Secret valediction: Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 'Cyclamens', by Catherine Beaumont

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is an icon of design - his style is unmistakable and his name synonymous with art nouveau.

Born in Glasgow in 1868, Mackintosh had a prolific output of work throughout his life across many spheres, from designing some of the most influential architecture of the 20th century to creating a whole new language of interior décor in everything from stained glass to textiles, from art schools to high backed chairs; but Mackintosh is little known as the gifted painter that he was.

Painted between 1922 and 1923, 'Cyclamens' breaks with Mackintosh's iconic stylised designs, being a vivid yet realist piece that looks more like oil than its true medium of airy watercolour. The giveaway of this painting's origin is the artist's delight in pattern and surface design, the rich swathes of crimson backdrop here resembling a Mackintosh textile swatch. The piece is a melting pot of organic abstraction, even the cyclamen leaves contorting with pattern until reality is reasserted by the stark white blooms. The deep background makes the pure petals shine like silver on a dark Scottish winter night, yet the picture was painted in southern light, Mackintosh having fled from Glasgow to London.

It seems there may be a deeper, symbolic meaning to what appears to be simply a decorative still life... Mackintosh was part of a group of likeminded artists and designers in Glasgow known as 'the Four', the others being the designer Herbert McNair and the artist sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald.

'Sleeping Princess' by Frances Macdonald 1909 - image: Wikipedia

The group were bound together not only by work but also in their personal relationships, Margaret becoming Mackintosh's wife and Frances marrying Herbert McNair. Also named the 'Spook School' for their eerily elongated style, their use of Celtic imagery bled into their paintings and decorative style, drawing from the natural world like botanists.

Within the wider association known as the Glasgow School, they were also part of a slightly larger circle called “The Immortals”:

Left: Charles Rennie Mackintosh surrounded by Frances Macdonald, Agnes Rayburn, 

Janet Aitken, Katherine Cameron, Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald. 

Right: Herbert McNair and Mackintosh in front of the 'Immortals' c.1893 

(c) Glasgow School of Art archives

The swooning virginal petals of Mackintosh's cyclamens remind one of 'the Immortals' as they appear in early photographs, languorously nymph-like in Edwardian white dresses set against open Scottish fields. The petals of the two upper cyclamens touch as though in reluctant parting, like the hands of Janet Aitken and Katherine Cameron.

The year before 'Cyclamens' was painted Frances Macdonald, Margaret's sister had died. Her husband Herbert McNair was distraught, vowing never to paint again and burning most of his wife's work. Looking at the piece in this context, one wonders if Mackintosh might have been alluding to the loss of Frances from the Immortals - cyclamens are one of the few plants to flower during the cruelest months of winter, defying cold death with their white buds, and signalling new life. The Four's delight in Celtic imagery and symbolism allows room for such an interpretation, especially bearing in mind Victorian flower language, where cyclamen means resignation and 'goodbye’.

Detail of 'Cyclamens', 1922-23 overlaying 'the Immortals' (Glasgow School of Art archives) c. 1893

However, another farewell may be intended. 'Cyclamens' was painted two or three years after Mackintosh’s final unrealised designs for studios in Chelsea, his last completed commission having been six years earlier with the dark, jazz-age remodelling of 78 Derngate, Northampton. Perhaps it is not so much an allegory of the lost immortals, of Frances' death and McNair's dissolution, but instead the end of Mackintosh's prolific career and artistic vision. The parting touch may be a symbol of Mackintosh's defeat, closing the door with sadness on his past magnificent success before moving to the South of France, living there in poverty for the last of his days and never realising another large-scale project.

We can only guess at the enigma of Mackintosh's true meaning in this piece, knowing only that it's decorative allure is not as elusive as its symbolism. 'Cyclamens' brings Mackintosh's career to its crescendo as both artist and designer, with a creative output that could never die, like the dancing cyclamen blooms and the beaming eyes of 'the Immortals'.

