Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect/ designer who played a key role in the United Kingdom side of the Art Nouveau movement.  The Art Nouveau movement came about out of the necessity for a new style of Art and Design.  The Art Nouveau style encompassed more than just imagery, it found its way to architecture, furniture, household items and many other aspects of people’s daily lives. Due to this, they style was very widespread and could be found in many places.

While Charles Rennie Mackintosh had a lot of his work done in the architecture side of design, he did have a few posters which fall under graphic design that I feel are very relevant to the modern styles we see today. This poster was done for the ‘Scottish Musical Review’ and was a giant of a poster as it stood over nine feet tall. At a quick glance, one can see a stylised and somewhat abstracted female figure towering in the centre of the poster decorated with vertical linear patterns and a halo in the rear. On a closer inspection, you can notice that bird like figures seem to flank the female figure on both sides as they seem to blend in to the same linear patterns that cover her. The halo in the back is very reminiscent of many Art Nouveau works of the time.  One can also see the strong Japanese influence in this work with the strong black outlines and stylised figures, something many an artist and designer were applying to their own works. Something that strikes me as interesting in this piece is Rennie Mackintosh’s  treatment of line. He seemed to use very geometric lines across this piece which goes against the trend happening at the time. Art Nouveau at the time seemed to be characterised by curvilinearity and this seems to fly in the face of that. This could be attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work in the architecture field.  Towering Figures and strong geometric lines, these are attributes that seem to harken to the Art Deco style which gains popularity some 30 years after the production of this poster.

 This is another example of one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s posters. While very similar in content and style, this poster seems to lend itself more to the organic style that was so prevalent in the Art Nouveau movement.  Yet again, the Japanese inspiration is evident in this poster, possibly more-so in this one than the previous. The reliance on white space and use of black lines to create figures are all aspects we see on the Japanese prints that made it to the west once they opened their borders.

As a personal  reflection, I feel like these two posters are very similar to some styles we see today. His treatment of the human figure is particularly what I'm referring to in this context. The figure is very stylised and heavy black lines are used to outline it, similar to how we see some cartoonists and comic artists treat their human figures today.

References:

·         Moma-moma.org-2014 [http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=4870][Last accessed on 02-11-2014]

·         Wendy Kaplan-Unframed.lacma.org-2014 [https://unframed.lacma.org/2014/05/01/new-acquisition-charles-rennie-mackintosh-poster-for-the-scottish-musical-review][Last accessed on 02-11-2014]