple’s move to France came about during a period of gradual decline of Mackintosh’s commercial success when the couple faced financial difficulties. Apart from the remodeling of W. J. Bassett‐Lowke’s

Northampton house in 1916, the Mackintosh’s received almost no substantial commissions in the last fifteen years of their lives. While in Port Vendres,

Mackintosh’s main preoccupation was watercolor painting. As for Macdonald, her artistic output ended in France. Her poor health and preoccupation with

Mackintosh’s growing depression and alcohol abuse were her primary concerns in the later years of her life.

The spring of 1927, Macdonald travelled alone to London, leaving

Mackintosh in Port Vendres. She remained in England for six weeks. Her trip had several purposes: to put the couple’s financial affairs in order; seek medical and dental care; and try to place Mackintosh’s recent paintings with one or more galleries in London. During his wife’s absence, Mackintosh wrote her a journal in letter form that he called “The Chronycle.” Each of the twenty‐three letters provides a running commentary on a few days’ events, his work, and poignant reiterations of

48 his sadness at being separated from his wife. In Mackintosh’s view, each of his letters could be reduced to the three words, “I love you,” a message frequently underlined with loving compliments. Mackintosh repeatedly embraces his wife in words as “M.M”—“My Margaret,” and signs himself “Y.T.”—“Your Toshie.”

Shortly after Macdonald’s homecoming to Port Vendres, the couple was forced to return to London. Mackintosh’s health was failing; he required extensive medical treatment at Westminster Hospital for cancer of the tongue. The cancer proved fatal, and Mackintosh died in London on December 10, 1928. Macdonald’s final five years were lonely and restless, spent between France and southern

England. She died in 1933 in a London nursing home at the age of sixty‐nine. At that time, couple’s estate was valued at just over eighty‐eight pounds due to health problems and the inability to receive substantial commissions.

In concluding this study, I remind my readers of the significance of collectivism for an aspiring female artist at the turn of the twentieth century. The first chapter revealed how female designers such as Macdonald in a commercial environment that valued male art over female designs. Yet, Macdonald overcame

Victorian stereotypes of gender through collectivism. The collaborative approach that the Mackintosh’s developed influenced the modernism. Macdonald’s and

Mackintosh’s interiors for Miss Cranston were among the first in which a female coined the entire decorative scheme. In the second chapter, I explored the couple’s

Mains Street drawing room and explained the ways it exemplifies an extension of the Arts and Crafts style. I showed how Macdonald and Mackintosh were influenced by the Arts and Crafts’ principles of good design promoting reform. Also, I

49 demonstrated how the Mains Street drawing room differed from the William

Morris’s Red House in its move from historicism. Lastly, in chapter three, I examined the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk which determined and explained how the Mackintosh’s Waerndorfer Music Salon embodied this concept, making it a total work of art, music and design.

From the earliest stages of their marriage, over twenty‐five years earlier, the couple had been seen as united by love and art. Their friend Hermann Muthesius, the German critic, had described them then as the “Künstlerpaar,” the artist couple.85 While their artistic collaboration had ceased over ten years before,

Mackintosh is generous in acknowledging Macdonald’s contribution: “You must remember that in all of my architectural efforts you have been half if not three‐ quarters of them.”86 Furthermore, Mackintosh’s concerns about the inequality of the female laborer’s wages as compared to male counterparts shows an enlightened belief in equal pay for work.

Eight decades after Macdonald’s death, her contributions to design and decorative art are only beginning to be recognized. The gesso and embroidery panels for the Ingram Street and Sauchiehall Street tea‐rooms, the Mains Street flat, the Turin Rose Boudoir, the Waerndorfer Music Room are among her finest achievements. By examining Macdonald’s contribution to her and Mackintosh’s designs, one can gain a fuller understanding of collectivism, modernism and the

Gesamtkunstwerk.

85 Quoted in The Chronycle: The Letters of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, 1927 (Glasgow: Hunterian Art Gallery, 2001), 21. 86 Letter from C. R. Mackintosh to M. Macdonald, 16 May 1927, Collection of Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.

50

List of Illustrations

1. Margaret Macdonald, photo by H.L. Hamilton, dimensions unknown.

2. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, photo by T & R Annan and Sons, Ltd., Glasgow, dimensions unknown.

3. Miss Cranston, ca. 1904, photo by T & R Annan and Sons, Ltd., Glasgow, dimensions unknown.

4. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, side chair, 1897, stained oak and silk, 137.85 x 50.8 x 45.72 cm (54.27 x 20 x 18 in.), Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.