Left to right; Textile designs, stylised daisies, purple on black, c1922; 78 Derngate, Northampton, 'Faded Roses' watercolour 1905
(c) The 78 Derngate Northampton Trust - see http://78derngate.org.uk/ for more

_______________________________________________________________________________
Sackerson adds -

David Walsh, Assistant Manager at The Charles Rennie Mackintosh House, says:

"This is our Centenary Year and we have a special exhibition "Charles Rennie Mackintosh & The Great War" - ( 78derngate.org.uk/whatson , ) - the largest display of Mackintosh design in England, until 29th April. If you or readers are able to visit, a warm welcome awaits."

Dreams of Bloomsbury at Charleston House

‘Come out and climb the garden path,

Luriana Lurilee,

The China Rose is all abloom

And buzzing with the yellow bee

We’ll swing you on the cedar-bough,

Luriana Lurilee’

From Charles Isaac Elton’s ‘A Garden Song’

I remember the dizzying chimes of this poem from when I first read Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, where the stanza sways through the consciousness of a group of intellectuals dining in the flowing light of the lighthouse. I was 14 years old and quite unaware that this poem would stream through my mind many years later, as I ambled the blooming garden paths of Charleston Farmhouse.

Charleston is the house museum of the Bloomsbury group’s country retreat in East Sussex, and to this day it looks as if its radical tenants are about to clatter through the door with easels and ink pots. In the dawn of the 1900s, the gifted sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (neé Stephen) became part of an eclectic circle of modern painters, writers and free thinkers, who oscillated around their avant-garde home in Bloomsbury. This new group, named the ‘Bloomsbury set’ was a radical backlash to the oppressive wake of the Victorian era. Bell, trained to classical ideals at the Royal Academy, broke free of restrained British art which largely clung to limpid realism and narrative symbols. In her paintings she defied symbolism and the Victorian taste for sombre colours, creating a new visual language of Post-Impressionism in England. With her sister, modernist genius Virginia Woolf, a new freedom was unleashed on Edwardian society.

There were many fascinating ‘Bloomsberries’, such as Duncan Grant, exquisite painter and ‘pacifist anarchist’, Maynard Keynes, crucial economist and first chairman of the Arts Council, Roger Fry, who brought Picasso and Matisse to an astounded British public and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband and art critic. All of these visionaries, together with Bell and her children, stayed at Charleston over the years, making it a hothouse of art, ideas and bohemian living in the 1900s.

The first glimpse you have of Charleston is its ochre gable, rising with a stately yet rural simplicity from the South Downs, its violet grey windows of the attics gleaming like a painter’s eyes to the landscape.

As you enter through the door trailing with heavy fuchsia, you pass not just through a threshold but into another world. You are submerged in the greatest appreciation of the senses, with an aging gilt mirror throwing your reflection into a painted room, with Vanessa Bell’s whimsical flowers blossoming in chalk paints on the window reveal, Persian rugs trodden by bohemian feet, flowers dancing jealously outside the sash window with walls lined by portraits of the Stachey’s and a fireplace painted in gaudy circles which, if thought about, would seem to jar yet bring the whole room into a state of avant-garde suspension. As you leave the room your eye is caught by a Duncan Grant mural of an acrobat falling languidly through the heights of the circus, his wan limbs raised with a sense of hedonism against the night…

You are led through, as if by hand, like an exquisite game of blind man’s buff, imagining Vanessa composing a still life on the lavishly painted dining room table, a beautiful ceramic form by Quentin Bell throwing dots of light across the ceiling and falling towards paintings of a cat curled up in pleasure by Duncan Grant and quirky porcelain plates collected by the ‘Bloomsberries’ on their travels. Then up, up, as if pulled by spirit along the womb-like corridors to the bedrooms, with the most magnificent light streaming in from the misty Downs…

But first, Clive Bell’s library, with worn copies of ‘Intimacy’ and great hardbound collections of Byron which match the elegant sensuality of the nude drawings that hang above his painted bed in the next room…. The Bloomsbury group are renowned for their adventurous affairs and new romantic boundaries, a motif which playfully dances through the décor. Each everyday object is turned into an objet de plaisir, being either playfully obliterated with paint or produced by the artists at Omega Workshops. The house is a complete piece of art, sculpture, and in fact living. I think the most beautiful thing about Charleston House is not just how its quirky inhabitants mastered their paintbrushes, but actually how they mastered the art of life; loving, freely and with great abandon in all things.

