by Rick Gekoski
In what ways are the rights of man and the rights of nations to be compared? The transmission of cultural objects as the spoils of war is an essential part of the diaspora of objects of art, and is regarded as inalienable. But it is hard to justify the looting of the Benin bronzes even in this mitigated if conventional sense. Britain was not at war with the kingdom of Benin, and its first, unauthorised, attempt to sack the city was punished with a justified pre-emptive strike. British reprisals were fierce, and totally out of scale with the moral imperatives, and it is hard to see why Nigeria should not regard the restitution of the bronzes as their moral and legal right. The friezes and columns of the Parthenon had fallen into ruin, and were regularly stripped, even by locals, not for their artistic value but to use as building material. The Egyptians left the treasures of the kingdom to crumble in the desert air. The Oba, on the other hand, had enhanced and protected their treasures.
Nor was the destruction of the kingdom of Benin an isolated incident. Those most respected of Conrad’s colonialists, the British, were also responsible, at much the same time as the sacking of Benin City, for destroying Kumasi, the capital of the Ashante empire, which was located in what is now called Ghana. For some hundreds of years a prosperous centre of trade and agriculture hacked out of the indigenous forest, the Ashante thrived due to the huge reserves of gold, and a relatively enlightened importation of slave labour. At its height, Kumasi had a population of some 2 million people, and was a thriving urban culture with a grand palace for the king, and a plethora of art works and jewellery fashioned from gold. The Ashante were literate, and the palace, according to one traveller, had a great many books, as well as sophisticated systems of law and trading.
Britain had been in armed conflict with the Ashante four times in the nineteenth century, drawn by the vast wealth, natural resources and trading power of the kingdom. Repulsed respectively in 1823 and 1863, a protracted assault on Kumasi in 1873-4 lead to a Treaty of Peace on terms favourable to the British, and to the sacking by some 2,500 soldiers of large parts of the city, and the destruction of the Royal Palace. In 1902, to no one’s surprise, the land became a British Protectorate, and was renamed the Gold Coast.
This is only one of many such stories of cultural destruction. In fact, there were a widespread and thriving set of urban cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, sometimes with a strong Islamic influence and at other times not, for centuries before the European colonial development. Some of these cities, located in southern Africa, were built not with the usual mud, timber and thatch but had major stone edifices. A member of the London Missionary Society expedition of 1829 reported that, on his visits to the Orange River, he had encountered the ruins of large numbers of towns and cities, some ‘of amazing extent’, with clear evidence of ‘immense labour and perseverance, every fence being composed of stones … raised without mortar, lime or hammer [and] examples of high-quality plastering, with cornicing and architraves, survive, and highly polished walls of the ruins of the houses still gleam from their original finish.’
Such remnants are, of course, testimony not to a thriving ‘African’ civilisation – there is no such thing – but to many, often competing, urban centres spread round the continent. You do not need to claim that these were the rivals of Venice to conclude that anyone who thinks, with Professor Trevor-Roper, that there is no such thing as African history or culture, is damagingly ignorant. This ignorance, though, is understandable, and is to this day widespread. When you survey most contemporary cities of sub-Saharan Africa, they are largely the residue of colonialism, and the conclusion that this is all there is, or ever has been, is too easily drawn.
Cultures, civilisations, cities, magnificent edifices come and go. We know that. The present state of Iraq has only minimal surviving testimony to the grandeur of the civilisations that have inhabited those lands. But we do not regard the Iraqis as savages, and we continue to regard ancient Mesopotamia with the highest respect.
Yet we have no such regard for Africa, or for its many lost civilisations. This was the fault not merely of widespread warring between tribal factions – cultures destroy themselves and each other – but is more substantially the legacy of colonialism. It is due to rapacity, to disrespect, to greed and to blindness. It is the fault of myriad visitors to the ‘dark continent’ in the nineteenth century, the well-intentioned as well as the merely venal. Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart.
