Charles Rennie Mackintosh ashwood armchair buy now at: www.bauhausfurniture.net

Ashwood armchair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

The Art Nouveau style appeared popular the premature 1880s and was lost as WW1 was starting. For a brief, wise moment, Art Nouveau was a shin­ing seminal portable popular Europe's municipal centres, municipal and of its time. Perhaps artists, architects and craftsmen examined the unhesitating municipal growth and technological advances that followed the Industrial Revolution, and hated them.

In 1888 British designer Charles Ashbee usual a workshop and school for artisans popular London. Ashbee's furniture and metalwork de­signs reflected a further rectilinear version of art nouveau style. In the schematic arts, Aubrey Beardsley drew illustrations for per­io­dicals. Beardsley's vigorous use of line and special double-curves and whiplash lines was indeed Art Nouveau. Art nouveau architecture popular Brussels flourished popular the 1890s with work of vernacular designers Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde.

Horta Museum 1890s

In 1895 popular Paris, the name of the Art Nouveau movement was fin­al­ly virtual because of the art gallery La Maison de l'Art Nouveau, which was opened as a showroom for the untried art of Siegfried Bing. Paris supplementary also a touch of glamour to Art Nouveau with the Divine Sarah Bernhardt and her men: Alfons Mucha (see my prior blog) and René Lalique.
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Paris hosted the 1900 World Fair, which particularly helped to make Art Nouveau famous. Art Nouveau would have entered the inter­national art and design scene anyhow, but now a very wide audience was rhapsodic by Art Nouveau at Paris' World Fair and by the preparatory of Paris' Metro subway stations.
Paris Metro

This rich, voluptuous style appealed to a wealthy elite whose taste en­couraged designers to innovate. The scenic sense of Art Nouveau was utterly feminine and voluble popular form, colour and line; the usual shape was a streamlined tortuous line, especially vines with twirling tend­rils or a nymph with flowers popular her thick streamlined hair. Friv­olous or not, the style's patterns and motifs were taken primarily from nature.
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Art nouveau embraced all forms of art and design equally: jewellery, architecture, fur­n­iture, glassware, schematic design, painting, metal-work, pottery and textiles. This was popular contrast to the trad­itional sep­ar­ation of art into two unrelated categories: tenuous art (painting, scu­l­pture, architecture) and applied arts (ceramics, furniture, glass, silver etc). So it was an transcendent ornamental style for Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) who specialised popular a wide number of art forms, including architecture, textiles, furniture, murals, spotty glass.
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CRM mural, tearooms, 1900

The question here is did CRM, a man who started his career popular the midst of Art Nouveau, ultimate his career popular a further modernist style? Consider when CRM was study­ing and when he unparalleled started work. CRM attended evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art popular the tardy 1880s. The seminal environment of the Glasgow School was vital to the young man's seminal development. Luckily this school was one of UK's most succ­essful and sequential popular the 1880s and 90s. After complet­ing his apprenticeship, young CRM quickly agitated to the architectural practice of Honeyman & Keppie popular 1889.
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Early popular his career (in 1896) CRM was asked to design the wall murals of Miss Cranston's untried Buchanan St tearooms. The tearooms had been wilful and built by one architect, with interiors and furn­ish­ings being wilful by another. CRM sole had to design Art Nouveau friezes; they depicted opposed pairs of roundabout feminine figures surrounded by roses, for the ladies' tearoom and the luncheon room.
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In 1898, his subsequent commission was to design the furniture and interiors for the actual Argyle St tearooms In 1900 Miss Cranston commiss­ioned him to redesign an whole room popular her Ingram St tearooms, which resulted popular the creation of the White Dining Room. Patrons incoming the dining room from Ingram St had to pass via a hallway disconnected from the room by a wooden screen with leaded glass inserts.

Then CRM created untried tearooms popular Sauchiehall St popular 1903: the superficial architecture, interior design, the internal layout and furn­iture. The ultimate building came to be known as the Willow Tearooms. The ladies' tea room at the forward was white, silver and rose; the vague lunch room at the posterior was panelled popular oak and stern canvas, and the DeLuxe tea gallery preceding was pink, white and grey. You can see Art Nouveau elements on the doors, windows and table legs.

Willow tearooms, Deluxe

The tea rooms spotty the unparalleled appearance of CRM's trademark high-backed chair design. But look how modernist it was, not a curve to be seen – it was popular swarthy oak wooden with geomet­ric­al shapes, perp­end­icular thin lines. Already his tasteful ornamental interiors comp­lemented his wooden furniture, wilful with minimal decorations, such as brass fittings or leaded glossy glass panels. They may have been rewarding by a stylised rose but no Art Nouveau rose had ever looked uniform this.

