Spooky Grandpa

If Britain has produced no modern architect to rival such contemporary giants as France's Le Corbusier, Germany's Walter Gropius or the U.S.'s Frank Lloyd Wright, it can at least lay claim to a granddaddy of them all: a brilliant turn-of-the-century Scot named Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The subject of a recent biography and the star of a recent exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, Mackintosh is currently Topic A in England's intellectual reviews and arty party conversations.

Vegetable Writhings. Glasgow-born in 1868, Mackintosh made his fame at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, lost it in drink, bad temper and unproductiveness, and died unnoticed in 1928. Yet he was a major link between the art nonveau in fashion during his heyday and the functional rigor favored today. Art nonveau was a style better suited to the limp, attenuated illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley than to architecture; it was once described as "a nerveless and sinuous line inappropriate for the description of any structure more firm than that of weeds under water." Mackintosh plunged into this watery world and emerged with a style all his own. In architecture Mackintosh subordinated the vegetable writhings of art nouveau to massive stonework reminiscent of 17th century Scottish castles. His famed Glasgow School of Art so well integrated the two that critics today vehemently disagree as to whether the building was a flowering of art nouveau or a foreshadowing of Gropius' bald glass and concrete Bauhaus building at Dessau. One critic decries the school's "extreme tension, its tiny, delicate, virginal essence, its icy withdrawal from everything worldly . . . The lily stem streams up in the long library windows and the flower peeps out of the embrasures above. This is architecture of the fin-de-siecle neurosis." Replies another: "The building itself is a masculine essay in square-cut stone, iron and plate glass ... the structural starkness is almost dour, the magnificently lit studios altogether functional . . . There is more here of Gropius than there is of Beardsley."

Black & White Discomfort. In interior decoration, Mackintosh hacked away Victorian jiggery-pokery and substituted a monkish austerity. His favorite colors were bone white and coffin black, with now & then a whiff of pale green or lavender. He liked his furniture uncomfortable, with chair seats close to the floor and chair backs aspiring toward the ceiling. He combined elaborate chandeliers and misty bits of stained glass with chill expanses of bare wall and floor.

Contemptuous Scottish contemporaries called Mackintosh a leader of the "Spook school." Some critics still sniff at his "hideous eccentricities," but most applauded the prophetic vigor of his recent show. Mackintosh, said one, was "contemporary with us. Yet we have ignored him and allowed his work to be destroyed. He is one of the nearly lost causes of British art." More soberly stated, he was an authentic if somewhat precious source for the main stream of modern design.

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