But it is the fault, too, sadly and demonstrably, of the most brilliant and acute chroniclers of this spectacle. Of Joseph Conrad. And of ourselves, unconsciously accepting the prevailing myths, unwilling to look, and to revise our received images, and to learn. To learn, as Tommie Smith and John Carlos demonstrated, that there is so much to be proud of in this heritage, and so much to be angry about as a result of its loss.
15
Born to Blush Unseen: The Lost Buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh
I have spent some time recently – too much time, it’s rather addictive – tucked away in my garden shed ogling a naughty magazine that I buy at my local newsagent, who sells it quite unashamedly to a coterie of lustful consumers. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I can hardly put it down. It’s full of gorgeous full-frontal pictures, though the private bits are discreetly hidden away. There are some nice rear views as well.
There’s no need to be censorious. You may well buy it too. It’s called Country Life, which is to the fantasies of the English middle classes what Playboy was to the young men of my own generation. The magazine is largely purchased – as Playboy was – by people who want to drool over the pictures, not to read the articles. It responds to our desire, and enhances it: it is architectural pornography.
The English – professional city people – lust after country residences as a tangible sign of success; in class terms a substantial country house allows the illusion of joining a rural squirearchy. You make your pile, and then you buy one: pick out something just right in a fashionable county, take up country pursuits, chop wood, plan a kitchen garden, go to school fairs, patronise the local farmer and the vicar, hunt a little perhaps, invite envious friends for the weekend.
The good life? Americans never consider even the possibility: a summer month in Maine or the Hamptons is perfectly adequate by way of rural exposure. And the French, with typical perversity, do just the opposite to les Anglais. No sooner have they inherited a grande maison or château in idyllic surroundings than they have sold it to an English couple. So cheap darling! And so pretty!
But there is a downside to this château-coveting, Georgian-rectory chasing middle-class fantasy: English people do not dream of designing and building a new house. Almost never. Indeed, the very term ‘architecturally designed’ has become so debased that it now means not architecturally designed, not individual, not an enactment of an individual client’s individual dreams. It’s a branding phrase used by mega-builders of pseudo-swish flats and housing developments.
Yes, land is expensive, it is hard to find the right plot and architect, planning permission can be a nightmare, you will struggle to control costs – these and a thousand other fears and caveats deter the few possible brave souls who wish to build something uniquely their own. It’s been this way for a while. There were a few Edwardians who commissioned (say) Edwin Lutyens to build something grand, personal and amusing. But for every Lutyens, there were dozens of capable architects without sufficient customers to keep them afloat.
Even, and this is deeply shocking, even Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the most brilliant British architect of the twentieth century, couldn’t find enough customers to sustain an architectural practice. Born in Glasgow in 1868, this preter-naturally talented young man studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and was already a partner in an architectural firm by the age of twenty-three. It was an ideal time to be working: Glasgow, known as the second city of empire, was expanding massively: railway stations, hotels, municipal buildings, factories, urban housing developments and individual villas were all n
ecessary, and a virtual renaissance in the arts accompanied the commercial boom.
Born to blush unseen: Mackintosh’s design for Liverpool Cathedral (1903).
Omnivorously inquisitive, Mackintosh developed at an astonishing rate. He won scholarships for overseas study and travel, gorged himself on the new architectural journals, studied Japanese architecture and style. Mackintosh had a rage for design, and became as well known for his furniture, fabrics, graphics, cutlery, light fixtures and wall decorations as for his (relatively few) buildings. His chairs, for instance, are instantly recognisable, objects of surpassing attractiveness, as long as you don’t try to sit in them.
Of his early work, the Glasgow School of Art, which he designed in his late twenties, is undoubtedly his masterpiece, and its north façade has been described by that great American architect Robert Venturi as ‘one of the greatest achievements of all time, comparable in scale and majesty to Michelangelo’. It is a remarkable claim, made more fascinating by the fact that Mackintosh had so skilfully outstripped his brief (‘Tis but a plain building that is desired’) and the crimped budget that accompanied it. The result of his labour now makes one catch one’s breath in astonishment and admiration, but at the time the building went largely unregarded. The governors of the School of Art congratulated themselves on having commissioned and produced (no mention is made of the architect) a ‘sound, substantial workmanlike building’.
