Arts of Resistance by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach sampler

Hugh MacDiarmid and the Arts of Modern Scotland 9
alan: You have to think of these people as part of
another kind of constellation: Geddes and
MacGillivray. MacGillivray was contemporary with
Rodin and again, it’s an affinity, as though his
brilliance as a sculptor of figures – Burns and
Byron, literary and cultural figures, just as Rodin
sculpts Balzac or Mahler – is technically evolving at
the same time as Rodin, but without literal
correspondence. Certainly MacGillivray came to
know Rodin’s work and he recognised him, as the
only sculptor he knew of ‘who worked or created
from within rather than from without’. But he
denied that he was ever a ‘follower’ of Rodin and
insisted that his own technique in clay was worked
out in the 1870s, long before Rodin was heard of in
Scotland. MacGillivray was also the editor of The
Pictish Review, to which MacDiarmid contributed
under more than one byline, a rather eccentric but
passionate periodical about the cultural variety of
Scotland and the need for a revival of Scotland’s
ancient languages, pre-eminently Gaelic. Yet if he
was looking to the ancient past, he was also
addressing the contemporary scene. There’s a
tremendous pathos in his memorial sculpture of
the First World War, The Wife of Flanders.
sandy: And of course in that constellation was
their now world-famous contemporary, Charles
Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928).
linda: What makes Mackintosh so special and
where do his ideas come from?
sandy: We know that he wanted to build with
‘native’ Scottish traditions in mind. Of his work,
he said that he wanted to ensure ‘that it is an
architectural style of the modern as distinguished
from the ancient world. That it is pre-eminently the
architecture of our own forefathers and of our own
land.’ That’s what he says in a lecture of 1891.
Mackintosh was recognized as a pioneer of the
modern movement and his inclusion in the
Secession exhibition in Vienna in 1900 signalled
his importance in Germany and Central Europe.
His masterwork is the Glasgow Art School building
– completed in 1909, but ignored in professional
journals till 1924. No published plan of the
building appeared till 1950. That’s a staggering
chronology. We should come back to that in regard
to the reception of other artists and art works in
Scotland during the 20th century.
alan: Mackintosh is probably now the most
famous Scottish artist of this era and it’s easy to
forget that this was not always so. He was certainly
a visionary. An artist-architect who believed in
gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art: he was
designing everything from the shape of the
building to the numberplate on the door… But he
went into eclipse as an influence. That chronology
of achievement and then the lack of available
information about his buildings, in terms of public
1.6 Charles Rennie Mackintosh 1868–1928 Glasgow School of
Art, Library Interior 1909