Cr Mackintosh

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.

Between 1896 and 1906, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) produced a series of buildings and interiors in and around Glasgow of such startling invention that he immediately established himself as one of the truly great figures in early twentieth-century architecture and design. David Brett argues that Mackintosh's originality was grounded in a highly subjective "poetics of workmanship", in which the structure, features, interiors and furnishings of each individual building became subject to a unifying system of forms, metaphors and unconscious associations. The system Mackintosh evolved allowing for the formulation of an almost infinite series of ensembles. After focusing on the various decorative details and interior spaces of Mackintosh's buildings the author reaches to the heart of Mackintosh's poetic system – the suffused eroticism of the sleek, "feminine" and intensely private "white interiors". A notable feature of this persuasive reappraisal of Mackintosh's work is the wealth of photographs by the author showing rarely featured details of buildings, interiors and furnishings.

Did you know that Williamina Fleming was an astronomer who discovered hundreds of stars? And that Alexander Fleming won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of penicillin? That Elsie Inglis set up hospitals all across Europe to treat over 200,000 soldiers? And that Robert Louis Stevenson's family of engineers built more than 100 lighthouses?

A showcase of the artistic output of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, known simply as 'The Four'.

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.

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.