ARTS

Architecture

George Walton: Designer and Architect (Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery, till 19 September; Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, 4 November-9 January 1994)

A true Glasgow Boy

Gavin Stamp

Edwin Lutyens passed through Glas- gow in 1898 on his way to Rosneath where he was building a house for Princess Louise. As a bright young architect he nat- urally went to see the latest things in the 'Second City', so he wrote to his wife while sitting in Miss Cranston's celebrated tea- room in Buchanan Street, then two years old:

...came here to these queer, funny rooms and had a most excellent breakfast ... Miss C ... has made a fortune by supplying cheap clean foods in surroundings prompted by the New Art Glasgow School. Green, golds, blues, white rooms with black furniture, black rooms with white furniture....

Cranston's several tea-rooms were one of the artistic sensations of a city then estab- lishing a reputation for extraordinary and adventurous art, and today Charles Rennie Mackintosh's recreated Willow Tea Room in Sauchiehall Street is a tourist shrine. But what Lutyens saw (and was influenced by) was not by Mackintosh but by his Glasgow contemporary George Walton. In Buchanan Street Mackintosh merely exe- cuted murals in a dazzling sequence of interiors which were the creation of Walton — designer of furniture and pottery, interi- or decorator, shop designer and architect.

Yet Mackintosh has eclipsed Walton: hence this comprehensive and beautiful exhibition in Kelvingrove to redress the balance. This is not before time. As Karen Moon argues in the excellent book that accompanies the show (White Cockade Publishing, f14.95), because Walton was closely associated with the Glasgow Boys, he was a more central figure in the city:

They were not concerned to surprise or dis- turb, nor to dominate; they were not con- cerned with eccentricity of form, nor to throw over traditional concepts of beauty. Walton operated from this same position and belonged more to this Glasgow 'school' than Mackintosh, whose inclination to distort con- ventional forms and proportions came from extra-Glasgow sources like Toorop and Beardsley.

Not that Walton has ever been forgotten. He lived long enough to be interviewed by the young John Betjeman, who praised his 'revolutionary' work in the Architectural Review in 1933, the year of his death, and Walton's excellent neo-Regency 'White House' of 1908 was celebrated in Raymond McGrath's book of Twentieth Century Houses. Soon after, Nikolaus Pevsner extol- led his designs as 'amongst the most bril- liant and historically most significant examples of the rapid and constructive pro- gress of Britain away from William Morris towards a new style of the new century'.

Of course, as with other 'progressive' Arts and Crafts designers like Voysey, or as with Mackintosh for that matter, the story is much more complex. Walton was eclectic in his historical sources and never lost a sense of the colourful and decorative. He was an inspired designer of shop-fronts which modernised traditional forms in unusual and striking ways. Walton became much involved with several 'New Art' pho- tographers like Craig Annan and, indeed, became Decorator-in-Chief to Photogra- phers'. For Kodak, he created wonderful and distinctive showrooms all over Europe: Brussels, Berlin, even Moscow. Daniel Robbins, the organiser of the exhibition, searched for a surviving example; alas, in vain.

Kodak is a most important part of the Walton story. As Karen Moon writes, he was the first to plant the Glasgow style firmly in English soil in the form of the Kodak shops, and so the fusion of the Scottish and English interpretations of the Arts and Crafts, the wooing with it of Liberty's and others, was begun.

Kodak's commercial success also brought him commissions from his principal private client: G.D. Davidson, photographer, busi- nessman and ardent socialist, whose increasingly anarchist leanings precipitated his final departure from Kodak's board of directors in 1912. For Davidson, Walton (who was not a trained architect) designed the White House and Wern Fawr at Harlech.

Inevitably, Mackintosh and Walton (who seem not to have been friends) must be compared. Walton was less conspicuously original, but he had a greater range as a designer and, unlike the precious Mackin- tosh, was commercially realistic and suc- cessful — running a company which was established in 1888 when the now more cel- ebrated Glaswegian was still a student. There was always a strong Classical struc- ture to Walton's designs and he also proved to be immensely resourceful and infinitely more adaptable in the face of changing fashions than Mackintosh — although that did not prevent the collapse of his fortunes after the Great War.

Indeed, Walton's later career helps explode the myth of the Mackintosh tragedy. Walton transferred his business from Glasgow to London as early as 1897, a move which can be seen to anticipate the Second City's eventual decline as well as more sad evidence of the magnetic effect of London upon talented Scotsmen. All went well until 1914 when his practice, together with the whole Arts and Crafts movement, fell apart. He was fortunate to find wartime work with the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) designing reformed and nationalised pubs for munitions work- ers in Carlisle — a pleasing anomaly in the licensing trade which survived until the unhappy government of Edward Heath.

But the 1920s were sad and difficult, cul- minating in the severance of Walton's agreement with Alexander Morton & Co in 1930 when his textile designs failed to sell. Soon after, his critical stock began to rise with the young partisans of the Modern Movement, but it was too late: three years later he was dead. Voysey would live on until 1941, but his own rehabilitation and celebration by Betjeman, Morton Shand and Pevsner did not resuscitate his career as a designer.

All of which suggests that things would not have been much different for Mackin- tosh even if he had kept off the bottle, remained in harmony with his partner Kep- pie and adapted his exclusively personal style to changing conditions. Walton left Glasgow, of course, while Mackintosh stayed; but it was not that Glasgow rejected Mackintosh, it was that he, and Walton, and Voysey, all fell out with the Zeitgeist. Not that Walton complained: as his old friend Voysey charmingly said of him, 'He was the most gentle of men with strong feelings always under control'.

Glasgow no longer boasts any tea-room or shop interior by this fascinating Glaswe- gian, but any Walton enthusiast should travel north rather than wait until the exhibits go to Brighton as a splendid re- creation of Walton's hugely successful draped interior for the 1897 Eastman Pho- tographic Materials Company's exhibition has been achieved in the Kelvingrove Museum. Unlike George Walton himself, these swags and hangings of white, grey and mauve will not be going south.