Perhaps this response, in some cock-eyed way, is a sort of compliment. To the ignorant eye the building may have looked like a competent pastiche of Scottish baronial and vernacular styles, for Mackintosh had managed to combine many fresh and modern elements that were still subsumed in the overall look. Yet it was not only the purblind administrators who could not see what was so triumphantly before their eyes; most of the architectural establishment couldn’t either. The building went virtually unrecognised in the Scottish and English press, and only the art journal The Studio (which published photographs of a few of the interiors) gave it any serious consideration. Yet on the continent the building was widely recognised as a work of genius.
If the first stage of the School of Art was recognisably and untroublingly Scottish, the subsequent building phase ten years later was in a more modern style, light and airy, the interiors fresh and inventive. The library, completed in 1909, was based on Japanese models, with a delightful use of beams and timbers, and is the undoubted highlight of the building. Though this extraordinary achievement led to a few further commissions, of which Hill House for the publisher Walter Blackie, and the charming tea rooms for his patron Miss Cranston are the finest, it did not, sadly, herald the beginning of a sustained architectural practice.
Mackintosh is probably most widely recognised as a designer of Glasgow tea rooms, which sounds modest enough but wasn’t. In the eighteenth century coffee houses were the usual meeting places in London, but by the 1840s they had been replaced by tea houses, as the drinking of tea became the norm in English culture. In London, Twining’s had been the first of the tea houses, but it was overtaken by Lyons Tea Rooms, which from the 1890s were the meeting place of choice. The Lyons Corner Houses in the West End were capacious establishments, often on four or five floors of an elegant building, offering both meals and a counter service, as well as telephone booths, ticket-purchasing kiosks and hair-dressing salons (which reflected the largely female clientele).
In Glasgow the tea house was also to become a fashionable upmarket establishment, a trend initiated in 1878 by Kate Cranston, or ‘Miss Cranston’ as she was known, whose empire grew substantially over the next thirty years. An eccentric, strong-willed businesswoman, she was an immediately recognisable Glasgow figure, with her taste for homemade dresses that swirled and flounced dramatically, rather wonderful hats, and imperious manner. Her brother had preceded her in the tea business and opened tea rooms before her, but he had neither her drive nor her extraordinary conviction that a tea house could become the very centre of Glasgow life.
She had an uncommon combination of intelligence, good taste and commercial acumen, at a time when women rarely opened their own businesses, and even less commonly succeeded when they did so. So certain was Miss Cranston that she would be shunned not merely by polite society but by her own friends and family, that she paid what she called ‘going-away’ calls on them, ‘because they would not want to know her when she had become a businesswoman’.
But before very long, they did. Everybody did. It was virtually impossible to live a full and happy life in Glasgow and not visit Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms. From the beginning she believed that if the venture was going to succeed, the tea rooms (unlike those in London) would have to attract men. Ladies were easy, the natural constituency of such premises, but what would draw a male clientele? The answer was a mixture of men-only rooms (including smoking and billiard rooms) with their own ‘masculine’ decorations and furnishings – ‘dark and solid’ – and a menu that included the kind of old-fashioned fare, such as pie and chips, that could be found in local pubs (and at much the same price). The fact that Miss Cranston’s, unlike those pubs, did not serve beer or spirits, was turned shrewdly to her advantage, for there was too much drunkenness in Glasgow, and wives were certain to encourage their menfolk’s entry into this salubrious, but dry, environment.
