Although not disdaining the Art Nouveau as completely as did the English and the Americans, the Austrians showed little of the enthusiasm of the French and the Germans. There is in Vienna one block of flats[[386]] of about 1900 so completely Art Nouveau that it might well have been designed by Horta himself. But the leading Austrian architects, old and young, reflected the new Belgian mode only with considerable diffidence and restraint. Otto Wagner (1841-1918), long a well-established academic architect and indeed Professor of Architecture at the Akademie, introduced more and more Art Nouveau detail in the Stadtbahn stations that he built over the years 1894-1901, most notably in the one at the Karlsplatz with its curved metal frame and inset floral panels. However, even this seems tentative and hardly rivals in interest Guimard’s contemporary Métro stations in Paris.
Wagner’s so-called Majolika Haus, a block of flats at 40 Linke Wienzeile designed about 1898, is far more distinguished and original (Plate [138A]). Although the ironwork of the balconies is here and there curvilinear in detail and the faience plaques that completely cover the wall are decorated with great swooping patterns of highly colourful flowers, the architectonic elements of the façade are nevertheless very crisp, flat, and rectangular. That Vienna would very shortly become the focus of a reaction against the Art Nouveau does not seem surprising in the light of this façade. Moreover, on an office building erected in the Ungargasse for the firm of Portois & Fix in 1897 by Max Fabiani (b. 1865), who had been Wagner’s assistant in 1894-6, the coloured faience slabs which sheathe its surface are arranged in a purely geometrical chequer-board pattern; only the ironwork has a slightly Art Nouveau flavour. In the late nineties it would be hard to say whether Art Nouveau influence was arriving or departing but for the projects other Viennese architects were publishing in the review Ver Sacrum started in 1898.
The design of the art gallery built in the Friedrichstrasse in Vienna in 1898-9 for the Sezession, a newly founded society of artists in revolt against the Academy, by J. M. Olbrich (1867-1908) seems more influenced, however, by the façade of Townsend’s Whitechapel Art Gallery—only just begun but already published as a project in the Studio in 1895—than by the work of the Belgians or the French, which had affected him strongly in the immediately preceding years. The pierced dome of floral metalwork alone vies in virtuosity with Horta or Guimard, and the pattern of this is actually quite English in character. The bronze doors are by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian Post-Impressionist who can be grouped, up to a point, with the Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, and Swiss Post-Impressionists mentioned earlier (see Chapter [16]). Olbrich was called to Darmstadt in Germany to work at the artists’ colony sponsored there by the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1899 and Darmstadt, like Vienna, soon became a centre of reaction against the Art Nouveau under his leadership (see Chapter [20]).
Both in Vienna and in Darmstadt the influence of the Scottish designer Mackintosh helped most to crystallize an alternative mode. Mackintosh first exhibited a room on the Continent at Munich in 1898, the same year that Baillie Scott was called by the Grand Duke to decorate an interior in the palace at Darmstadt. In 1900 Mackintosh was invited to design a room in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna. That exhibit undoubtedly encouraged Viennese architects, already diffident towards the Art Nouveau, to turn very sharply away from it. This Adolf Loos (1870-1933) had already done in designing a completely rectilinear shop interior in Vienna in 1898. Loos, Wagner after about 1901, and Wagner’s pupil Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) were all leaders in the international reaction against the Art Nouveau (see Chapter [20]). The position of Mackintosh, however, is rather hard to state so categorically and must be considered here in more detail.
At home in Scotland Mackintosh’s early decorative work of the mid nineties approached Continental Art Nouveau more closely than that of any other Briton, not excluding Townsend. Indeed, he was castigated by his compatriots and his English contemporaries for participating in so exotic a movement. But Mackintosh also came nearer to possessing genius than most of the men of his generation associated with the Art Nouveau, not even excluding Horta. That genius, all the same, was of so ambivalent a nature that he could seem for a few years to go along with the general stream of Continental fashion and yet, almost at the very same time, provide also a real protest against its excesses and its superficialities by the craftsmanlike integrity and the almost ascetic restraint of his best work. That protest the Austrians and the Germans were not slow to heed.