5. Margaret Macdonald, The May Queen, 1900, gesso panel with twine, glass and beads, 421 cm x 208 cm (165.75 x 81.89 in.), Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

6. Margaret Macdonald, The Dew, 1901, silvered lead in repoussé, 122.5 x 29.8 cm (48.23 x 11.73 in.), Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

7. Mackintosh, The Wassail, 1900, gesso panel with twine, glass and beads, 412.31 x 208 cm (162.33 x 81.89 in.), Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

8. Margaret Macdonald, O Ye that Walk in Willow Wood, ca. 1903‐04, painted gesso with twine and colored glass beads, 164.5 x 58.4 cm (64.76 x 22.99 in.), private collection.

9. Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mains Street flat Drawing Room, 1900, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, photo by T & R Annan & Sons Ltd.

10. Philip Webb, Red House exterior, 1859‐60, Bexleyheath, Kent.

11. Philip Webb, William Morris, et. al, Red House interior view, 1859‐60, Bexleyheath, Kent.

12. Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mains Street dining room, 1900, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.

13. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, drawing room desk, 1900, oak, painted white with beaten silver copper panels, 128 x 173 x 51.6 cm (50.39 x 68.11 in.), Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.

51 14. Margaret Macdonald, The White and Red Rose, ca. 1902, painted gesso set with string, glass beads and shell on hessian, 101 x 103 cm (39.73 x 40.55 in.), Private collection of Donald and Eleanor Taffner.

15. Margaret Macdonald, The Seven Princesses, 1906, gesso panel with beads, shells and silver string, 596.8 x 254 cm (234.94 x 98.98 in.), Vienna Museum of Arts and Crafts, Vienna.

16. Gustav Klimt, The Beethoven Frieze, 1902, casein paint, gold paint, chalk, graphite, applied plaster, and appliqué materials, 341.4 x 215 cm (134.25 x 84.65 ft), Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna.

17. Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, “The Rose Boudoir” room, 1902, photo by The Studio, 1902.

18. Margaret Macdonald, The Heart of the Rose, ca. 1902‐03, painted gesso panel, 246 x 238.76 cm (96.9 x 94 in.), Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow.

19. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, Design for “House for an Art Lover,” 1901, decorative panel in Music Room, lithograph, 38.8 x 52.3 cm (15.28 x 20.59 in.), Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow.

52 Bibliography and Works Consulted

Books

Billcliffe, Roger. Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings and Interior Designs. Third Edition. New York City, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1986.

Burkhauser, Jude, ed. Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880‐1920. Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1993.

Brett, David. C. R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1992.

Carruthers, Annette, ed. The Scottish Home. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 1996.

Delorme, Jean‐Claude. Architects’ Dream Houses. New York City, New York: Abbeville Press, 1996.

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

Egger, Hanna, Pamela Robertson, et al. A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and the Salon Waerdorfer in Vienna. Vienna: Bohlau, 2000.

Hartley, Keith. Scottish Art since 1900. London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1989.

Helland, Janice. The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Howarth, Thomas. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement. London: Routeledge, 1977.

Kinchin, Perilla. Taking Tea With Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate, 1998.

Macaulay, James. Hill House: Charles Rennie Mackintosh. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1994.

Macdonald, Murdo. Scottish Art. New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Seven Princesses, trans. by Richard Hovey. London: Herbert Stone and Company, 1984.

53

Marsh, Jan. William Morris & Red House. London: National Trust Books, 2005.

Marsh, Jan and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Women Artists and the Pre‐Raphaelite Movement. London: Virago Press Ltd, 1989.

Martin, Elizabeth and Vivian Meyer. Female Gazes: Seventy‐Five Women Artists. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1997.

Massey, Anne. Interior Design of the 20th Century. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1990.

Neat, Timothy. Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. Edinburgh: Canongate Press Ltd, 1994.

Parkinson, Sharon Fell. Les Sept Princesses: The Influence of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Dramatic Symbols, as Depicted in his Play, Upon the Visual Symbols of Margaret Macdonald’s Gesso Panels. Unpublished dissertation submitted to Ohio University (Nov 1994).

Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, with an introduction by Richard Weston. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. 4th edition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

Robertson, Pamela Reekie. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, 1864‐1933. Glasgow, University of Glasgow Press, 1983.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “Willowwood.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems. London: Oswald Doughty, 1957.

Shedel, James. Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna, 1897‐1914. Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, Inc., 1981.

Wickre, Billie K. Collaboration in the Work of Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, J. Herbert MacNair. (PdD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993).

