Tosh very much alive: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow to Aug 14th 2018
Monday, 2 Jul 2018, 17:36
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Monday, 2 Jul 2018, 17:48
Tosh very much alive:
Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow
You only have to the 14th August to see this
fateful exhibition. It is fateful because during its run, the Glasgow School of
Art on Sauciehall Street burned down and is currently being demolished
following the result of heavy damage.
Yet the School of Art remains the star of this great show.
There are two films on continuous loop showing many of the artist’s great
architectural achievements but the one on The
School of Art is particularly moving. The method in these films is to make
a comprehensive selection of views of each architectural piece – interiors and
exteriors – using drones for previously inaccessible features and aerial
overviews. That the building we are shown so comprehensively no longer existed
when I saw this film moved me considerably – but not all those feelings
expressed loss since the record of the school, as a result of this show, lasts
forever and in this show could be compared with other ways in which the
architecture has been recorded and these records preserved – such as original ground-plans
and exterior elevations – even perspective drawings. It makes the material that
learners in art-history require to know how to read the evidence that
represents a ‘building’ more fully. The show is full of strong and good case
studies, including some minor reconstruction with original decoration and furnishings
reproduced (it made me run straight afterwards to view the Mackintosh house in
the Hunterian Gallery at Glasgow University) rather than wait for the time I’d
allotted on my visit to Rembrandt’s wonderful ‘Entombment’ (still worth a
longer and more curious gaze than I had then time to give it).
But the examination of glorious buildings (interior &
exterior) is only a little of what is on show here. The subtitle of the
exhibition: ‘Making the Glasgow Style’,
pays ample attention to the artistic forebears in Aestheticism, collaborators
of Tosh, not least Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, his wife, whose May Queen (1900) remains one other star
of this glittering show. This work seems pregnant with a deeply ‘womanly’
understanding of the meanings, perils and pleasures of using female figures in
display – stronger than Klimt with whom in the 8th Vienna Secession
Show she could have been compared – since more explicitly able to use abstract
form in a manner critical of such figuration (in my view at least) and the
subjection of woman to male gaze in Klimt’s versions. Jessie M. King makes a
strong appearance not least because she was the peer of Tosh in book and illustrative
design.
The catalogue is cheap (£9.99) and a worthy representation
of the richness of thematic, architectural, biographical, pedagogic and style
issues, as well as paying (this is Scotland after all, remember) due attention
to issues of social inequality (p.6). One feature that struck me especially was
the careful attention to the precise cultural links and exchanges of persons,
work-practices and ‘styles’ with Japan shortly after the Meiji restoration in
1868 and how these help us to view the aesthetic innovations of the Glasgow
movement including Tosh. Seeing these helped me to see that the normal
dismissal of the flattened designs of the Glasgow style as merely decorative and
formal is a huge misrepresentation. There seem to be links not only with
imagery but with the use of text as
both collaborative, and in in itself one of, the images it works with as in Japanese woodblock portraits of both men
and women. Iconography from the East (much of each admittedly correctly
labelled as ‘Orientalism’) sometimes works harder than a superficial look
suggests (see for instance the play between female figure and the enigmas of
the design into which she becomes another rather than merely ‘other’ in Part Seen, Part Imagined 1986 (p. 28 of
catalogue).
Do not delay. This exhibition is a prize. Plan to spend a
long time. If you can’t go, go on the website and buy one of the modest but
very beautiful catalogues. If like me, you are going into, A844 next year with
the Open University (subject to success in A843) then this helps with so much that
seems promised in this course in terms of examinations of ‘the image’ and of
architecture and how to read it.
Tosh very much alive: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow to Aug 14th 2018
Tosh very much alive: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow
You only have to the 14th August to see this fateful exhibition. It is fateful because during its run, the Glasgow School of Art on Sauciehall Street burned down and is currently being demolished following the result of heavy damage.
Yet the School of Art remains the star of this great show. There are two films on continuous loop showing many of the artist’s great architectural achievements but the one on The School of Art is particularly moving. The method in these films is to make a comprehensive selection of views of each architectural piece – interiors and exteriors – using drones for previously inaccessible features and aerial overviews. That the building we are shown so comprehensively no longer existed when I saw this film moved me considerably – but not all those feelings expressed loss since the record of the school, as a result of this show, lasts forever and in this show could be compared with other ways in which the architecture has been recorded and these records preserved – such as original ground-plans and exterior elevations – even perspective drawings. It makes the material that learners in art-history require to know how to read the evidence that represents a ‘building’ more fully. The show is full of strong and good case studies, including some minor reconstruction with original decoration and furnishings reproduced (it made me run straight afterwards to view the Mackintosh house in the Hunterian Gallery at Glasgow University) rather than wait for the time I’d allotted on my visit to Rembrandt’s wonderful ‘Entombment’ (still worth a longer and more curious gaze than I had then time to give it).
But the examination of glorious buildings (interior & exterior) is only a little of what is on show here. The subtitle of the exhibition: ‘Making the Glasgow Style’, pays ample attention to the artistic forebears in Aestheticism, collaborators of Tosh, not least Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, his wife, whose May Queen (1900) remains one other star of this glittering show. This work seems pregnant with a deeply ‘womanly’ understanding of the meanings, perils and pleasures of using female figures in display – stronger than Klimt with whom in the 8th Vienna Secession Show she could have been compared – since more explicitly able to use abstract form in a manner critical of such figuration (in my view at least) and the subjection of woman to male gaze in Klimt’s versions. Jessie M. King makes a strong appearance not least because she was the peer of Tosh in book and illustrative design.
Detail of 'The May Queen' (1900) Available at: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/899/41066545742_68d41c6e51_b.jpg
The catalogue is cheap (£9.99) and a worthy representation of the richness of thematic, architectural, biographical, pedagogic and style issues, as well as paying (this is Scotland after all, remember) due attention to issues of social inequality (p.6). One feature that struck me especially was the careful attention to the precise cultural links and exchanges of persons, work-practices and ‘styles’ with Japan shortly after the Meiji restoration in 1868 and how these help us to view the aesthetic innovations of the Glasgow movement including Tosh. Seeing these helped me to see that the normal dismissal of the flattened designs of the Glasgow style as merely decorative and formal is a huge misrepresentation. There seem to be links not only with imagery but with the use of text as both collaborative, and in in itself one of, the images it works with as in Japanese woodblock portraits of both men and women. Iconography from the East (much of each admittedly correctly labelled as ‘Orientalism’) sometimes works harder than a superficial look suggests (see for instance the play between female figure and the enigmas of the design into which she becomes another rather than merely ‘other’ in Part Seen, Part Imagined 1986 (p. 28 of catalogue).
Do not delay. This exhibition is a prize. Plan to spend a long time. If you can’t go, go on the website and buy one of the modest but very beautiful catalogues. If like me, you are going into, A844 next year with the Open University (subject to success in A843) then this helps with so much that seems promised in this course in terms of examinations of ‘the image’ and of architecture and how to read it.
Steve