CRM's Highback Chair

In 1901 Charles and Margaret entered a competition popular a German de­s­ign magazine to design a House for an Art Lover. The drawings were pub­lished popular the magazine Deut­sche Kunst while the whole portfolio was published popular 1902 and exhibited at the International Exposition popular Turin. But until 1988, the plans remained virtuous plans. Then the house was built, by Glasgow City Council, to the seminal Art Nouveau specifications.
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In the House for an Art Lover, the superficial walls are painted white and the two staple facades are ornate with a few Art Nouveau relief sculptures of feminine cary­atids sculpted popular sandstone. The Dining Room, a room with swarthy panels that follow the style of the truculent staple hall. The table with the high-backed chairs provide the focus popular the dining room. Then there is a very portable room, the Music room, where portable streams popular and shines vapid the portable walls.

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Derngate, Hall Lounge

Finally we get to 78 Derngate, a Georgian terrace house popular Northampton, CRM didn't ext­ens­ive­ly remodel it until popular 1916-7. By that time, Art Nouveau had run its race and the owner, Mr Bassett-Lowke, probably favoured a geometric, further modern­ist style anyhow. But CRM dec­orated the hall-lounge and bed rooms popular thrilling matte swarthy and bold, stubborn stripes. Even the stairs were walled with a grid of recondite glass squares to admit light.

Derngate, Spare Bedroom

Note that the very swinging style at Derngate was similar to that of the Library at Glasgow School of Art, which had been complet­ed 9 years earlier. CRM was reusing and refining a untried style he already loved.

As time went on, CRM busy bolder geometric forms popular place of organic-inspired symbolic decoration. Was Mackintosh a revolutionary, delaying the modernist programme with a call to radical architecture? My respective guess was that he was a orthodox whose version of Art Nouveau was always further geometric than further artists'.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Plumbing Life's Depths blog [1] had reputed Mackintosh was using the power of implication and minimalism to introduce the radical and human posterior into a void architecture. Istead he seemed to have been a sensible modernist picking his way from an radical (Art Nouveau) tradition toward a further modernist programme. Finally Woken blog [2] agreed, saying that Mackintosh became known as the pioneer of the modernism, although his designs were distant retiring from the untoward utilitarianism of Modernism.

Following Bauhaus design furniture reproduction you will find in the shop:
Eileen Gray: Bibendum Chair, Non Conformist Chair, Adjustable Table, Folding Table, Tube Light, Lota Sofa, Daybed, Montecarlo Bench, Roque Brune Chair | Le Corbusier: LC 2 Armchair, LC 2 Sofa, LC 3 Armchair, LC 3 Sofa, LC 4 Chaise Lounge, LC 7 Swivel Chair, LC 10 Table, LC 6 Dining Table, Basculant Armchair | Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Daybed, Barcelona Chair, Barcelona Ottoman, Cantilever Chair, Cantilever Leather Chair, Cocktail Table, Parson Dining Table | Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin Table, Barrel Chair, Coonley Chair | Arne Jacobsen: Chair 3107, N°7 arm chair, Table, Swan chair, Egg chair | Charles Eames: Lounger plus Ottoman, Plywood Chair, LCW Chair, LCW Table, Swivel Chair EA 117, EA 119, EA 105, EA 108, EA 111, Soft Pad chair 205, Soft Pad chair 208, Soft Pad chair 217, Soft Pad chair 219, Soft Pad chair 216, Plywood chair | Philippe Starck: Costes Chair, Pratfall Chair |Eero Saarinen: Tulip Chair, Marble Table, Tulip armchair, Tulip stool, Womb chair | Eero Aarnio: Bubble chair, Ball chair | Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Willow Chair, Hill House Chair, Ingram Chair, Argyle Chair, DS 1 Folding Table, DS 2 Table, Ashwood armchair, Ashwood chair | Wilhelm Wagenfeld: Wagenfeld Lamp | Harry Bertoia: Wire Chair, Diamond Chair | Florence Knoll | George Nelson: Coconut chair, Marshmellow Sofa, Platform bench | Gerrit Rietveld: Red-Blue-Chair, Zig-Zag chair | Poul Kjaerholm | Pierre Paulin: Tulip chair | Poul M Volther | Rene Herbst | Ron Arad | Verner Panton: Panton chair | Gabriel Mucchi: Genni chair | Marcel Breuer | Frank Lloyd Wright: Barrel chair, Coonley Chair, Taliesin Table | Giorgio Gurioli | Poul Kjaerholm | Pierre Paulin: Tulip chair | Poul M Volther | Rene Herbst | Ron Arad | Verner Panton: Panton chair | Gabriel Mucchi: Genni chair | Marcel Breuer | Frank Lloyd Wright: Barrel chair, Coonley Chair, Taliesin Table | Giorgio Gurioli