Taking the tosh out of Toshie
Gavin Stamp
CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH by Alan Crawford
Thames & Hudson, £6.95, pp. 216 1928 in London of cancer of the tongue; he was 60 years old. It is Glasgow's misfortune that he was cremated at Golders Green crematorium and his ashes given to his wife and collaborator, Margaret Macdonald, for had he been buried in his native city his grave would surely now be a shrine. As it is, Glasgow is the focus of a cult which has got out of hand. Mackintosh has become the perfect avant-garde hero, the lonely, misunderstood genius ahead of his time who was obliged to die in poverty and exile; he is Byron, Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright rolled into one. This is the myth celebrated in a recent and ridiculous television film starring Tom Conti (a Glaswegian, at least) as Toshie, battling against Glasgow and the world.
This is the myth that the tourist industry likes to promote. There is money in Mackintosh. Less than 30 years after three of his Glasgow buildings were threatened with demolition by the authorities, the city is covered in lettering in an invented Mackintosh typeface and shops are filled with objects he never designed — mirrors, jewellery, mugs — sold under his name (what Murray Grigor rightly calls Nockin- tosh'). The Hill House at Helensburgh, now owned by the National Trust for Scot- land, cannot cope with the damage caused by the number of visitors; a single cabinet by Toshie (which ought to be in The Hill House) was sold last year for almost £800,000; bogus buildings are erected from ideal designs that Mackintosh never intended to be realised. And publications on the man — both worthwhile and worth- less — continue to pour off the presses: books analysing the modernity of Mackin- tosh's handling of space, the significance of his ornament, the sexuality of his symbol- ism.
Here is yet another. But although this is a modest paperback in Thames & Hudson's 'World of Art' series, it is far from being another hagiography to length- en the bookshelf space devoted to the Glasgow designer. In fact, as well as being an admirably succinct and perceptive sur- vey of Mackintosh's achievement, this is a major work of revisionism, challenging the accepted view. Other architectural histori- ans, such as Robert Macleod, David Walk- er and James Macaulay, have already suggested that the interpretation put for- ward by Thomas Howarth in his seminal book of 1952, significantly entitled Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Move- ment, was not entirely accurate, but Alan Crawford offers a new and wholly convinc- ing interpretation of Mackintosh's career.
The notion that Mackintosh was a Pevs- nerian 'pioneer' has long been questioned, while anyone who knows Glasgow must appreciate that he was one of several bril- liant and original architects working in the city at the turn of the century. But Craw- ford goes further and demolishes each aspect of the Mackintosh Myth in turn, while demonstrating that it was not Howarth but Toshie's friend and advocate, the German architect and writer Hermann The doors of the Salon de Luxe, Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow, 1903 Muthesius, who first romanticised his career.
Yes, Mackintosh's work was known in Vienna and elsewhere, but it is not true that he was much more influential abroad than at home. Nor is it true that his work was singled out for condemnation by the English Arts and Crafts movement; nor is it true that Mackintosh was a lonely, misunderstood figure in Glasgow. Indeed, as Margaret wrote to Muthesius in 1904, thanks to the popular success of his work for Miss Cranston,
the whole town is getting covered with imita- tions of Mackintosh tea rooms, Mackintosh shops, Mackintosh furniture &c — It is too funny — I wonder how it will end.
It ended in tears, of course, but partly because of Mackintosh's own character. He could not adapt to changing architectural conditions and fashions, so becoming increasingly isolated and despondent; that solace was found in the bottle is unfortu- nately an authentic part of the myth. Even so, it is not even true that Mackintosh resolved to leave Glasgow after the decline of his career and health and the collapse of his partnership with Honeyman & Keppie. It was in July 1914 that the Mackintoshes went on holiday to Walberswick to recu- perate and, 'they were away when the war broke out and, somehow, they never went back'.
Alan Crawford is well qualified to examine Mackintosh dispassionately. The biographer of C. R. Ashbee and an histori- an of Victorian architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement, he knows exactly what contemporary buildings Mackintosh knew and was influenced by. But to put the Glaswegian in context and explode the myth of a lonely pioneer of modernism is not to diminish Mackintosh. Quite the reverse, in fact: this inspired revisionism rescues Mackintosh from Mocicintosh and turns him back into a real person — a bril- liant, innovative and fascinating designer in his own time; a man who played games, with mouldings, with discontinuities and with contradictions.
I have not called him a genius [explains Crawford] because I am not sure what it means. And I have not called him a pioneer because his work did not look forward to Modernism, though one can see why the Modernists looked back to him. He was an ordinary, hard-working man with extraordi- nary talents, and he did not always know where he was going.
As well as giving revealing analyses of Mackintosh's buildings — pointing out their weaknesses as well as their strengths — Crawford paints a sympathetic portrait of the Glasgow policeman's son who rose both through his talent and through his marriage to a remarkable middle-class bluestocking (one reason, perhaps, for the hostility Toshie evidently often provoked in Glasgow). The book is organised chrono- logically, by chapters defined by the addresses where Mackintosh stayed, first with his parents and then with Margaret, ending with a poignant account of their last days together in the south of France where he developed his extraordinary skills as a painter. Finally comes an entertaining account of the fluctuations in Mackintosh's reputation since his death and the growth of the Mackintosh myth which — when shared by ordinary Glaswegians — the author cannot help finding sympathetic: in the recreated Mackintosh house in the Hunterian Art Gallery, 'Why is it all white, Dad?' Dad: 'Because the man was a genius.'
This carefully written and profound short study of Mackintosh's achievement deserves to become a standard, essential text. More to the point, it ought to stop so much of the nonsense committed in poor Mackintosh's name. It won't, of course; myth is always much more attractive than the truth. As Alan Crawford himself wisely concludes, 'I am sure that this will not be the last word.'
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