A Look at the Spook School
Have you heard of the Spook School? I hadn’t. I’ve heard of 1988’s groundbreaking film Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, arguably the best of Mr. Doo’s cinematic masterpieces, but no Spook School.
The Spook School, more commonly known as The Glasgow Four, was a small group of artists studying at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1800s. The Four were comprised of two sisters, Margaret MacDonald and Frances MacDonald along with Herbert MacNair and, most famously, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. That’s MacDonald, not McDonald like the deliciously salty fries and Mackintosh, not Macintosh like the $2000 Netflix machine.
Together, these four changed the face of art nouveau in Scotland. We looked briefly at art nouveau and its influence on art deco in the last blog post. Art nouveau is highly decorative, curvilinear, organic, and oftentimes mystical. The movement spanned roughly between 1890 and 1914. Glasgow was an industrial city where people worked hard and oftentimes experienced hardships. Art nouveau offered a beautiful reprieve.
Glasgow, 1895
While many of the women enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art were taking classes in search of a hobby, Frances and Margaret were looking for a career. The two worked very closely and cosigned many of their pieces.
Herbert was working at the architectural firm Honeyman & Keppie when he began taking night classes at the school. Charles was an architect who worked with Herbert at Honeyman & Keppie. He also began taking classes during his architectural apprenticeship. They had some strong mustache game.
The headmaster at the time was Francis H. Newbery who noticed that the work of these four (before they were The Four) was stylistically similar. He introduced the two sisters to the two men. The four became The Four and they began working together closely.
The Four brought a special brand of art nouveau to Glasgow. They looked back through time to their Scottish history and allowed traditional elements to influence the new style. They drew inspiration from a Celtic revival style and illuminated manuscripts. The Book of Kells had recently been republished at the time, and it contributed to their unique interpretation of art nouveau.
The Book of Kells
There are a few consistent themes we see among the work of The Four. Dense patterns are a common element used. They overlap and intermingle, working together. A soft, almost organic palette is oftentimes used. Perhaps the most comment characteristic in the work of The Four is the thin, elongated bodies. These figures have an almost ghostly, ethereal quality. It’s these illustrated figures that gave the group the nickname ‘Spook School’.
So, The Four graduated and the two married the other two and the two twos changed the dynamic of the four. The sisters worked together less often than they worked with their partners. Margaret and Charles stayed in Glasgow while Frances and Herbert moved to Liverpool.
In 1896, The Four exhibited outside of Glasgow for the first time. They took their work to the Arts and Crafts Society in London. Unfortunately, the Londoners in this society stanned William Morris a little too hard (big surprise) and the work of the Four went largely unappreciated. Fear not, their day in the sun was soon approaching.
Mackintosh's poster design for the school's musical review
Enter the eighth Vienna Secession. The Secession began as an effort by Austrian artists to break from the typical, traditional constraints of art work and try something new. The Four were invited to exhibit at the eighth Secession in 1900.
They set up their work in the Scottish room. It was a reflection of how they lived at home, with sleek furniture working with decor as one large collective piece of art. This is referred to as the German ‘gesamtkunstwer’, or ‘total artwork’. The room contrasted the overly decorated, overly stuffed Victorian style that was popular at the time. The furniture was simple and linear. Among the most popular of the works in this room was Mackintosh’s high backed chairs and Margaret Macdonald’s The May Queen, a three-paneled painting.
The Scottish Room at the Eighth Vienna Secession
The Four saw a lot more appreciation in Vienna than they did when they exhibited in London. When the time came to return to Glasgow and London they felt entirely removed from the movement as a whole. It seems they lived out the remainder of their lives feeling isolated from the art they loved the most.
Frances and Herbert moved south to London, but had trouble establishing a clientele. Frances took part time jobs to make ends meet, and her dissatisfaction with her circumstances can be seen in her work from the time. Frances died at 48, and Herbert destroyed much of her work out of grief and gave up art altogether.
Charles was asked to help with the Wiener Werkstatte studio and workshop in Vienna, but this offer came right at the beginning of World War I and he was unable to travel. He and Margaret would later move to France to live a quiet life and paint, which sounds pretty alright to me.
So, that’s The Glasgow Four, or Spook School if you prefer. I think we can all agree that Spook School is a much more fun name. If there is a topic you would like to see covered in a blog post, let me know. Unless directed otherwise, I will continue to haphazardly bounce around to my favorite pieces of art history.
Sources
Graphic Design: A New History, Second Edition, Stephen J. Eskilson
The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau, JSTOR Daily - https://daily.jstor.org/the-scottish-sisters-who-pioneered-art-nouveau/
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society - https://www.crmsociety.com/about-mackintosh/charles-rennie-mackintosh/
James Herbert McNair, Mackintosh Architecture - https://www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/name/?nid=McNJH
How the Mackintosh Four took European Art by storm, The Herald - https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/16181219.mackintosh-four-took-european-art-storm/
