Gesso sells for Record Price

  

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933) 
The Heart of the Rose
98.7cm. x 100.3cm.
Sold for £490,900

 
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933)
The White Rose and the Red Rose
98.7cm. x 100.3cm.
Sold for £1,700,000

At the Christie's Sale in London, the Gesso Panel by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (The White Rose and the Red Rose) set a world record of £1.7m for the sale of a Scottish art work.

The Heart of the Rose and The White Rose and the Red Rose represent the pinnacle of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s skill and imagination.  This pair of painted and jewelled gesso panels was first displayed in the Rose Boudoir at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin, 1902.  The harmonious character of this space – in which all elements, architectural, furniture and decorative, combined so effectively – was the fruit of a collaboration between Margaret and her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  Margaret’s contribution to the Exhibition earned her a diploma of honour.  She had made first versions of these panels for a Mr Wylie Hill (The Heart of the Rose, now in the Glasgow School of Art) and for the Mackintoshes’ own home (The White Rose and the Red Rose, now in the Hunterian Art Gallery).

The Rose Boudoir defined a moment of consummate refinement in the evolution of the couple’s oeuvre.  These panels played a pivotal role.  They illustrated the rose theme in a lyrical, symbolist manner, infusing the room with an enchanting and poetic atmosphere.  The rendering of the rose, allied with the sensual, stylised female figures, was a perfect expression of the international sensibility associated with high Symbolist art and literature.  The panels exude a mood that takes them beyond the merely decorative.  They have a depth of expression that suggests at once the sacred and the profane.  Here are subtle evocations of maternal and sensual love, imagery vibrant in its contrasts of innocence and of sexual awakening.  While they have their place within the European Symbolist movement, the panels remain strongly representative of the Glasgow avant-garde.  Working in the challenging medium of gesso, with which she was now well practised, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh has achieved a distinctive, light, sweeping elegance of line within a tightly refined graphic composition. 

Following the Turin Exhibition the panels were purchased by Fritz Wärndorfer, the great patron of the Viennese avant-garde, sponsor of the Werkstäatte and admirer of the Mackintoshes, who probably first came to the attention the Viennese Secessionists though coverage in The Studio magazine, widely circulated throughout Europe.  They had been invited to exhibit at the Eighth Secessionist Exhibition in Vienna, 1900, and were already designing a music room for Wärndorfer.  The artists of the Secession responded enthusiastically to the Mackintosh vision.  This approach involved uncluttered lines and a prevailing purity of form in architecture and furniture, enriched through poetic detail and by the graphic, often figural elements that added a touch of mysticism and unified the composition of rooms.   In many ways the use of these gesso panels within the Rose Boudoir bears parallels with the concept of Gustav Klimt’s mosaic friezes for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet, created a few years later.   The two projects shared close similarities of intention and of theme.  In both instances the mysterious figures convey a deep yet enigmatic sensuality and spirituality.  Margaret’s magical panels command respect as works of art of international stature. 

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