I would like to return to the dreamy blooms of Charleston’s garden paths with the end of Charles Isaac Elton’s poem, borrowed via of Virginia, who swings back to us on the cedar-bough…

‘Swing, swing on a cedar-bough!

Till you sleep in a bramble heap

Or under the gloomy churchyard tree,

And then, fly back and swing on a bough, 

Luriana Lurilee’

by Catherine Beaumont

Bibliography

‘A Garden Song’, Charles Isaac Elton

‘Among the Bohemians’, Virginia Nicholson

‘The Angel of Charleston’, Stewart MacKay

‘To the Lighthouse’,Virginia Woolf

‘Vanessa Bell’, Frances Spalding

A painter on a painting: ‘Girl with a Kitten’ by Lucian Freud

Artist Catherine Beaumont looks at Lucian Freud's 1947 "Girl With A Kitten":

Image: Tate - http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/T/T12/T12617_10.jpg

‘Girl with a Kitten’ by Lucian Freud, is to me as an artist, a very fascinating painting. It is a portrait of the artist’s first wife, Kitty Garman, who was the daughter of famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. Freud painted her in 1947, a year before their tempestuous marriage. The painter’s future wife is cloaked under the anonymous title, ‘Girl with a Kitten’, highlighting that this is a double portrait, equally of the ‘girl’ and of the young kitten who is clasped strangely by the neck.

The enigmatic pair are painted in muted, ashen colours, a myriad of dove greys and soft blues, set against the dark swathes of Garman’s mahogany hair, which seem frayed and static from the intensity of the painter’s gaze. The colours are a precursor of Freud’s later impasto flesh tones that would become so acclaimed, yet in this painting they appear restrained like the tight grip of the sitter on the kitten’s neck.

What so thrills me about this painting, as an artist and as a curious human being, is how impenetrable this portrait is. Freud structures the portrait with a three quarter profile of his future wife, with her gaze averted, making her inaccessible, yet he places the kitten staring directly out of the centre of the canvas. With such a direct gaze, it makes me feel that the kitten is more than just a passive addition to the painting, but an emblem of Kitty Garman herself. However, this is surprising as it is so unlike Freud to use symbols in his work, claiming that his ideal in art is to appear ‘in his work no more than God in nature’. But why is the kitten’s gaze so direct and unblinking? Why does it stare with such intensity at the viewer? To me it seems that the kitten plays with the sitter’s name, linking ‘kitten’ with ‘Kitty’, giving the anonymous ‘girl’ an identity and pairing their feline eyes and heart shaped faces.

If this is so, it would make me feel that it tells us more about Garman and Freud’s relationship. In the painting, the girl seems absent, with a look of almost horror in her eyes. She is distant from her grip on the kitten, which makes me wonder if this grasp reflects not herself but the artist’s grip on her, his ‘Kitty’, as her future husband. The look of tension in her eyes makes me think of ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning – “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall”… I feel that Garman becomes a possession of the artist, as in the Duke’s ruthless collection, to be collected with many other women that he would love and paint. In this piece, it seems to me that it captures Garman’s dawning realisation of her partner’s turbulent nature, suspending perfectly this line - ‘Then all smiles stopped together’…

On the other hand, on closer inspection you can see that Garman’s eyes are painted in startling hazel green, whereas the kitten’s eyes are a lucid pale blue, which more closely resemble Freud’s eyes.

Source image for second detail:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/freud-man-with-a-thistle-self-portrait-t00422

Perhaps then, the captured kitten is not Kitty Garman at all, but represents how Freud felt trapped and suffocated by this serious, pre-marital relationship.