Mackintosh made his first mark in Glasgow, which had earlier been the home of the highly original ‘Greek’ Thomson (see Chapter [4]). By the nineties, moreover, interest in contemporary French painting was probably livelier there than it was in London. But Glasgow was also as notorious as Chicago, that major focus of architectural achievement in the America of the nineties, for its presumed philistinism. Touches of Mackintosh’s hand can be distinguished in work of the office of John Honeyman (1831-1914) and his partner Keppie, where the young architect was employed at the start of his career, notably in the Martyrs’ Public School in Glasgow of 1895. But it was in the decoration of the first of a series of Miss Cranston’s ‘tea-rooms’ (scottice, restaurants), the one in Buchanan Street remodelled by him in 1897-8, that Mackintosh’s personal talents were first effectively exploited. His very earliest decorative compositions and the murals that he and his wife provided here, full of heavy and presumably Gaelic symbolism, are parallel to, rather than derivative from, the work of the Belgians. They are, in fact, much closer to the drawings of Beardsley and the paintings of Toorop and Munch than to the plant-like ironwork and almost Neo-Rococo carved stone ornament characteristic of Horta. But the same long swinging curves are present, the same linearity, and the same rejection of all stylistic influence from the past.
In this same year 1897 Mackintosh’s firm had the good fortune to win the limited competition for the Glasgow School of Art with a project that was entirely their young designer’s (Plate [132A]). Thus he very soon had an opportunity to prove himself architect as well as decorator in a way that only two or three of the Europeans associated with the Art Nouveau had been able to do up to this point. The school was built during the next two years, just as Horta was finishing his Maison du Peuple in Brussels. The only element in the design that relates to the contemporary Art Nouveau of the Continent is the ironwork. This is quite incidental to the major architectonic qualities of the building, moreover, since it is purely decorative, not structural. It is also extremely restrained in its abstract curves, like Fabiani’s of this date in Vienna, and almost totally devoid of vegetable or floral reminiscence.
The entrance to the Glasgow Art School seems to derive from Webb, but, like that of Townsend’s contemporary art gallery in London, it is rather less traditional in character than Webb’s work of this period. The somewhat wilful asymmetry and the plastic elaboration of the central part of the façade contrast nevertheless with the straightforwardness of the general treatment. There are two ranges of very wide studio windows—reputedly derived from a Voysey project—like ‘Chicago windows’ but larger, with the reinforced-concrete lintels above them frankly exposed, and little else in the whole composition. To later eyes this façade, expressing so clearly the uncomplicated plan that it fronts, tends to appear deceptively simple and obvious. But Mackintosh’s very sensitive proportions and the delicate touches of linear detail provided by the ironwork create a design at once very direct and very subtle.
The north end of the building is a tall plain wall of rather small-scaled random ashlar broken only by a few strategically spotted windows of various shapes. At once medievally dramatic and quite abstract, this façade makes one appreciate all the more the almost classical serenity and horizontality of the main front. The Art School is clearly the manifesto of an architectural talent of broad range and great assurance—very different indeed from that of Voysey.
Mackintosh was not alone in Glasgow in these years. A real ‘school’ existed, chiefly in the field of decoration, of which George Walton was another notable exponent.[[387]] Like Baillie Scott and Ashbee, Walton had some success as an architect in England (see Chapter 15) as Mackintosh did not, even though he executed a few interiors below the Border. But local support was not what it should have been for any of them in either Scotland or England. While the Art School was in construction, however, Mackintosh was asked in 1898 to provide the already-mentioned room in Munich, first of many that he showed at various exhibitions in Germany and Austria. This interior was very different indeed, both in the basic rectangularity of the forms and in the delicacy of the membering, from Van de Velde’s Art Nouveau Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of the previous year. Thus, even before Van de Velde reached Berlin in 1899, a new line of influence from Glasgow into Germany—and soon into Austria also—was established whose general tendency was in sharp opposition to the lusher currents flowing from Brussels and Paris.