Wilhide, Elizabeth. The Mackintosh Style: Design and Décor. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1995.

“Introduction,” to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Haus eines Kunstfreundes. Meistens eins Innendekoration. Trans. by Christine Hughson. Darmstadt, 1901.

54 Exhibition Catalogues

Duncan, Alastair. Modernism: Modernist Design 1880‐1940. Minneapolis, MN: Norwest Corporation, 1998.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: Memorial Exhibition. Glasgow: McClellan Galleries, 1933.

Articles/Periodicals Michelson, Annette. “’Where is Your Rupture?’: Mass Culture and Gesamtkunstwerk.” October: The Second Decade, 1986‐1996, ed. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yves‐Alain Bois, et. al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997): 95‐113.

Owens, Craig. “Bayreuth ’82,” Art in America Vol. 70, No. 8 (Sept 1982): 132‐38.

Taylor, J. “Modern Decorative Art at Glasgow.” The Studio (October 1906): 29‐35.

Waddel, Jeffrey J. “Some Recent Glasgow Tea‐Rooms.” The Builders’ Journal (April 15, 1903): 126.

Das englische Haus. 3 vol. (Berlin 1904‐05), trans. J. Seligman (London 1979): 48‐ 54.

Archival Resources Robertson, Pamela, ed. The Chronycle: The Letters of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Margaret Macdonald, 1927. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2001.

“Seemliness” lecture by Charles Rennie Mackintosh delivered at the Glasgow School of Art, [1902]. Hunterian Art Gallery archive, University of Glasgow.

55

Figure 1 Margaret Macdonald Photo by H. L. Hamilton Dimensions unknown

56

Figure 2 Charles Rennie Mackintosh Photo by T & R Annan and Sons, Ltd., Glasgow Dimensions unknown

57

Figure 3 Miss Cranston Photo by T & R Annan and Sons, Ltd., Glasgow Dimensions unknown

58

Figure 3 Charles Rennie Mackintosh Side Chair 1898 Stained oak and silk 137.85 x 50.8 x 45.72 cm (54.27 x 20 x 18 in.) Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

59

Figure 5 Margaret Macdonald The May Queen 1900 Gesso panel with twine, beads and glass inlay 421 x 208 cm (165.75 x 81.89 in) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

60

Figure 6 Margaret Macdonald The Dew 1901 Silvered lead in repoussé 122.5 cm x 29.8 cm (48.23 x 11.73 in.) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

61

Figure 7 Charles Rennie Mackintosh The Wassail 1900 Gesso panel with glass, beads and tin inlay 412.31 x 208 cm (162.33 x 81.89 in.) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

62

Figure 8 Margaret Macdonald O Ye That Walk in Willow Wood Ca. 1903‐04 Painted gesso with twine and colored glass beads 164.5 cm x 58.4 cm (64.76 x 22.99 in.) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

63

Figure 9 Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh Mains Street Flat Drawing Room Photo by Craig Annan 1900 Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

64

Figure 10 Philip Webb Red House exterior 1859‐60 Bexleyheath, Kent

65

Figure 11 Philip Webb, William Morris, et. al Red House interior 1859‐60 Bexleyheath, Kent

66

Figure 12 Mains Street Flat Dining Room 1906 Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

67

Figure 13 Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh Drawing room desk 1900 oak painted white with beaten metal panels 128 x 173 x 51.6 cm (50.39 x 68.11 in.) Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

68

Figure 14 Margaret Macdonald The White Rose and the Red Rose ca. 1902 painted gesso set with string, glass beads and shell on hessian 101 x 103.5 cm (39.73 x 40.55 in.) Private collection of Donald and Eleanor Taffner

69

Figure 15 Margaret Macdonald The Seven Princesses 1906 Gesso and oil paint with beads and shell 596.75 x 251.4 cm (234.94 x 98.98 in.) Vienna Arts and Crafts Museum, Vienna

70

Figure 16 Gustav Klimt The Beethoven Frieze 1902 Casein paint, gold paint, chalk, graphite, applied plaster, appliqué materials 341.4 x 215 cm (134.25 x 84.65 in.) Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna

71

Figure 17 Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh “The Rose Boudoir” 1902 Photo by The Studio

72

Figure 18 Margaret Macdonald The Heart of the Rose Ca. 1902‐03 Painted gesso panel 96.9 x 94 cm (38.14 x 37 in.) Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow

73

Figure 19 Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh Design for “House for an Art Lover” 1901 Decorative panel in Music Room Lithograph 38.8 x 52.3 cm (15.28 x 20.59 in.) Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow

74