Charles Rennie Mackintosh And The Modern Movement

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an innovator. He is undoubtedly one of Scotland’s most celebrated architects. His astounding buildings creatively reinterpreted the past and opened the way for the Modern Movement. Architecture was his first love, though he was also a highly accomplished artist and designer of interiors, furniture, metalwork, glass and textiles. In addition his graphic design work, using nature and organic plant forms, made him an early exponent of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In the later years of his life he produced watercolour paintings of intense power and subtlety. His extraordinary work is still regarded today as innovative and modern, and continues to astonish and delight art lovers everywhere.

A beautifully illustrated biography of Thomas Howarth, who discovered Scotland's most original architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. With many previously unpublished documents from Mackintosh, Margaret MacDonald, Herbert McNair, and more.

Together with the National Library of Ireland, Architectural Press presents seventy previously unpublished drawings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The identification in the National Library of Ireland of three sketchbooks, from which these drawings have been selected, represents a significant addition to the body of early drawings by Mackintosh. The sketches date from a crucial period in the young man's development, spanning his highly successful student years and the beginnings of his professional career. Each of the three sketchbooks covers an area central to his growth as an artist: the architecture of his native Scotland, an important scholarship journey in Italy and, Mackintosh's first love and greatest influence, the study of plants and growing things. Essentially private, these little known and unique works provide privileged access to significant moments in the artist's intellectual and emotional life. In this book Elaine Grogan attempts to take them out of the library display-case and bring them to life in the hands of the reader. She invites us to look over Mackintosh's shoulder on his early tentative steps towards fulfilment as a creative genius. Connections are traced, both backwards in time to his training and forwards to his great successes and eventual bitter eclipse.

The Glaswegian architect, designer, & painter was a man ahead of his time. His work, as imaginative & original as other artists & architects of the Art Nouveau period, also extended in other directions & became an inspiration to aspiring artists.

Of the many practitioners of art nouveau in Great Britain, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) has outlasted them all. His work bridged the more ornate style of the later nineteenth century and the forms of international modernism that followed. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he is frequently compared, he is known for so thoroughly integrating art and decoration that the two became inseparable. His work has been honored by a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his designs have proliferated to such an extent that they can be found reproduced in posters, prints, jewelry, and even new buildings. His most important project was the Glasgow School of Art, which still functions as a highly prestigious art school. This glorious building is visited each year by thousands of tourists from around the world. Built over a dozen years, beginning in 1897, the Glasgow School of Art is Mackintosh's greatest and most influential legacy. This completely redesigned and heavily illustrated edition of Mackintosh's Masterwork has been greatly expanded and contains newly discovered material about both the early life of the architect and the formative years in which his plans for the School of Art were executed.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), architect and designer, studied at the Glasgow School of Art and worked for Honeyman and Keppie, an important architectural studio of the time. Noted also for his work as a designer and interior decorator, his furniture combines the Scottish tradition with all the delicacy of the new modernity. Part of the Art Nouveau movement, his work has an especially innovative style which influenced the designers of the Viennese Secession and the development of the Modern Movement. With time, Mackintosh has become recognized as one of the fundamental figures in the world of 20th century architecture and design. The text is translated into four languages: English, German, French and Italian. Color photos.