She had the confidence and money to indulge her taste, and was to become Mackintosh’s major patron for over twenty years. She first employed him and his capable wife (‘Margaret has genius, I only have talent’) in 1897 – the same year in which he began working on designs for the Glasgow School of Art – to do many of the interior designs for the walls on three floors, with murals, stencilling and decorations, of her Buchanan Street Tea Rooms. The effect (colours were subtly modulated from ‘greyish-greenish yellow’ upwards to blue as you rose through the building, as if from earth to sky) was delightful, startlingly new, totally arresting. For only 2d. one could have a cup of tea and enter a set of rooms that were, themselves, fully integrated works of art.
Miss Cranston’s new rooms were almost immediately designated as must-sees for any tourist to Glasgow, and one such was Edwin Lutyens, anxious to observe what all the fuss was about:
a Miss Somebody’s who is really a Mrs Somebody else. She has started a large Restaurant, all very elaborately simple on very new school High Arts Lines. The result is gorgeous! And a wee bit vulgar! She has nothing but green-handled knives and all is curiously painted and coloured … Some of the knives are purple and are put as spots of colour! It is all quite good, all just a little outré, a thing we must avoid and shall too.
Anyone who does not detect the sound of envy amidst this mitigated enthusiasm isn’t listening very hard. (Within a few years green-handled knives were used in the Lutyens household, and he brought home with him from Glasgow a basketful of Miss Cranston’s ‘most delicious’ blue-willow pattern china.)
Mackintosh’s major contribution to Miss Cranston’s burgeoning empire, in which he had total control of the project from the refurbishment of a modest tenement building to the interior designs and furnishing, was the Willow Tea Rooms, which opened in 1903. According to Perilla Kinchin, whose Taking Tea with Mackintosh is the best guide to the relationship, a contemporary photograph of the Salon de Luxe shows:
eight high-backed silver chairs, decorated with oval cutouts and squares of purple glass, carefully lined up at the central tables on the marked-out carpet. At the side of the room are chairs with lower curved backs, also silver, and upholstered in purple velvet. The lower walls were panelled with silvery purple silk, stitched with beads down the seams. Margaret had contributed a decorative panel in gesso, her favourite medium: three elongated ladies, dripping with strings of glass jewels … Above was a chandelier of countless pink glass baubles … Round the walls ran a frieze of leaded coloured and mirror glass, reflecting and refracting the customers of this fantasy world.
The spirit and aesthetic of the Vienna Secession is apparent, for Mackintosh was not only revered in
Europe but had derived many of his ideas from continental models. Glaswegians flocked to the new rooms, and even the intimidated working classes made their wary way into this splendid setting. The journalist Neil Munro, who wrote the popular ‘Erchie’ column in the Evening News, had some fun with the notion of introducing two unsophisticated working men into this middle-class paradise, and suggesting they tuck into the cakes:
It was a real divert. It was the first time ever he had a knife and fork to eat cookies wi’, and he thocht his teaspoon was a’ bashed oot o’ its richt shape till I tellt him whit that was whit made it Art. ‘Art,’ says he, ‘whit the mischief’s Art.’
But they do not stay for too long, because Mackintosh’s chairs not only had a tendency to wobble and eventually to fall apart, but were also distinctly uncomfortable to sit in, or on. This apparent failing was, however, something of a virtue in their setting, because patrons who linger over their tea are bad for business. Better to have an abbreviated visit, to see and be seen, and pay and get out before cramp set in.
The Willow commission was followed by further work for Miss Cranston, who had Mackintosh redecorate and furnish her home in 1904. In the following year he received a commission to design a house for Walter Blackie, the Scottish publishing magnate. Hill House, in Helensburgh, is a masterpiece of domestic architecture, and one of the highpoints of Mackintosh’s oeuvre, an astonishing place to experience, one of those architectural wonders that makes one gasp with surprise and pleasure. But its charms are quite unlike those of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater, that extraordinarily sculptural house set perfectly into its landscape. The genius of Hill House, though its exterior has a pleasing Scottish rusticity, is to be found in its interiors, fittings and decoration: ‘Here is a house.’ said its proud architect. ‘It is not an Italian villa, or an English mansion house, a Swiss chalet or a Scotch castle. It is a dwelling house.’