Arts & Crafts / Mackintosh

During the era of Victoria of England, a reformer artistic movement has born, considered as the english equivalent of the French Art Nouveau.
The movement is about all the concerns of the artists through progress, the need of individualism, new values…

The main “names” of this movement:

John Ruskin (1819-1900): poet and writer, fascinated by medieval and Gothic eras. For him, the artistic ideal is born from the meeting of competencies and not their competitors.

William Morris (1834 -1896): manufacturer of furniture and art objects he designed them, but it is primarily a business leader

Walter Crane (1845 -1915): illustrator and promoter of Decorative Arts , he practiced his art in many areas : illustration, painting, ceramics , wallpaper , upholstery, etc.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 -1928): British architect and designer whose simple and functional style had a strong influence on architecture and interior design

For those artists it was urgent, not only to rehabilitate the handmade work, but to save and re invent traditional techniques. Soon they were the initiators of new schools to train artisans, tapestry, embroidery, printing on the board with enamelling, brassware, pottery, natural dyes woven textiles with the trades, the marquetry and cabinet.

Another of their ideas was that we couldn’t do a good job, if we live and work in a healthy and pleasant environment. In their works, arise plants and animals, symbols of nature, but more or less stylized. It is the Fine Art.

In Europe, many artistic movements were inspired by those ideas about the relationship between the arts and crafts, on simplicity and use of natural materials.

Arts and Crafts inspired movements such as the Viennese Secession movement and the Bauhaus movement. It can also be seen as an introduction to Modernism, where its pure forms, stripped of historical associations, have been applied to new industrial production.

Realisations:

According to Mackintosh furniture contributes to the unity of the room.

The furniture that we know the most was developed as part of interior design: Catherine Cranston teahouses, the House of Amateur Art, Hill House, his private etc. It is supposed to participate in this overall unit holds dear, without imposing individually.  

Mackintosh designs furniture with simple lines, stripped upholstery and a proliferation of expensive details in the Victorian era of the times. The furniture is lacquered white punctuated with a few buttons purple, green or silver on the ground. The lacquered furniture end up not standing the white walls, the space becomes immaterial. Mackintosh breaks completely with the overloaded style of his time.

Its high back chairs seem to represent thrones symbolic traces dear to Mackintosh. We also have to appreciate his taste for the system partition of the Japanese interior design because this high back gently separates us from our neighbors. For one of the teahouses of Catherine Cranston, he invented the curved mesh back chair. 

I can see at first in his furniture a skeletal appearance, vertical, straight and rigid compared with rounded shapes, welcoming and padded his time but I rather see those lines as a solution to the partition of the space, expression of an architect.