Collaboration in the work of Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and J. Herbert MacNair. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

Sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald with Charles Rennie Mackintosh and J. Herbert MacNair were the progenitors of the Glasgow Style, an art movement that shaped trends in architecture and design in Britain and Europe, 1895-1905. The success of the movement was due to collaboration between the artists. The sisters worked together from the beginning of their careers, creating both fine art and decorative art. Their interaction with Mackintosh and MacNair began while all attended the Glasgow School of Art, and by 1895, patterns of collaboration were established. Frances' marriage to MacNair in 1899 and Margaret's to Mackintosh in 1900 resulted in closer working relationships within the couples. Scholars have focused on Mackintosh as one of the geniuses of modernism, at the expense of his collaborators, especially Margaret, with whom he had a thirty year professional relationship. Macdonald and Mackintosh achieved their success and critical acclaim between 1898-1906, when she participated in almost half of his architectural projects. I have attempted to offer collaboration as a creative model as an alternative to the concept of the solitary genius that has dominated art historical thought about modernism and specifically about this group, allowing the contributions of the women to come more fully to light. My methods have included explorations of social and artistic systems that encouraged and supported collaborative work in Glasgow at the turn of the century, questioning the perception of Mackintosh as a solitary hero of modernism, and reassessing the work done by all four artists using collaboration as a creative model. Throughout the project, primary sources including letters, newspaper and journal articles, lecture notes and other nineteenth-century documents have informed my conceptions of the artists and their works. In the absence of conclusive supporting materials, such as letters describing the exact processes of collaboration, formal analysis has played a crucial, but not exclusive role in understanding the art and the artists' approaches to it.