HE was so far ahead of his time that a chair he designed 120 years ago is frequently used today in futuristic films and TV series like Star Trek, Blade Runner and Dr Who.

Now 150 years after architect, designer and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born, his incredible legacy is to be celebrated with a year-long programme of events and exhibitions.

Works that have never before been seen in public will be on display, while the famous Willow Tea Rooms are being restored and his Oak Room will form the centrepiece of the new V&A Dundee’s Scottish Design Galleries.

A major new temporary exhibition has also just opened at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with other exhibitions planned at buildings in the city associated with Mackintosh.

“It’s a really exciting year for people to rediscover Mackintosh,” said Kelvingrove curator Alison Brown.

“He was ahead of his time and regarded by many as a pioneer of modernism. He learned from antiquity and Scottish traditions and digested the art of Japan as well as being very aware of what his contemporaries were doing.

“His genius is that he distilled this and had this understanding of space and line and proportion – a Mackintosh building is an absolute perfection of bringing it altogether.

“He was unique and a master of directing your eye to the key points of decoration. The high-backed chairs he designed are now iconic and are still being used by TV and film set designers to represent the future. It sums up his genius that he came up with something so perfect.”

WHERE CAN WE SEE THEM?
AN example will be on display at the Kelvingrove exhibition which runs until August 14.

By following a chronological narrative, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Making the Glasgow Style presents his work in the context of Glasgow, key predecessors, influences and Glasgow Style contemporaries.

“He was born in 1868 and died in London 1928 so it is 60 years of an immensely creative life,” said Brown. “The exhibition follows his life story, putting him into context in what was going on in Glasgow because he was born into an amazing, exciting city which at that time was becoming the self-styled second city of Empire.

“There were major shifts happening as his generation was the first to receive compulsory education between the ages of five and 12 after the Education Act of 1872 was passed. Major welfare, social and political events were happening then and he taps into that perfectly.”

WHAT WAS GOING ON?
IT was a time when there was an energetic and radical outpouring of new ideas across all the arts in Europe, most notably in the fields of design and architecture. In Glasgow, this gave birth to the Glasgow Style, a distinctive variant of Art Nouveau centred on The Glasgow School of Art. At the heart of it was the work of “The Four”: Mackintosh, his future wife Margaret Macdonald, her younger sister Frances, and Frances’s future husband, James Herbert McNair.

“He wasn’t in isolation – his genius was to pull all these things together and create something absolutely ahead of its time,” explained Brown.

“There was amazing dialogue going on between all of these individuals and women designers were very important. Jessie Newbery and Ann MacBeth brought needlework to international acclaim at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) while Jessie Marion King was one of the most commercial successes of all the Glasgow artists. Dorothy Carleton Smyth had a particular flair for costume design and after teaching briefly at the GSA went on to design for productions around Europe.

“Through all this Mackintosh progressed stylistically and went on to create his absolute master works such as the second phase of the GSA, Scotland Street School and the Willow Tea Rooms.”

SO WHAT CAN WE SEE?
THE Kelvingrove exhibition features more than 250 objects which highlight the diverse spectrum of media Mackintosh and his contemporaries mastered.

Key highlights include a section of lathe and plaster wall with a stencilled design Mackintosh created for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tea Rooms. An early example from 1900 of his internationally renowned rose motif, this wall section was salvaged just prior to the building being gutted and repurposed into a hotel in 1971.

It will be on display for the first time since its removal from the former tearoom premises. This will be shown alongside a number of other decorative elements and fittings from the interiors of the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, again for the first time on public display and conserved especially for this show.

“The stencil is a rose tree of human height that had been painted over in the 1920s,” said Brown. “No-one knew if we were going to be able to restore it as it had been sealed in a crate since 1971. It is probably 100 years since this piece of stencilling was seen so it is going to be a revelation.”

IS THERE MORE?
OTHER feature objects include delicate watercolours not shown in a generation, such as Pinks; Grey Iris; and Part Seen, Imagined Part.

The exhibition has gathered items from the very best of Glasgow’s internationally renowned civic collections alongside loans from The Hunterian, The GSA, the V&A and a number of private lenders. Several of these works have never been on public display and the majority have not been shown in Glasgow for 30 or more years.

Mackintosh 150 is co-ordinated by Mackintosh heritage partners from across Glasgow and beyond and includes a programme of events and exhibitions at The Lighthouse and at Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, GSA, Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow Cathedral, The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, Scotland Street School and the House for An Art Lover. It takes place as investment in Mackintosh’s built heritage continues at the GSA and The Hill House in Helensburgh.

Mackintosh’s legacy has been identified as one of the drivers of the Glasgow Tourism and Visitor Plan to 2023, which aims to grow the city’s economy by increasing overnight leisure tourism visits by one million over the next six years.